February 8, 2019--Climate

The one thing I am incapable of reading and writing about is the planet's perilously changing climate.

I pride myself on my ability to identify and solve problems. I made a long career doing just that from the City University of New York to New York University to the Ford Foundation.

But about the climate I able to offer only a sense of hopeless despair. No solutions. Therefore, I run from the subject.

Not proud of myself, I have difficulty following or participating in global warming discussions. I confess this means I've given up hope that there are ways to bring about meaningful remediation. Though I know it is critical that we urgently do all we can to try.

What can one think, more, what can one do when greeted as readers were two days ago by a headline and story in the "New York Times" that the "'Climate Crisis' May Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100"?

I ignored my own practice of running from the subject and read how at least a third of these glaciers will melt by the end of the century, even "if the world's most ambitious climate change targets are met."

If these goals are not met (and most experts agree this seems likely) by 2100 the world's highest mountain range will lose two-thirds of its glaciers.

This would mean that the Himalayas could heat up by 8 degrees Fahrenheit by century's end, bringing "radical disruptions to the food and water supplies, and mass population displacement."

"Normal" Himalayan glacier melt, I read, provides water to about a quarter of the world's population.

And then yesterday, the "Times" in an above-the-fold front-page graph and story about rising global temperatures, reported that 2018 was the fourth hottest year since 1880.

Though I will be long gone, all I can think about is what kind of a world I am participating in bequeathing to my one-year-old niece. 

September 12, 2017--9/11

After breakfast at the diner, driving toward town yesterday morning, approaching the information center, I noticed that the flag was flying at half mast.

"For Florida?" I wondered out loud. "That would be a bit strange. I'm not sure that's appropriate to do."

Living up here one pays attention to things such as the display of flags and other symbols of patriotism. Not everyone is gung ho, far from it--there's a full range of feelings about the meaning of America and how to think about what it means to be an American.

"It's not about Florida," Rona said, sounding a little exasperated  with me.

"If not that what does it mean? Did someone like the police chief die? I didn't read or hear anything about that."

"You can be so oblivious," Rona said.

"So what is it then?"

"Don't you know what today is?"

"Monday? What are you getting at?"

"Listen to yourself--Monday, September 11th." She let that hang in the air between us.

After a moment it hit me, "I can't believe it. It's 9/11 and I was unaware of that. Considering how we personally experienced that morning I thought it would be etched in my mind forever, that I would never forget the anniversary."

"The day the world changed."

"Sixteen years," I said, "A lifetime. But it feels like it happened just a short time ago. That was some horrific morning."

"Yes," Rona said, "We were in the city. It was a beautiful day and I went out on the terrace to check the weather. Whether I needed a sweater before heading to Balthazar for coffee."

"And I was inside mindlessly watching the local news on TV, probably to get the Yankees' score."

"Right above our building," Rona said, "flying much too low and too fast, what turned out to be the first plane passed right over us, heading south about half a mile to the World Trade Center."

"And then in about a minute, both from outdoors where you were and on the TV that I was watching, which was showing a shot of lower Manhattan to illustrate the glorious weather, there were what seemed like two explosions. Of course, there was just one--the live one you witnessed and the one on TV, which I assume in retrospect was being broadcast with a seven-second delay."

"Then all that followed," Rona said recalling the fear and sadness.

"I'm so out of it," I said, upset with myself, "That I forgot today's the anniversary. I can get too relaxed here. Sometimes too disconnected from the world and time. But that's a lame excuse. There is and should be no excuse for not remembering the anniversary."

"I forgot as well," Rona said, "Until I saw that flag." I had pulled off the road to be close to the flagpole, in that way to perhaps feel more directly connected to the memory and emotions.

"And then we raced down to the street," I said, "found our nephew who was living in an NYU dorm even further south, closer to the attack. How we found him with the thousands of people running through the streets I'll never know. And then the three of us went to Washington Square Park and saw the second plane hit and in a few minutes watched as the two buildings imploded." 

We sat I the car looking up at the flag.

"Sixteen years," Rona said with a sigh. Almost a third of my lifetime ago. Where did those years go? Will it be that in another 16 years we'll be on this same road and stop to see the flag which I am sure will again be at half mast? People here won't forget. They don't forget things of this kind. But we . . ."

