Why I Interrupted Schwarzman
Classmates,
Those of you who attended our reunion dinner heard me interrupt Steve Schwarzman’s rambling, self-aggrandizing talk by shouting, “That’s enough Steve: You’ve dispossessed tens of thousands of people out of their homes…”
Undoubtedly I should have risen magisterially from my seat and addressed a few more temperate but still-critical words to him and the rest of us. But:
1. Steve had just insulted President Salovey as the latter stood (almost obsequiously) a dozen feet away during his talk: “People who have resources,” Steve said (I paraphrase only slightly), “get some unwanted friends, and Peter came to me with a list of projects Yale wanted to fund. I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about this list….’” — and here Steve launched into a story about what prompted his $150-million gift to redesign Commons and rename it for himself — a story he has told before, and not quite honestly, as I show by recounting more of it the Dissent magazine column below here on screen and in another one, from The Washington Monthly, that’s linked in it.
2. I also noted in the Washington Monthly column that Steve’s private equity Blackstone firm got into and rode the subprime mortgage whirlwind that he and his managers knew was throwing those thousands of Americans out of their homes.
3. As chair of Donald Trump’s Business Advisory Council, he stuck with a Trump as the council disbanded over the President’s Charlottesville remarks, and, on mid-term election night, November 2018, was in the White House with Trump, watching the returns.
There is some stuff that Yale simply should not eat, and as I watched some other diners rolling their eyes and shifting uncomfortably in their seats while Steve went on and on, I decided that someone had to object.
“Free speech,” anyone?
Jim Sleeper
When Plutocracy Comes to Campus
When undergrads challenged a rich donor close to Donald Trump, his biggest defenders were their own university’s leaders.
May 15, 2018
Stephen Schwarzman (center) at a reception in Davos, 2016 (Financial Times / Flickr)
If you worked full time at raising money for a hard-pressed public school district or even a major American university, you might be thrilled at first to find a donor such as the multibillionaire global asset manager Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman of the Blackstone private-equity group. Schwarzman has an “edifice complex”—a mania to name everything after himself—as virulent as Donald Trump’s, but since he doesn’t seem to be dictating any school’s curricular and hiring decisions, you might think that its students and faculty would be grateful.
Think again.
We now have Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where Schwarzman Scholars are trained to join “the next generation of global leaders” as their patron becomes the Cecil Rhodes of Asia; the New York Public Library’s flagship beaux arts Stephen A. Schwarzman Building; and the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center, a $150-million remake of Yale University’s civic Commons. And there’s more to come.
Yet like Rodney Dangerfield, Schwarzman can’t “get no respect.” The harder he tries to turn America into the United States of Schwarzman, the less respect he’s getting, even from his intended beneficiaries. Instead of extending their trembling hands in awe and gratitude, some have been disrupting the delicate dances through which their institutional leaders and development officers have courted self-aggrandizing donors like Schwarzman.
The courtiers’ motives are understandable enough: Although a civic or liberal education needs some independence from profiteers if it’s going to prepare future citizens to “speak truth to power,” it also needs some independence from the partisan and ideological demands that often come with public funding. With even the best public funding declining these days, the race is on at every educational institution to find private donors, however crass, who won’t ask more than to name buildings after themselves.
For a long time, Schwarzman didn’t seem to ask more. He seemed content with garish self-promotions, however widely lampooned, like the $3 million sixtieth birthday party he threw for himself a decade ago in Manhattan’s hulking Seventh Regiment Armory, with a performance by Rod Stewart. As recently as last week, New York Times style writer Jacob Bernstein portrayed Schwarzman as “a 5-foot-6-inch bundle of testosterone” and “a flash point for income inequality, a man with more money than respect,” in a colorfully photographed account of the Met’s annual fashion gala—this year themed around the Schwarzman-funded exhibit “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” Yet his continuing failure to win respect “seldom stops him from having the last laugh, or getting the multi-million-dollar tax write-off,” Bernstein noted.
