NYU Colonizing Brooklyn Heights?

New York University is coming to Brooklyn — and so is its voracious appetite for real estate.

The fast-growing private institution, based in Greenwich Village, is opening its first non-Manhattan residence in a Brooklyn Heights apartment tower, and is negotiating what it described as a “merger” with Downtown Brooklyn-based Polytechnic University.

The Brooklyn Paper has learned that 115 graduate students plan to move this month into the “sliver building” at 67 Livingston St., between Clinton and Court streets. The building was formerly used as a residence hall by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society.

The dormitory news follows a statement by NYU earlier this week that it is negotiation a merger with Downtown Brooklyn–based Polytechnic University.

NYU spokesman John Beckman said in a written statement that his school has been “looking across to Brooklyn to spread the tentacles of its ever growing physical campus.”

Is this a joke? Did Beckman actually say "tentacles?"