The Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation

The B-School announced today that they’d received a $100 million donation from businessman and philanthropist Ron Perelman.

Perelman is part of the Board of Overseers for the B-School and serves as CEO and chairman of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc., which that owns a ton of corporations—including the Revlon make-up company and Scantron, the company that makes those standardized tests that require a number 2 pencil.

Perelman’s $100 million will go toward building the B-School’s two new buildings in Manhattanville, one of which will be named the Ronald O. Perelman Center for Business Innovation, “in recognition of [his] generosity.” The other building will be named after Henry Kravis, B ’69 and co-chair of the Board Overseers, who made his own $100 million donation last year.

No word on whether either of the buildings will be restricted to undergrads. But as of this writing, http://undergradsinperelman.tumblr.com is still available.

Read the press release after jump

Zero Fucks Given

Bloomberg Businessweek profiles PrezBo in a new light. (Bloomberg)

A blind Chinese blind rights activist escapes “extralegal” house arrest in his rural village; American embassy may or may not be harboring him. (NYT)

Ronald Breslow, author of space dinosaurs, is  being accused of self-plagiarism; he denies everything. (Nature)

Some rich alumnus who credits Columbia with his transformation from poor Bronx kid to Wall Street elite donates $25 million for the B-School’s Manhattanville Expansion. (CBS Newsroom)

Not Hawkma via Wikimedia Commons

Yet to be revealed is whether the new Institute too will have no chairs.

Just over an hour ago, Helen Gurley Brown announced a donation of $30 million dollars to be shared between Columbia’s School of Journalism and Stanford’s School of Innovation to create a bi-coastal Institute for Media Innovation based out of Columbia’s J-school campus. Helen Gurley Brown reigned as head editor of Cosmopolitan magazine from 1965 to 1997, and is credited for developing it into what is now the best-selling young women’s magazine in the world. Extremely lengthy press release after the jump.

Read on if you dare. . .

To further his ongoing efforts to reach out to students and increase transparency in the wake of Moodygate, interim Dean Valentini held a town hall last night. Deantini held the court in the oaken glory of Havemeyer 309, where he’s given countless lectures and even once had one burst out in song. Seasoned Town Haller Conor Skelding sat in.

Taking a stand.

Over the course of the night, Dean Valentini accomplished the following four things:

• Explained the mystical decision-making process of the dean and affirming his commitment to a clear system
•  Refused to speak for Moody-Adams, or really anybody else, or to approximate people’s opinions.
• Emphasized his commitment to listening to us, and
• Demonstrated his capacity for being a nice guy by sharing anecdotes, and chatting with speakers about where they’re from.

A few minutes after the intended start of 8 pm, Sam Roth, Editor of the Spectator, opened with a little blurb to the effect that the town hall was intended to address student concerns in a “time of upheaval.” Havemeyer 309 was sparsely filled, with maybe 40% of the lower level occupied and nobody in the wings. So, from approximately 8 to 9 pm, Deantini addressed Sam and CCSC prez Aki Terasaki’s concerns.

The pair started off with general questions, like why Deantini got the job (“because the president asked me to do it”), and whether he thought he could do it (“Yes”).

Roth then touched on interrelations between governing bodies, which Valentini turned into the motif of the entire event. For the duration of the evening, JJV would expound on exactly who makes each decision, and how. Valentini pointed to a strange segmentation in our school: the College has everything it needs to run under its aegis, except teachers, who are under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. (more…)

Mr. Vagelos and his wife, Diana Vagelos, of Barnard Diana Center fame, gave a whopping $50 million to fund a New Medical and Graduate Education Building. This is the largest gift the Med Center has ever received in a fundraising campaign. This isn’t the grad school center we wrote about last week, as it’s specifically for Med school education. It’s The Vag… uptown!

Update: PrezBo has officially spoken, again reiterating the “truly inspirational” nature of the Vagelos’ generosity. Check your inboxes for his take, but read the original press release below!

NEW YORK (September 27, 2010) – Columbia University Medical Center announced a major gift of $50 million from a respected alumnus of its medical school, P. Roy Vagelos, M.D., and his wife, Diana Vagelos. The gift will support the construction of a new medical and graduate education building, which will be built on the medical center campus and named in their honor.

The Vagelos gift marks the largest received for CUMC’s fundraising campaign. With its receipt, the campaign for the College of Physicians and Surgeons (P&S) has raised more than $1 billion, making it one of the first medical schools in the nation to achieve this level of support.

“It is clear that whatever the benefits Roy and Diana Vagelos may have gained from attending Columbia and Barnard, they have given even more back to our university through decades of service and support, and we are enormously grateful,” said Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger. “With this latest demonstration of generosity, they are helping establish a new sense of community and campus life at our medical center in Washington Heights that is so important to our attracting future generations of talented medical students and faculty. Roy Vagelos’ understanding of the resources required to train today’s top medical researchers and clinicians, and his deep and abiding engagement with Columbia, have made him an invaluable partner in our long-term plans to enhance all aspects of life and learning at our medical center.”

(more…)

A sharp-eyed tipster wrote in to let us know that the Columbia home page just gained a button, right below the events calendar: “Giving to Columbia.” It’s a snazzy site–Provost Brinkley, whose homepage doesn’t seem to have been updated much in 11 years, would be jealous.

It may even be better than those of Brown and Dartmouth, which are the only other Ivies to have found it necessary to, er, wear their need on their sleeves. They’re also the at the bottom of the Ivy League endowment barrel, with $2.3 and $3.5 billion each. Strangely, Dartmouth boasts the second highest alumni giving rate of the great eight, coming in behind Princeton at 50%. According to US News and World Report, Columbia and Cornell come in dead last on that one (35%). 

So…Barack must have learned it somewhere else?

- LBD