"It will be a stretch for me to be still alive in another 16 years. I don't mean to make this about me. I'm just being realistic. And since the last 16 years went by so fast, does this mean, as I think about the next 16, that . . ."

I didn't complete the thought. I didn't want to complete the thought.

Feeling me struggling with this, Rona slide closer, held onto me and said, "Your mother lived to 107 and so . . ."

She trailed off as well.

"We'll be OK," I finally said. "We'll be OK."

February 24, 2016--Donald TRUMP and the Jews of New York

For this I know I will be in big trouble.

Yesterday, on its Web page, the New York Times published two articles that essentially trashed Donald TRUMP:

"Donald Trump, Crony Capitalist" and "Trump Is No Power Broker in New York, Despite All the Signs." The signs being the ones on all the buildings with TRUMP on their facades--TRUMP Plaza, TRUMP Tower, and so on.

Putting aside the remarkable coincidence that the articles appeared on the day of the Nevada caucuses and exactly a week before Super Tuesday, they left out one important thing when talking about TRUMP as a crony capitalist, making deals with City officials to get permits and tax abatements to make his deals work (so what else is new in NYC?) and noting that his real estate "empire" is hardly an empire when compared to those of the real moguls--the Tishmans, the Silversteins, the Dursts, and so on--the critical thing missing from both articles is one thing that goes a long way to explain why TRUMP's NYC real estate colleagues have little good to say about him--

It is the fact that he isn't Jewish.

What do the following leading real estate families have in common with the aforementioned Dursts, Silversteins, and Tishmans?

The Malkins
The Roses
The Rudins
The Tishes
The Resnicks
The Zekendorfs
The Speyers
The Sterns
The Macklowes
The LeFraks

This is not a random or closely edited list, but rather the names of most of the major real estate families of New York City.

At the risk of being accused of being anti-Semitic, let me note that I am not a self-hating Jew, but someone proud of my heritage.

I also happen to be someone who spent a number of years involved with many of these remarkable men (they were all men) when I was acting dean of New York University's School of Continuing Education within which was situated the amazing Real Estate Institute.

With NYU's president I spend quite a few breakfasts and dinners with various mixes of these men in an attempt to advance the interests of the Institute and to, frankly, raise money for the university.

At the time, Donald TRUMP was beginning to make a BIG name for himself, consummating and carrying out huge deals in Manhattan all with his name emblazoned in brass. A little tacky some of my real estate friends said. Though Larry Silverstein, the Institute's chairman was angling to purchase the World Trade Center, there was no move to rename it for his beloved mother who launched the family real estate empire by each month visited the Silverstein tenement buildings on the Lower East Side to collect cash rents.

And so, though there were office buildings, residential towers, and hospital wings named for each of these men, TRUMP's obsession to name everything he owned after himself was considered to be beyond tacky. And it didn't help that he was not generous in his philanthropic work. Hardly an emergency room in town was named for him or Fred, his greatly-admired father, or his prematurely deceased brother. The Donald seemed interested only in making money and promoting himself. He was, I realize now, even at that early time, halfway to starring on The Apprentice.

Unspoken, but clearly implied or hinted at was that TRUMP was "not one of us."

At first I thought this referred to his lack of interest in NYU and the Institute, though each year he bought a table at the Real Estate Dinner and kicked in a minimalist $25K or so as a place holder. This when Larry and the other "boys" were anteing up millions for us and other New York charities. Especially, contributions to numerous Jewish causes, including for pretty much anything to help Israel and its government.

I once, perhaps after a drink or two or three, asked a couple of our benefactors, who also were university trustees, if Donald's estrangement from NYU and the RE Institute was because he wasn't Jewish.

The glances they exchanged and the fact that they changed the subject resonates with me still.

Larry Silverstein, Third From Left

June 4, 2014--NY, NY: Fish Story

We've had a series of beautiful days. It is as if the weather gods are compensating New York City for the harsh winter they imposed.

So we have been taking long walks. For the fresh air, the exercise, and to take note of all the changes that occurred during the four months we were lolling in Delray Beach.

