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AROUND THE QUADSCampus NewsCLASS DAY: Robert Kraft ’63 will be the keynote speaker at the College’s May 17 Class Day ceremony. Kraft, the owner of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, is a former trustee, a patron of the Kraft Family Center for Jewish Life and the 2004 recipient of the Alexander Hamilton Medal for distinguished service and accomplishment. While a student, he was elected class president all four years but did not serve in his junior year, as students were prohibited from serving as president three years in a row. DONATIONS: Contributions to colleges and universities rose 3.4 percent or $800 million for the year ended June 30, 2004, to a record $24.4 billion, according to a report by the Council for Aid to Education, a unit of the RAND Corp. After adjusting for inflation, the increase amounted to 0.7 percent. Columbia ranked seventh on the list at $291 million. Harvard, which led the list for the 27th time in the past 36 years, received $540 million, slightly below the $545 million it received the previous year. Stanford was second at $524 million, up 8 percent, and Cornell ranked third with $386 million, a 22 percent increase that was helped by a $50 million bequest. Completing the top 10 were Penn, $333 million; Southern Cal, $322 million; Johns Hopkins, $312 million; Columbia; M.I.T., $290 million; Yale, $265 million; and UCLA, $262 million. Alumni were the largest source of charitable giving last year, accounting for $6.7 billion, or 28 percent of the total. Other big sources were foundations, $6.2 billion; individual donors who were not alumni, $5.2 billion; and corporations, $4.4 billion. CHAIR: A search committee has begun meeting to draw plans to fill a new endowed chair in Israeli and Jewish Studies, created to focus on modern Israeli history, politics and society, with an anticipated start date of fall 2006. The University also is creating a visiting professorship designed to bring to Columbia Israeli scholars from a wide range of disciplines. Four trustees have pledged $3 million toward the endowed chair, which is expected to cost $5 million. Professor Michael Stanislawski, assistant director of the Center for Israel and Jewish Studies, is leading the search committee. He said discussion about the chair began about a year and a half ago, when there was friction on campus but before the current conflict over the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department erupted. “This chair is not a political appointment; it’s an academic appointment,” Stanislawski said. “It would be naïve to speculate that there is an absolute disconnect between the controversy in previous years and this chair. But this was not meant to be a political response; it was meant to be purely academic.” PLAYBOOK FOR LIFE: The NCAA has teamed with The Hartford Financial Services Group to develop a program called Playbook For Life, which is designed to teach student-athletes about personal finance. The first event associated with this initiative took place on March 2 at the Dodge Fitness Center and featured former All-Ivy linebacker Javier Loya ’91, who is president and CEO of CHOICE! Energy, a Houston-based commodities brokerage firm he co-founded in 1994. Loya and former Notre Dame and NFL running back Allen Pinkett spoke about building financial portfolios, overcoming financial fears and achieving the discipline necessary to reach financial goals.
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