In a capstone tribute to Meyer Feldberg ’65, Columbia Business School dedicated its 28th Annual Dinner to celebrating a 15-year deanship that transformed the School.
Held on May 3 at the Waldorf-Astoria, the joyous gala was attended by a crowd of more than 1,000 guests, including alumni, faculty members, students and friends of the School.
The keynote address was given by Michael C. Bloomberg, mayor of New York City. Henry R. Kravis ’69, founding partner of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and a member of the School’s board of overseers, was chairman of the event.
Thanks to Kravis’s dedicated leadership, the celebration raised over $10 million, exceeding the previous fund-raising record for the dinner by more than threefold.
The funds raised by the dinner will establish the Meyer Feldberg Distinguished Fellowship Program, an initiative that will help Columbia Business School continue to attract the most outstanding MBA students year after year.
For a significant portion of those graduates present, Feldberg was in fact their dean—44 percent of all alumni attended during his tenure. Guests included senior icons of the global business community as well as thriving leaders of successful organizations—more than 90 corporations were represented—and young alumni in the early stage of their careers.
The Meyer Feldberg Distinguished Fellowship Program will annually provide full tuition to a select group of entering Columbia Business School students, who will be chosen for their academic achievements and potential for leadership.
“The Feldberg Fellowship Program will enable the School to make explicit its emphasis on leadership and excellence through the support of especially promising students choosing to study at Columbia,” says Marilyn F. Kohn, associate dean for external relations and development.
The first fellowship recipients will be selected from the class of 2006, this fall’s entering class. Ultimately, Kohn says, the fellowship program will “generate a global network of distinguished graduates who can serve as ambassadors of the School and its mission.”
As the dinner began, Kravis welcomed attendees by noting that the evening program would depart from tradition by honoring one, not two, exemplary leaders from the business and government sectors. Feldberg, Kravis warmly joked, “stands out so much that he is much better than any two people we could possibly honor.”
Kravis offered his heartfelt acknowledgment that the outgoing dean “represents what is the finest of Columbia Business School.” Feldberg’s comprehensive and enduring transformation of the School, he noted, had included increasing the budget from $30 million in 1989 to $140 million in 2004, growing the endowment from $16 million to $280 million and not only leading a $170 million capital campaign but completing it a full year early. The School, Kravis said, also has become the second-most selective business school worldwide—a peer of the top handful of truly preeminent graduate business programs.
In his keynote address, Mayor Bloomberg praised Feldberg’s strategic decision early in his deanship to tie “the fate of the School to the life of New York.” It was, noted the mayor, “the perfect merger.”
“Columbia Business School is New York,” Bloomberg continued. “It’s a great school. It produces leaders and it produces builders. I think [Meyer] said it best [when he began his deanship in 1989]: He said he wanted to create the quintessential business school in the quintessential business city in the world. I think that is exactly what the School is and what the city is.”
“And I think you will agree,” Bloomberg added, “he is the quintessential business school dean.”
Noting wryly that Feldberg’s last sabbatical lasted all of 11 days, Bloomberg offered good wishes for his sabbatical leave, after which he will return to the School to teach as the Sanford C. Bernstein Professor of Leadership and Ethics.
Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, emphasized in his remarks that Feldberg’s deanship had been a boon not only to the School but to the entire University. “The truth is that Meyer Feldberg has accomplished something [for which], in the academy, across the United States, there are very few contending analogies,” he said.
Russ Carson ’67, general partner of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and chairman of the School’s board of overseers, spoke of Feldberg as a close colleague and a “loyal, compassionate friend.” “Meyer captured my imagination” when he first took the deanship, Carson said. “He had vision, energy and passion,” he noted, “as well as a sense of humor and perspective.”
Taking the podium, Meyer Feldberg welcomed incoming dean Glenn Hubbard, the Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics and academic director of the Eugene M. Lang Center for Entrepreneurship.
“I know many of you have often wondered what it would take to render me speechless and make me humble,” said Feldberg in response to the announcement of the fellowship program and the praise he had received during the evening. “Well, now you know.”
“I know I stand on your shoulders,” he continued. “It is you who have made me a success. It is the alumni and faculty who have raised the currency of Columbia Business School. Your success has been my reward.”