Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Session:         Page of 824

organization that's practically bankrupt go out and do such a thing as that! Spend that kind of money on housing?” Well, in fact, the heads of all the big non-profit institutions have housing provided for them. Universities provide them, hospitals provide them, and so on. And the question is not misspent money, the question is trying to get the right person to save the institution. Anyway, we finally solved the problem by getting a trustee, namely Dick Salomon to give the money for this purpose only. He stated, “I would not give this money if it were not for this purpose.” That sort of took us all off the hook.

He immediately did the same thing that I did, but more thoroughly. Examined every nook and cranny of the whole institution, the institution's fairly big. I think then there were about twenty six hundred people working there and it had a budget of maybe sixty million, and an endowment of seventy, seventy-five million I believe it was. He realized that he was taking on a perilous job. An awful lot of work had to be done and that it was going to take quite a long time to turn this monster around. The morale of the staff was terrible. They'd been hit so often, there'd been so many firings that they practically all had their arms up around their faces waiting for the next blow. So we made one major decision that we communicated to the staff. No more talk about what's wrong with the Library, only talk about what's good about the Library. Even if you can only find one thing.

[laughter]





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help