Nevertheless, as I reported last year, criticism has been darkening, not only among observers of the glitterati and among investors who consider Schwarzman’s business practices nasty and destructive. It’s darkening also among students, parents, and teachers who you might not expect to bite a hand offering to feed them. They don’t like seeing beloved civic institutions (and themselves) forced to honor, in perpetuity, someone who rushed to chair President Trump’s business Strategic and Policy Forum and stayed with him even after it disbanded in a recoil at Trump’s indulgent comments on the white nationalists who led the riots in Charlottesville.
The most impressive rebuff came in April, when residents of suburban Philadelphia’s Abington public-school district rose angrily against his bid to rename its high school after him in return for a $25 million donation, the largest ever given to an American public school. This is the high school Schwarzman graduated from in 1965, and that took $400,000 to rename its football stadium for him in 2005.
At first, the astonished school board had embraced the deal. But as word spread of Schwarzman’s ties with Trump and of the ways other megadonors are pulling strings in education—including the Koch brothers, whose donations to universities give them influence on teaching and curricula—a huge petition and tumultuous public meeting forced Abington’s school board and Schwarzman himself to drop the renaming plan and renegotiate the other terms.
That revolt made reporters at the student-run Yale Daily News wonder why their university’s governors hadn’t similarly declined Schwarzman’s offer to donate $150 million that is now transforming the Commons, a massive hall in the university’s sacred civic complex, into the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center. Schwarzman, whom Yale President Peter Salovey says is intimately involved in the redesign, once recalled taking his meals there in 1965 as a lonely freshman, the son of a dry-goods store owner struggling to cope with then heavily preppy, WASPy Yale. Turning the tables at Commons must be giving him satisfaction.
But it’s also teaching Yale about the desperate, delicate dance of donors and recipients, thanks to investigative reporting by the student-run Yale Daily News. In 2016, the YDN published a striking condemnation of Schwarzman and, a year later, a profile of Schwarzman,“Profit at Any Cost,” that recounted his meteoric rise in finance capital, his dubious business premises and practices, and his seemingly endless craving for name recognition. The article prompted Yale’s vice president for communications and its chief of staff to invite the student journalists in for what turned into three grillings, two of them in the presence of Yale President Salovey. The administrators requested that the paper apologize to Schwarzman, even though it had also published a conservative student’s column, “In Defense of Schwarzman”— for which Salovey had sent that student a letter of thanks.
Instead of bowing to the pressure, the student reporters raised the bar. On April 27 they published a 4200-word investigative story by Hailey Fuchs, “The Donor Game,” exposing Yale’s delicate dance with Schwarzman. Overseen by YDN editor-in-chief by Rachel Treisman, the investigation revealed that in 2008, the financier had offered $125 million to build a new Yale residential college on condition that it be named after him. Informed that no Yale college can be named for anyone living, “Schwarzman walked away from the gift.” A seven-year-long minuet of offers and counter-offers ensued until Yale agreed to re-design and re-name Commons.
The story explains that although the university has been more successful in its endowment investments than most other Ivies, its 225 development officers have more difficulty than Harvard or Stanford in raising the money to invest, because Yale’s smaller, newer business school hasn’t as wealthy alums (Schwarzman earned his MBA from Harvard after graduating Yale in 1969), and doesn’t have as many science labs and research projects that attract large funding.
Remarkably, Fuch’s story also details the administration’s relentless pressure on the YDN after it published “Profit at any Cost.” Reporter David Yaffe-Bellany told her that it seemed like the three administrators were “running public relations interference for one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the country.”
“We ultimately issued a few clarifications but no corrections” of the Schwarzman profile, former YDN editor David Shimer said. “But my suspicion is that this unusually tense meeting—which was clearly and unfortunately meant to intimidate us—had less to do with inadvertent factual errors, which the News is always eager to correct, than with the pressure the administration was under.’”
The pressure on university leaders is characterized well in former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham’s classic 2001 essay on Yale, “Quarrels With Providence.” As Lapham recalled,….
[Please finish reading the piece here. Thanks.]
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Take a look at www.jimsleeper.com
Jim,
Thank you for speaking up last night. And thank you for writing this post to give the background on why you did this, I have been disturbed by Schwarzman’s propensity to donate funds to construct buildings named after him: at his high school, at Yale, and even more offensive to me, at MIT, where he has no connection. I also think the Schwarzman’s Yale contribution, as described by Schwarzman himself as not being on Yale’s list of desired improvements, is a problem. Schwarzman’s story is indeed touching, and I am sure we can all empathize with him, but I suspect Yale’s planners have improvements with greater need in mind.
