Bollinger Starts Columbia $4 Billion Drive With Lenfest, Kravis

Bloomberg.com
Updated: New York, Sep 23 23:58 London, Sep 24 04:58 Tokyo, Sep 24 12:58

Bollinger Starts Columbia $4 Billion Drive With Lenfest, Kravis
By Patrick Cole

Sept. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Columbia University President Lee Bollinger says he needs more alumni like trustee H.F. ``Gerry'' Lenfest. The former cable company owner today is giving $48 million to the school, bringing donations to his alma mater to more than $100 million.

The gift is large yet accounts for less than 10 percent of what the university wants to raise each year until 2012. ``We have to bring in more and more gifts of this magnitude,'' Bollinger says.

Bollinger, 60, is enlisting wealthy alumni such as Lenfest, financier Henry Kravis and Pequot Capital Management Inc.'s Arthur Samberg to give money and recruit donors for a $4 billion, seven-year fund-raising campaign, the largest ever attempted by a U.S. educational institution. His goal is to take the school -- now rated the ninth best college by U.S. News & World Report -- into the ranks of Harvard and Yale. To achieve the goal, Bollinger will have to overcome a history of stingy graduates and neighborhood opposition to expanding its New York City campus.

``I think there will be six or seven universities that will legitimately claim to have a level of distinction different from other institutions, and I want Columbia to be one of those,'' Bollinger says.

Columbia's $5.9 billion endowment is the eighth-largest among U.S. universities -- barely one-fifth of Harvard University's $25.5 billion and one-third of Yale University's $15.2 billion. Ivy League competitor Princeton University, ranked first in the U.S. News ranking, has the nation's fifth-largest endowment at $12.7 billion.

``We have a ways to go relative to other institutions,'' Bollinger says.

Kravis, Chavkin
One major focus of the university's campaign, which will officially debut Sept. 29, is Columbia's graduates in financial services and on Wall Street, including Kravis, a founding partner of New York-based Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a private equity firm; Arnold Chavkin, chief investment officer at JP Morgan Partners/Vail; and Mark Gallogly, founder of Centerbridge Partners, a private-equity firm in New York and the former buyout chief at Blackstone Group LP.

In May, Kravis joined Samberg and private investor Russell Carson to give a combined $45 million to Columbia's business school, where they earned MBA degrees.

Carson is a 1967 Columbia Business School graduate. His New York venture capital firm, Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, has put together more than $16 billion in buyout and debt funds since its founding in 1979.

``The business school has done a lot for me, and I like the idea of doing something for the school in return,'' Carson says, adding that he's helping raise $300 million for the business school, which will be counted as part of the capital campaign.

`At the Forefront'
``The things I focus on are individual gifts from major donors,'' Carson says. ``I am a major donor, and it's always easier for a major donor to talk to another potential major donor.''

Jerome Chazen, a 1950 business school graduate and chairman of the New York private equity firm Chazen Capital Partners, says he has agreed to serve as an adviser to the Columbia campaign to keep the school ``at the forefront.''

``We have to make sure that we have sufficient funds to do what's necessary,'' says Chazen, a former Columbia trustee and a founding partner of the apparel maker Liz Claiborne Inc.
Commuter School

Improving the giving rate of Columbia's 250,000 living alumni is difficult, Bollinger says. Last year, about 36 percent of Columbia's undergraduate alumni made donations, Vice President of Development Susan Feagin says.

By comparison, about 59 percent of Princeton alumni donated in the 2004-2005 school year, according to the school's vice president for development, Brian McDonald. Yale University's alumni giving in 2004-2005 was about 48 percent, Yale spokesman Thomas Conroy says.
Many Columbia graduates haven't given because it was primarily a commuter school until the 1960s, making it difficult for students to feel connected, says Robert McCaughey, professor of history at Columbia's Barnard College and author of ``Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University'' (Columbia University Press, 2003).

To counter the trend, Bollinger, a former Dartmouth College provost who became Columbia's president in 2002, is emphasizing fund raising more than his predecessors. The university has received more $5 million and $10 million donations from its trustees in the past two years than in previous capital campaigns, Bollinger says. Six trustees have given gifts of $10 million or more to the current drive, Feagin says.

Hedge Fund Events
R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia's business school, says he has hosted fund-raising events at hedge funds, private equity firms and banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley.

``There's not a single day that goes by that I'm not working on fund raising,'' says Hubbard, a former economic adviser to President George W. Bush.

Bollinger says he's traveled in the past seven months to India, Japan, China, Israel, Turkey and Jordan to meet with alumni and encourage donations. Last year, he created a single campus-wide alumni organization instead of having separate units for each university division.

Highest Costs
``I want to draw alumni into the whole university, not just the parts they went to,'' Bollinger says.

Columbia received $377.2 million in cash donations during the 2005-2006 school year, up from about $281.5 million in the 2002-2003 school year, Feagin says.

Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, led all colleges in fund raising last year with $603.6 million in donations.

Columbia's undergraduate tuition is currently $33,664. With room, board and fees, students pay $47,229 -- the highest of any Ivy League institution. Tuition at Harvard, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is $30,275, and the total cost to students is $43,655, including room, board and fees.

In March, Columbia received a $200 million grant from The Greene Foundation, the largest gift ever received by a U.S. university. The money will be used to create the Jerome L. Greene Science Center to study the human mind and brain diseases. Greene, who died in 1999, was a graduate of Columbia Law School and founding member of the New York City-based law firm of Marshall, Bratter, Greene, Allison & Tucker.

Today's gift from Lenfest, chairman of Cherry Hill, New Jersey-based Telvue Corp., a cable-services company, will be used to create a matching fund to endow professorships at the schools of law and arts and sciences. Lenfest, 76, is a 1958 graduate of the law school.

The university also was set to announce today that incoming undergraduates from families with incomes below $50,000 won't be charged for their education, an aid program similar to ones instituted at Harvard and Yale.

Obstacles to Expansion
Columbia enrolls about 7,200 undergraduates and 14,000 graduate students. A larger endowment will also be used to increase the faculty and enlarge the campus.

To add more classrooms and laboratory space, Bollinger wants to expand north of the main campus in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan into a part of West Harlem known as Manhattanville. The plan is to add about 5 million square feet (465,000 square meters) for research labs, classrooms, faculty and student housing, as well as stores and office space, according the Columbia's Web site.

The $7 billion plan has angered some neighborhood residents, because it would force out small businesses and knock down apartment buildings.

Columbia has already purchased about two-thirds of the land. Some property owners have refused to sell, and the university might ask the state to exercise eminent domain to acquire the remaining land, says Columbia Executive Vice President Robert Kasdin.

`Unique' Location
``Taking private property and giving it away is unconscionable and anti-American,'' says Jordi Reyes-Montblanc, chairman of Community Board 9, the neighborhood's representative to elected city officials.

Bollinger says he's determined to see Columbia catch up with Harvard, Princeton and Yale in the size of its endowment and the quality of its faculty and students.

``I love this institution. I feel it has a very unique place in American society probably because of its location in New York City,'' he says.

To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Cole in New York at pcole3@Bloomberg.net . Last Updated: September 19, 2006 00:07 EDT