Scores of West Harlem residents and community leaders responded with skepticism and anger last night to Columbia University’s plan to expand its campus by 17 acres into Manhattanville.

As many as 90 people signed up to speak and hundreds more packed a school auditorium at a public hearing before the Department of City Planning to review the university’s outline for an environmental impact statement. Most of the speakers asked for more details about Columbia’s plan and urged the university to reject the use of eminent domain.

“At a bare minimum, you must replace the housing and the workplaces of these people that you’re displacing,” a Harlem historian and member of Community Board 9, Michael Adams, said in comments directed at the university. “Otherwise, it will just continue to be a hostile project,” he added later.

Columbia representatives did not respond directly to the objections raised last night but repeated that eminent domain would be exercised only “as a last resort.” The city will accept written comments about the plan until January 6.

Columbia’s $5 billion, 25-year proposal would rezone and overhaul a 35-acre swath of land that stretches from 125th Street to 133th Street and west of Broadway to the Hudson River. The plan, the university says, would accommodate its pressing need for more space and at the same time revitalize West Harlem by adding thousands of new jobs, open space, and retail areas.

Yesterday’s hearing, held in the auditorium of Roberto Clemente Middle School on 133rd Street at Broadway, was designed to gather public comments on the planned scope of Columbia’s environmental impact statement, a key document in the lengthy city process for approving major land developments. The dozens of speakers included some who passionately denounced the university’s plan altogether and others who simply asked city planners to consider alternatives before deciding to go forward.

Community Board 9, which represents the area where Columbia wants to build, has drafted its own proposal to redevelop Manhattanville. The board’s plan, known as 197-A, limits the areas on which the university can build, guarantees that residents and businesses won’t be forced out, and maintains units of low- and moderate-income housing in the area.

“The 197-A has wide, wide support in this community,” the board’s chairman, Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, said.

Columbia has agreed to include the 197-A plan as an alternative in its environmental statement, but community board members yesterday demanded that its proposal be given equal weight in the city’s deliberations.” The 197-A must be compared topic by topic as a full-blown alternative plan,” a board member, Mathy Stanislaus, said at the hearing.

In pushing its broad, long-term plan, the university repeatedly has pointed to statistics that show it is lagging behind its chief Ivy League rivals in space. In its 17 acres, Columbia wants to build academic buildings, research laboratories, and housing for graduate students and faculty. Since first offering its proposal in 2004, the university also has promoted aspects of the plan that it says will benefit the community at large. Those include nearly 7,000 new jobs, added tax revenue, 50,000 to 70,000 square feet of open space, and an enhanced waterfront.