You Gotta Be Rich to Get Rich!

Artist's rendition of the Perelman Building

My network, (CNBC), broke the news this morning that Ron Perelman was donating $100 million to Columbia Business School.

The story got me thinking about how Universities and non-profits often only really draw the big bucks after they establish a reputation as being one of the best.

Let me back up a bit here before I connect this to Columbia athletics. Columbia alums my age and older know that the B-School used to be the black sheep in the Columbia grad school family. While the law school and med school were always top 5 ranked programs, the business school was barely in the top 25 as recently as 1988. Despite the boom in Wall Street during most of the 80’s, the school seemed moribund and trapped inside the odd-looking Uris Hall directly behind Low Library.

But with the school’s continued resurgence as the 90’s began, Columbia started putting more of an effort into boosting the business program. By the end of the 90’s, it was a top 10 program.

And then, it started attracting big donors, the kind of donors who like to donate entire buildings. And there you have the biggest single reason why Columbia has chosen to expand into Manhattanville in the first place.

Yes, yes… lots of other schools and administrators needed more space. But the B-school was shooting for big donations from guys like Perelman, Henry Kravis, and Warren Buffett, (two down, one to go. Buffett has still not ponied up massive cash to his Alma Mater). Take a real good look at the blueprints for the new space uptown and it’s obvious the business school is the big dog of the expansion.

Simply put, Columbia Business School is reaping the rewards of its success. The trouble with that is, schools like this end up getting more and more donations and soon the job of expanding and building to suit all those big ticket donors can be impossible.

But that’s a problem that’s generally good to have.

Considering Columbia football’s struggles for the last half century, it’s amazing that it has roped in as many dedicated donors as it has. The uptick in those kinds of donations in recent years is even more impressive.

When you talk Columbia football donors, you’re still mostly talking about Bill Campbell and Robert Kraft. I don’t mean to leave the other somewhat lesser known names out, but that’s the deal.

But if you think the donations to CU football are impressive now, wait until we start winning, (I know, we’re waiting for 52 years already… but you get my point). I predict 2-3 winning seasons in a row or just one Ivy title will open some floodgates that could result in one or more of the following items checked off our collective wish lists:

1)  Parking garage at Baker Field

 2) Practice field on campus, (Manhattanville)

3)  Free pizza to go along with the free beer in the pregame picnic area, (okay, that may have been a little stretch).

Old Argument

For those of us who consider ourselves longtime fans, we all might think we are among the first people to have started the call for removing the Ivy football postseason ban.

Well, we’re probably wrong.

A reader just sent me an interesting NY Times article about the Yale football team voting unanimously to urge the league to end the postseason ban.

The dateline on that article? January, 1961!