This morning I attended a talk at the Yale British Art Center where the director described Paul Mellon’s insistence that his name be kept off buildings built with his contributions. This habit of insisting that your name be attached to buildings constructed with your contributions illustrates a mistrust that people won’t give you the credit you deserve. But in fact, Mellon’s humility supports more honor in my view.
So, I thank you for saying with a loud voice what I was thinking.
— Harry Forsdick
Pierson College
BS, Yale 1969
MS, MIT 1974
Thank you, Harry. Many have told me that they assess this pretty much as you and I do. But I want to acknowledge here that others disagree and resented my interruption at the dinner.
I didn’t come to it with any intention whatever of making any “statement” or interrupting anyone. It was only as Steve ‘dissed the president of Yale and then launched into his disingenuous account of how “I was a lonely freshman at Commons, and now I’m glad i can turn the tables there” that I became incensed.
Steve’s edifice complex is almost as well-known as Trump’s, but in his little homily he didn’t mention that he had offered to fund one of the new residential colleges if Yale would name it “Stephen A. Schwarzman College.” Informed that no residential college can be named for a living donor, he walked away for seven years. Yale kept courting him until he got it to agree to rename and redesign Commons. Our students have plenty of great facilities already in their residential colleges, many of which have been significantly redesigned underground, as some of you surely noticed. The redesign of Commons is all about Steve Schwarzman, and little else.
Well, as I watched the president of Yale stand there a foot below him, as if in attendance on him, while Steve regaled us with his designs for Commons, I became incensed. I know that many universities’ buildings are named for miscreants who engage in self-aggrandizing, self-exculpating philanthropy by naming things after themselves. (Let me tell you sometime about four of the buildings at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School.) But Yale’s Commons? Read the Washington Monthly and the Dissent magazine columns, where some preternaturally wise, courageous undergraduates explain why and how we’ve let Yale down by doing this. I’m not one who insists that “The kids are alright,” but they’re right about this one. If Yale was right to re-name Calhoun College (of which I’ve been a fellow for 15 years), it will be right to re-name Commons someday. Steve wants his name to be like that of Carnegie or Rockefeller. That’ll be up to the country, but I hope that Yale will set the example that Steve’s old high school did, as recounted in the Dissent column pasted above.
There’s plenty wrong with Donald Trump, but all this was known before the first primary, which Trump won, as he did the election. There may be a lot wrong with Steve Schwarzman – all this is new to me – but advising the President of the United States is not one of them; I also take issue with the mis-representation of Trump’s remarks at Charlottesville – his even-handedness was directed at those not wanting the monuments removed, not at racists; there is enough to criticize about Donald Trump without fostering this false myth;and why interject politics into your criticism of Schwarzman? We should be able to disagree politically and still be friends.
I can agree that Schwarzman has a perfect right to inject himself into politics as he’s done. But sometimes, tragically, politics itself forecloses further agreement.
Decades ago, I read an article or chapter (I wish I could remember where) about how Princeton students felt on the eve of the Civil War, when it was becoming clear that the Southerners among them would not return to or bond with their classmates or alma mater. The caesura was too profound.
(Incidentally, our webmaster, Wayne G. Willis, has a terrific column –in the Yale Daily News’ “Welcome Alumni Issue” — “Reunion Clerking Through the Centuries” — https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2019/05/25/willis-69-reunion-clerking-through-the-centuries/ — in which he recalls clerking for the 60th reunion of the Class of 1909 in 1969, just after we’d graduated, and one of the 1909’ers he met recalled clerking similarly for the Class of 1859 just after his own graduation, and talking back then with a ’59’er who described Yale on the eve of the Civil War. Most Yalies were Abolitionists, so the college wasn’t riven apart, but Princeton had a lot more Southerners.)