"It's a shame," Rona said, as if already taking the clear air for granted, "how the banks and pharmacies and food places are pushing out the shoemakers and dry cleaners."

"And the mom-and-pop places," I joined in the familiar litany.

Living peripatetically as we do, these shifts in the neighbor are more dramatic than they would be if we were here all the time. It would feel more like a steady drip than a torrent of change.

"Why don't we try to enjoy things," Rona said, wanting us to move on from nostalgia for the old, more human scale New York. "For example, look at this little park. I don't think I ever noticed it before. It's just a sliver of a triangle, all grown over like a woodland landscape with what looks like a rambling path. Let's finish our ices and wander in."

We were at Sixth Avenue and Bleecker Street and had just stopped at Rocco's, an old-fashioned Italian bakery to get some of their delicious homemade ices. "Just like the old days in Brooklyn," Rona had said but then added, "Here I am, doing it again, living in the past. I find it so hard to move on and get comfortable with all the change and gentrification."

I put my arm around her and we ventured into the pocket park.

Though tiny, it was a transporting oasis from the throb of traffic on Sixth.

"I'll say one thing positive about all the new things."

"I'm looking foreword to hearing that," I smiled.

"During the past 20 years or so the city has done an amazing job of improving its parks. From Central and Prospect Park to Washington Square, Union Square, and now this one. It really is like an enchanted glade. Magical."

"And we have it all to ourselves. That's almost my favorite part."

Rona hugged me and I let my hand find her breast. "Stop that. There are other people here," she squirmed away from me but giggled with girlish pleasure.

After wandering further in the West Village we turned to home. Broadway, pleasantly, was a bit less crowded than when NYU is in session and also the street demographics are now shifted more toward our end, my end, of the actuarial scale, which meant that we didn't have to dodge the streams of college-age kids staring obliviously at their smart phones.

"Did you see that?" Rona whispered, pulling on my sleeve.

"What?"

"That women. The one pushing the walker."

"I see her," she has shuffled passed us as we stopped to look in a shop window, "But I don't know what you're pointing out."

"What she has in the basket."

"Maybe a cat, like I told you about seeing the other day when I went out for the paper? The woman who had her cat seat-belted in a kiddie stroller."

"No. Not her. Walk faster. You're not going to believe this one."

"Give me a hint. I don't want to race after her and scare her. She looks pretty fragile."

"She's stopped at the light. We can catch up without startling her. This you won't believe."

We got to her well before the light changed and I looked surreptitiously into the basket. Rona, excitedly, was poking me in the back. I brushed her hand away so I could get a closer look.

"I see what you mean," I said.

Rona, nodding, to shush me, poked me harder.

To the woman I said, "Are you taking him for a walk?" I was referring to the fish in the small bowl in her walker basket.

I expected to be glared at or at least ignored.

"Yes," she said, with a wide smile. "It's such a beautiful day I thought he'd enjoy being out."

"It is beautiful," I said, not knowing what to say. "He must . . ." I cut myself off, not believing I was talking about a fish that was being taken out for a walk.

"He's cooped up all day."

"I know what you mean. Just like the rest of us when . . ."

"I know you think I'm crazy," she said, looking directly at me.

I truly did not know how to respond because, yes, I did think . . .

"Maybe I am. At least a little bit." I was happy to see her smiling. It suggested enough self-awareness to assure me that she didn't require an intervention.

"You know when all this began?"

"This?"

"With the fish. He's a Beta."

"I can see that."

"After Herb died." I looked away. "Almost a year ago."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"We were together almost sixty years. I didn't know what to do with myself. I wanted to die. If I could find the courage, I wanted to end it. To kill myself."

"That's . . ."

"I know. Sad and desperate." She looked at me and I shrugged as empathetically as I could. "That's how I felt. As if life no longer had meaning." She shuddered. "But then a friend suggested I get a pet. How having a pet is good for people living on their own. It brings life into your life."

"I've heard that too," I said.

"But look at me. Am I able to walk a dog? Or bend down to empty a litter box?"

"I don't . . ."

