Dammit Lady, I'm Trying to Raise $4 Billion Here!
Too funny. Bloomberg carried this story a few days ago, about how Columbia University President Lee Bollinger is embarking on a $4 billion fundraising drive. I can just picture Bollinger's "aw shit" reaction when news got out that the dean of the International Affairs school has invited Iranian apocalyptic whackadoo Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak at the university. Apparently SIPA Dean Lisa Anderson got a little jealous that her competitor, the Kennedy School at Harvard, was getting all the press. Clearly she thought, 'we're just as good as Harvard, we will get our own women-beating, gay-bashing, terrorist-sponsoring theocratic dictator to speak!' I'm sure Dean Anderson got a call from Bollinger post haste to the effect "you flumin' idiot, I'm trying to raise $4 billion with a b here! You're killing me!"
A little side color for readers that may be unfamiliar with the dynamics up at Columbia (and why would you be my globally-minded readers, parochial concern that it is?). Columbia has always been a bit balkanized in that the prestigious graduate programs produce alumni that are loyal to their graduate school and not the university in a larger sense. This is particularly true of the business school which produces capitalist movers and shakers who generally see the rest of the university as a silly hive of aging 60s radicals and neo-collectivist idealogies. Bollinger pissed alot of alumni off with his antics and it has exacerbated this balkaniztion, which has impications in the fund-raising sphere. Rich alumni are making donations specifically to their graduate schools. You get a faint whiff of this in the Bloomberg article. Russ Carson for example gives big dollars to the b-school but I doubt he would give one red cent to the university at large for Bollinger to get his grubby hands on. Bollinger sounds high-minded, but truth is he isn't enamored of not having more control over the funds that current b-school Dean Glenn Hubbard and particularly former Dean Feldberg have brought in. ``I want to draw alumni into the whole university, not just the parts they went to,'' Bollinger says. Yeah well, Bollinger is a big part of the reason behind the fund-raising balkanization.
Anyway, Bollinger appears to be deftly slinking out of this with a mild condemnation of Ahmadinejad and a "ah...er...(think dammit!), um... too short notice to pull off."
A little side color for readers that may be unfamiliar with the dynamics up at Columbia (and why would you be my globally-minded readers, parochial concern that it is?). Columbia has always been a bit balkanized in that the prestigious graduate programs produce alumni that are loyal to their graduate school and not the university in a larger sense. This is particularly true of the business school which produces capitalist movers and shakers who generally see the rest of the university as a silly hive of aging 60s radicals and neo-collectivist idealogies. Bollinger pissed alot of alumni off with his antics and it has exacerbated this balkaniztion, which has impications in the fund-raising sphere. Rich alumni are making donations specifically to their graduate schools. You get a faint whiff of this in the Bloomberg article. Russ Carson for example gives big dollars to the b-school but I doubt he would give one red cent to the university at large for Bollinger to get his grubby hands on. Bollinger sounds high-minded, but truth is he isn't enamored of not having more control over the funds that current b-school Dean Glenn Hubbard and particularly former Dean Feldberg have brought in. ``I want to draw alumni into the whole university, not just the parts they went to,'' Bollinger says. Yeah well, Bollinger is a big part of the reason behind the fund-raising balkanization.
Anyway, Bollinger appears to be deftly slinking out of this with a mild condemnation of Ahmadinejad and a "ah...er...(think dammit!), um... too short notice to pull off."
posted by Donny Baseball at 10:22 AM
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