Trump is right about some ways in which neoliberal Democrats have been wrong, but his “solutions” are destroying the institutions of the republic. For example, the prosecution of Julian Assange — an easy target, certainly no hero of mine –sets precedents for suppressing freedom of the press in ways never before attempted. The recruitment and training of ICE as a presidential Praetorian guard is another precedent-breaking move. Many such executive actions, unchallenged by our supine Senate and unlikely to be overruled by an increasingly compliant judiciary — could leave our children unfree in ways we’re not anticipating.
The civic-republican tradition with which we and other generations have grown up — arguably since the Civil War, although it was often violated –holds that a classically liberal-capitalist republic like ours has to rely on a critical mass of its citizens to uphold, voluntarily, certain public virtues and beliefs that neither markets nor the liberal state nourish or defend well enough — the state because it can’t judge too strictly between one way or another, and markets because their genius is to approach investors and consumers as self-interested individuals, not to ask who their grandparents were or what their religion is, even though those latter things matter immensely for civic virtues. For that, we rely on “civil society” — the churches, schools (including Yale), and civic associations, which are supposed to stand somewhat apart from markets and states but which are now being distorted by omnivorous markets. Trump incarnates and intensifies that distortion and its dissolution of civic-republican comity and, with it, republican institutions. Although he’s sometimes right about how those institutions have faltered — he was “right” about the Vietnam War, even while avoiding it as little Donnie Bone Spurs — he’s incapable of correcting or rescuing the institutions because he’s a carrier and casualty of the forces and the thinking that are dissolving them.
John C. Calhoun, too, was right that some aspects of Northern white “wage slavery” in his time were wrong, but that didn’t make his politics reconcilable with Yale’s fundamental purposes and commitments as a wellspring of civil society.
I don’t believe that, on balance, Trump’s strategies and tactics (if one can even call them that) and Schwarzman’s and other Yalies’ support for them can be reconciled with what Yale stands for. I dearly hope that this doesn’t presage another civil war. Lincoln pleaded for reconciliation and friendship even in his second inaugural address, but that was a bridge too far. So now, too. I spoke up because someone had to say so.
It is the lack of comity and repeated lies that underlie my fears for our Republic, which is why I responded to the Charlottesville statement. Among the “public virtues and beliefs” that must be upheld is a sense of fairness which I do not find in almost any of the media, nor in those opposed to Trump, and it is this that makes discourse about our disagreements so difficult. So let Schwarzman advise Trump; Big Deal.
Prosecution of Assange? ICE as a Praetorian gurard? I am more concerned with the politicization of our institutions – the IRS in the Lois Lerner affair, the bugging of Diane Feinstein’s Intelligence committee, the spying on Fox reporter James Rosen, the Mueller investigation if it happens to have been done on spurious evidence, all done under the previous administration.
I thought this started out as a comment about Mr. Schwarzman and his donation. I guess it is too much to hope that we could keep our current President or politics out of it. On its face, Mr Schwarzman was ill mannered but not all that surprising. I did not know him at Yale and do not now, but I am told he was an”insecure” young man- it is clear that nothing has changed.
I would expect many of us felt overwhelmed and alone when we first got to Yale and entered Commons, I knew no one and I am sure I was not alone. However most of us got over it, learned to get along with our classmates and built a social network of varying dimensions. It seems Mr. S did not. More the pity.
The sad part of this donation is that while it may improve “student life”, an assertion open to debate, it does little or nothing for the educational mission of the University. When annual tuition costs exceed 60-70K per student it would seem this should be the priority . I would have felt better if President Salovey had prostrated himself for 150 million in tuition aid.
Yes, I can’t help but feel that most of the bells and whistles in the new Schwarzman Center are superfluous, because the residential colleges are much better equipped that way now — they’ve been significantly redesigned, underground — than they were in our time. To my mind (and I felt this especially during his talk at the reunion dinner) the $150 million is really about putting his name on the very place where he felt ignored as a freshman. In effect, he’s turning the tables.
What he left out in his talk — but what the Yale Daily News reported, as I’ve reprised and linked in the Dissent magazine column — is that he offered to fund one of the new residential colleges if it would be named “Stephen A. Schwarzman College.” Informed that Yale won’t name a residential college for a living donor (or indeed for any donor as such), he walked away for seven years until they found something grand enough to bear his great name.
I hereby nominate Jim Sleeper for the 2019 Richard Blumenthal award.