"You can say it. It's the truth. I'm old and all crippled up. With my knees. I could also use a new hip. And I have back spasms from top to bottom. So . . ." She pointed at the fish bowl and this time she shrugged.

"So this . . . ?"

"Yes, this. I call him Herb. I know that's crazy but at this point I don't care, I don't care what anyone thinks."

"It makes sense to me," I managed to say. In fact, it did.

By then the light had turned green and she began painfully to cross the street.

"Nice talking to you," she said over her shoulder. "Have a nice day."

July 23, 2013--501(c)(3)

Colleges and universities are exempt from virtually all federal and state taxes because they are deemed to serve a "public purpose." They provide undergraduate and graduate education services as well as sponsor research, both considered to contribute to the public good.

To gain tax exempt status higher education institutions have to convince the Internal Revenue Service that they are not-for-profit; do in fact serve a public purpose; and do not, under the guise of their not-for-profit status, operate as if they are profit-making corporations.

If they pass these threshold tests (and it is not difficult to do) they are granted 501(c)(3) status. After that  they are required to file a 990 tax statement at the end of each year so the IRS, if it wants too (though it rarely does), can closely examine their sources of income (tuition, grants, endowment earnings, and alumni gifts) and how they in turn spend this income--on faculty and administrative salaries and benefits and on various forms of non-personel overhead costs for classrooms, athletic facilities, staff office, and the like.

A basic understanding between the IRS and universities is that administrative and faculty salaries and benefits should not approach those of for-profit corporations. After all, to provide their public service they in effect receive taxpayer subsidies by the very fact that they are tax exempt. Every dollar of taxes colleges do not pay must be made up by ordinary taxpayers. So keeping control of expenses, especially salaries and benefits, should be serious business and colleges' and universities' fiscal behavior should be closely monitored by the IRS.

This very rarely occurs.

It is almost unheard of for the IRS to audit 501(c)(3) institutions and even rarer for the IRS to keep an eye on salaries and perks.

That is until recently.

It wasn't the sleepy IRS that began to raise questions about questionable fiscal practices at a number of universities but grizzled Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley.

He stumbled onto upsetting information about compensation practices at New York University during Secretary of the Treasury nominee Jack Lew's confirmation hearing.

Lew had briefly been a senior administrator at NYU and, when he left to make his millions on Wall Street, was given a $685,000 golden parachute. Grassley also turned up information that NYU has been attempting to obscure the fact that Lew and others, including NYU's president John Sexton, had been given an array of perks that are, to say the least, questionable at a legitimate 501(c)(3) institution.

Senior administrators as well as some "star" faculty where offered below-market-rate loans to help them buy apartments; senior faculty and staff are able to live in downtown Manhattan apartments at well below market rents; and a number of senior administrators, including the dean of the law school and president Sexton have been give hundreds of thousands of dollars in subsidies so they could buy weekend country houses. In addition to Jack Lew, Sexton and law school dean Richard Revesz have been guaranteed lifetime annual high-six-figure bonuses after they retire. In Sexton's case, it is reported he will receive annually at least $600K above his pension when he leaves. His current salary and benefits package is nearly $2.0 million a year.

To the vast majority of the faculty, Sexton's retirement could not come soon enough.

Almost all of the schools and colleges of the university have voted no-confidence in him and the chair of the board of trustees, mergers-and-aquisition fixer Martin Lipton.

Among the things the faculty claim is that these corporate-like perks are not only being paid for by taxpayers through NYU's 501(c)(3) tax exempt status but by faculty and staff who have not seen their salaries and benefits keep pace with inflation and by increases in student tuition and fees--NYU's primary source of income. Since Sexton became president and the perks began to flow, tuition has risen well above the rate of inflation and scholarships, as a percentage of tuition, have declined.

During the ten years Sexton and his royal staff have been at the trough, NYU's ranking in US News & World Report has consistently fallen. Even the law school declined from 4th to 6th place and its once-esteemed Institute of Fine Arts is no longer number one. And, perhaps most significant, the undergraduate college has been slipping in standing during Sexton's tenure.

NYU and Columbia and many other elite institutions that are behaving in versions of the same manner are doing whatever they can to avoid giving Senator Grassley the information he is demanding.

