Columbia College needs big bucks, and the election of Allen Turner as board chairman late last month signals the first all-out effort in the school’s history to get it from private donors. Columbia has grown from a scruffy broadcasting school with an anything-that-breathes admissions policy and a faculty of moonlighters to one of the largest arts colleges in the country. It has an annual budget of $160 million–90 percent of it from tuition–and it’s the biggest property owner in the South Loop, but it can’t keep paying its own way. Crunched on one hand by pressure to keep tuition increases down and on the other by a mushrooming student body (10,500 and growing) that expects sophisticated equipment and campus amenities, Columbia’s appointed Turner to lead the charge on the handout circuit.
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The piano-playing, poetry-loving, art-collecting, hoop-shooting, self-made south-sider is also a Pritzker partner, celebrated as the city’s Medici prince in a Chicago magazine profile a few years back, and he appears to be an inspired choice. As board chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art in the early 90s Turner was instrumental in raising more than $55 million for the MCA’s new edifice. (He probably can’t be blamed for the way it looks.)
In 2002 the Columbia Chronicle wondered why a school with an endowment of only $46 million was paying its president nearly as much as Princeton, whose endowment is 233 times as large. Though Carter said from the beginning of his tenure that building Columbia’s endowment was a priority, during the five years he’s been there private donations have remained flat or declined; gifts last year were under $1 million. Still, when a small group on the board attempted to oust him a couple of years ago, they were voted down. “At this point,” says Turner, “Dr. Carter is very secure in his job. He has his team firmly in place. The vice presidents [a majority of them Carter appointees] are all on the same page. The board is happy with the staff.”
