Office of Public Information and Communications Columbia University New York, N.Y. 10027 (212) 854-5573
With a focus on undergraduate life and a $25 million gift to build a new student center, Columbia University tonight (Friday) extended its "stunningly successful" Campaign for Columbia to the year 2000 with a goal of $2.2 billion, the largest total ever sought by a university.
Columbia President George Rupp announced that Alfred Lerner, a Cleveland, Ohio, alumnus of Columbia College, has launched the new phase of the fund drive with a pledge of $25 million to erect a new student center to be named Alfred Lerner Hall.
Dr. Rupp also announced that the two co-chairs of the University Trustees, Jerry Speyer, an alumnus of the College and Columbia Business School, and Lionel Pincus, an alumnus of the Business School, have pledged $10 million each to the new phase of the campaign. The Pincus gift will establish an endowment fund for strategic innovation so that Columbia can be flexible in responding to the opportunities ahead. The Speyer gift is intended to strengthen the University at its core, with the purpose of the gift to be determined as specific needs arise.
Dr. Rupp reported "splendid success" in the Campaign's first five years. Launched in the fall of 1990, the drive achieved its goal of $1.15 billion in February of this year, 10 months before the Dec. 31 date it was due to finish.
"Our stunningly successful effort over the first five years has created momentum across the institution," he said, "and has encouraged us to continue, without a pause, toward a new total of $2.2 billion by this time in 2000." He spoke at a special celebration dinner for hundreds of alumni and friends of the University in the Rotunda of Low Memorial library on Columbia's Morningside Heights campus in New York City.
Dr. Rupp reported that during the first phase of the campaign, the number of gifts to Columbia nearly doubled to just under 60,000, and giving rose from $110 million to more than $150 million a year.
Columbia's attention to undergraduate life and teaching is evident in the 105 endowed professorships that have been created through gifts made since the start of the campaign five years ago. Alumnus John Kluge gave $25 million for faculty development and then another $60 million in 1993 to endow minority scholarships for undergraduates. Morris A. Schapiro's $10 million gift for an engineering research building and artist LeRoy Neiman's $6 million gift to the School of the Arts both are strengthening the undergraduate experience.
Since 1993, when he became Columbia's 18th president, Dr. Rupp and his team of senior administrators have reorganized student services from top to bottom, created a new $2 million exercise center in the gymnasium, put all residence halls on the Internet, begun a rebuilding and renovation of Butler Library, improved academic advising, promoted diversity in the student body and maintained Columbia College's commitment to need-blind admissions and full-need financial aid.
The new campaign will center on students and faculty, and the facilities that serve them most closely: libraries, classrooms and the new center for students' social and extra-curricular activities.
Alfred Lerner Hall will replace Ferris Booth Hall at Broadway and 115th Street. Demolition will begin next June, and the new undergraduate student center will open in 1999. The architect is Bernard Tschumi, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, in association with Gruzen Samton Architects.
"This building signals the University's increased attention to the quality of undergraduate life," said Dr. Rupp. "We are enormously grateful to Mr. Lerner for his generosity, which will allow construction of a student center worthy of our unsurpassed undergraduate curriculum," he said.
Mr. Lerner is a 1955 graduate of Columbia College. He is chairman and chief executive officer of MBNA Corporation. Long active in Columbia affairs, he has been a University Trustee since March.
"Columbia has played an important role in my life," Mr. Lerner said. "I hope this gift will help to assure that others have the kind of experience that has meant so much to me."
Lerner Hall will crown a thorough rebuilding of the Columbia campus now under way. Projects include a $10 million expansion of the Law School, a $12 million modernization of Furnald residence hall, a $12.8 million renovation of the Graduate School of Journalism, a $7.5 million restoration of Casa Italiana, a $6 million renovation of the School of the Arts building, rebuilt quadrangles and new brick walkways.
In the extended campaign for $2.2 billion in 2000, Columbia will seek half the total in endowments and building funds "to strengthen Columbia's permanent foundation," Dr. Rupp said. Such donations will support financial aid, professorships, research and high quality facilities and infrastructure, including the complete renovation already under way in Butler Library, the main building of the nation's sixth largest research library system.
The other half of the campaign goal will provide funding on a current basis for teaching and research throughout the University.
The original $1.15 billion goal of the Campaign for Columbia included $150 million for the Presbyterian Hospital, part of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center on Washington Heights in New York City. The new, $2.2 billion goal will increase the hospital's share to $200 million.
Dr. Rupp noted that the new target for the year 2000 was ambitious, "particularly because we are seeking the additional support without the conventional silent phase in which about a third of the total is typically secured." Columbia began the campaign five years ago with a nucleus fund of $329 million in pledges.
The Columbia president also said that the challenge for the new campaign is daunting because "the largest income streams that support education and research will shrink in the months ahead."
"The days of adequate government support are gone," he said. "In the case of health, in particular, we face a potential meltdown in resources, regardless of our best efforts."
Approximately $400 million of the more than $1.15 billion received so far was added to the University's endowment, largely for new professorships and financial aid funds. Other notable gifts to the campaign so far include $20 million from the estate of Lucy G. Moses for scholarships and faculty support; $12 million from Herbert Irving for cancer research; $10 million from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to build the Center for Disease Prevention at the Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Park; and $10 million from Jerome A. Chazen for an Institute of International Business.
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