We will see where this goes. From my experience as a dean at NYU and other institutions, what has been revealed about elite universities' financial practices is the tip of the iceberg.

But there is a simple solution--just as academic accrediting agencies from time-to-time place colleges on probation because they violate academic freedom or replace too many full-time faculty with less expensive and qualified part-timers (at NYU nearly 40 percent of undergrad courses are taught by adjuncts or graduate assistants), Senator Grassley could press the IRS to take a close look at NYU's books; and, if they find what the faculty is alleging, consider revoking NYU's tax-exempt status.

That would get their attention and quickly cause NYU and others engaged in similar practices to begin to reverse the decades-long trend to corporatize American higher education at taxpayers' and their students' expense.

July 22, 2013--"No Jews. No Dogs"

When I applied to Columbia University, I had no idea. When I became a faulty member at the City University of New York, I had no idea. And years later when I became a dean at New York University, I had no idea.

I did know that by some NYU was called New York Jew, but I naively had no idea what that fully meant. Just that during the 1970s it felt as if there was a disproportionate percentage of Jewish students enrolled. But NYU, after all, is in New York City and at the time there were more Jews living in New York than in all of Israel.

But later I began to understand why NYU was very Jewish at its downtown location but more gentile at its University Heights campus and why Columbia College on its application required a passport-style photograph. When I asked my parents about this they said it was probably to see if I was a Negro. Having lived through the Holocaust and having seen No Jews. No Dogs signs at hotels in upstate New York, they knew discrimination when they saw it.

Once I arrived on campus on Morningside Heights I saw that by requiring a headshot Columbia was doing a pretty good job of screening some of us in and keeping others out--in my undergraduate class of about 600 there was only one Negro. And he was the star of our otherwise pathetic football team.

I was beginning to figure things out. But I thought these practices were all about people of color, not that Columbia's screening policy also very much pertained to me.

Then some years later, reading Thomas Bender's University and the City, I began to see the extent of the quota system colleges and universities were implementing to keep the number of Jewish students down to as bare a minimum as they could get away with.

And just this week, reading Leonard Dinnerstein's definitive Antisemitism In America many more details of this virulent system became even clearer.

As with so much in regard to higher education, in this too Harvard took the lead.

In the 1920s, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell (a Lawrence and a Lowell), declared that his college had a "Jewish problem." He noted that Jewish enrollments had more than tripled from 6 percent in 1908 to 22 percent in 1922. To assure that students developed into "true Christians" (to Lowell, this was at the heart of Harvard's mission) one had to limit the number of Jewish students for fear that the institution would lose its "character."

The Board of Overseers agreed. One member, Jack Morgan (of J.P. Morgan) wrote to his colleagues--

I think I ought to say that I believe there is a strong feeling that [a potential new member of the Board] . . . should by no means be a Jew or a Roman Catholic, although, naturally, the feeling in regard to the latter is less than in regard to the former. I'm afraid you will think we are a narrow-minded lot, but I would base my personal objection to each of these two . . . on the fact that in both cases there is acknowledgement of interests of political control beyond, and in the minds of these people, superior to the Government of this country--a Jew is always a Jew first and an American second . . .

Other colleges seeking elite status rushed to follow Harvard's lead. In addition to establishing strict admission quotas for those Jewish students they felt compelled to admit, they established rules to socially restrict and even segregate "Hebrew" undergraduates.

At Syracuse University, where a Ku Klux Klan chapter existed, Jews were excluded from almost all campus organizations, including fraternities. Their Jewish students were also housed separately from Christians. At the Universities of Michigan and Nebraska, gentile students were advised against associating with Jewish males. And Harvard cleverly came up with the idea of geographic diversity in order not to have to handle too many Jewish applicants since most lived in a few big cities and states.

Ernest Hopkins, president of Dartmouth, summed up the reasons for these application procedures and quotas--

Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.

Beside the illiteracy of President Hopkins' statement (if he were a high school senior and had included it in his application to Dartmouth, if he had been accepted, he would have been placed in remedial English), in his statement he was unfortunately telling it like it was.