Trump University’s leader is unhappy with real estate decisions made by Columbia University’s leader:
Trump said Columbia came close to buying land from him on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center before Bollinger’s appointment to the university presidency in 2002. Trump said he had been working on a deal with businessman and Columbia trustee Alfred Lerner, when Lerner fell ill.
Bollinger, formerly president of the University of Michigan, had different ideas for the university’s expansion and said he wanted to stay closer to the university’s home in Harlem. And, according to Bollinger and the expansion’s Environmental Impact Statement, the nine-acre Trump property was too small and too far from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.
Years after the deal fell through, Trump is still irate. “They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,” he said in a phone interview.
Here is an excerpted version of Trump’s recounting of events, as stated in a letter he wrote to the Columbia Spectator’s Eye magazine:
Columbia University had a great opportunity to build one of its finest and most spectacular campuses anywhere in the world…It would have given Columbia large acreage, fronting the Hudson River between 59th and 62nd Street directly behind Lincoln Center. It was [Alfred Lerner’s] vision to build Columbia’s Business School and School of Performing Arts there, and what a vision it would have been…
The new President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who came in from the University of Michigan, didn’t like the idea. Instead, he wanted to build Columbia’s new buildings in a lousy location on land which, in certain instances, he did not even own. Once the project was announced, it became virtually impossible to acquire the holdings because everybody wanted top dollar. He actually announced his project before buying the land—dummy!
If that wasn’t enough, Trump added a hand-scrawled comment at the bottom: “Bollinger is terrible!” And in a phone interview with The [Wall Street] Journal, Trump continued his invective, calling the university president a “total moron.”