Michael Bloomberg, philanthropist
Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg just
gave 1.8 billion dollars to his alma
mater, Johns Hopkins University, thus removing for perpetuity and with one
dramatic gesture the “tuition loan crisis” for future undergraduates at that
great university. In the future,
forever, nobody will ever have to decline admission to Hopkins on financial
grounds. Fleming has two things to say
about this: what a gift! and what a Mensch!
I realize that my unalloyed
enthusiasm violates canons of academic niggelkeit,
which ought to be a German word meaning that ability to find the dark cloud
that must necessarily accompany the most dazzling Sterling of silver linings,
but I cannot help it. Louis XIV, having
advanced some fellow in aristocratic rank, is supposed to have lamented, “I
have now made one man ungrateful and a dozen others jealous”. Don’t allow it to be thus with regard to this
princely gift. I’ll explain why the
worry even crosses my mind, but first I need to tell you about my lunch with
Michael Bloomberg.
Shortly before I retired Mr.
Bloomberg gave a hundred-room dormitory to Princeton in honor of his daughter, who had pursued a brilliant undergraduate career here. I know it was “brilliant” because by chance I
saw some of it first hand as the director of her senior thesis in Medieval
Studies. The dormitory, Bloomberg Hall,
is actually named for her—a wonderful
paternal touch, but also one that dramatizes the special undergraduate emphasis
of our institution. Compared with a gift
of nearly two billion a splendid new dormitory costing merely many millions may
suddenly seem small beer. In fact, it is
a very big deal. When the building was
finished, the University catered a small lunch party for the donor, the
honoree, the donor’s formidably intelligent sister, some major officers of the
institution, and a couple of spear-bearers, including me. I don’t have a lot of high-and-mighty
lunches, which is a pity if this was anything to go by. It was really great. After graciously and succinctly covering all
the ceremonial topics required by the occasion, Mr. Bloomberg proposed that we
have a general conversation, quite off any “record,” having to do with
challenges facing the country and the city of which he was then the mayor. What followed was an unforgettably
stimulating academic seminar that did its best to avoid the academic even as it
eschewed the partisan simplisms defining most of our current political
discourse. I had heard a few glib politicians before. Here was one who could think on his feet and carry
on a smart conversation with other smart people. That was the first and only occasion on which
I have been in the presence of Michael Bloomberg; and it left me with a very
high opinion of the man.
Hence the somewhat grudging
reaction to this fantastic gift to Hopkins from various leaders in higher
education caught me off guard. I read
about the gift in an op ed by Bloomberg on Monday. Over the next few days—maybe even the next
day—there was a cluster of vox pop letters to the editor. I cannot find the relevant back copy of the Times, which I fear was used to wrap up discarded
turkey bones; but I think I remember the letters well enough. There were four of them. Two were from “ordinary” readers. The first of these was interesting but
irrelevant, arguing that a college education is not a necessary prerequisite to
social significance or economic success—a true observation, but one that
Bloomberg’s munificent initiative had not questioned either in fact or by
implication. The gist of the other was what a gift! and what a Mensch! But even this
letter suggested that there was something problematic about the man’s
charity—though the problem might be temporarily deferred while we applauded the
charity The niggelkeit factor was explicit in the two other letters in which two
high-ranking academic administrators (provost of an important institution in
New York City and president of a Seven Sisters college) weighed in. Concerning the largest single private gift of
money ever made to an academic institution at any time in history these
worthies were, I thought, rather faint of praise. The institutions they lead are very different
from each other—as both are different from Johns Hopkins—but they joined
together in a shared subtext: very generous, Mr. Bloomberg, but it would have
been so much better, don’t you know, if you had given the money to us.
How well I can understand the
feeling! My first reaction to many a
brilliant new publication is how much more deftly I could have handled the
topic—never mind that that would require, contrary to fact, my having had the
wit to come up with the topic in the first place. It would seem inappropriate, however, to
display my inner turmoil in this regard in the letters column of the
newspaper of record. Bloomberg has not
resolved the issue of resource inequity among American institutions of higher
education. His aim is not so impersonal
or so grandiose. “My Hopkins diploma
opened up doors that otherwise would have been closed, and allowed me to live
the American dream,” he writes. “I have
always been grateful for that opportunity.”
Old-fashioned virtues—perhaps like the very notion of “the American
dream” itself--are withering away. I
hope that one of the last to fade will be gratitude.