Who Profits From Upper West Side's Barnard College?--Part 5

The State University of New York [SUNY]'s website claims that SUNY is "committed" to "providing quality education at an affordable price to New Yorkers." Yet SUNY, a public university, has a board of trustees which has been interlocked in recent years with a private college that is “under the umbrella” of the private Upper West Side-based Columbia University: Barnard College. And "non-profit" Barnard College bills each of its students over $58,000 per academic year to enroll at its private college campus on the Upper West Side.

As SUNY’s website also notes, Merryl H. Tisch “was appointed Chair of the State University of New York in September of 2019, after serving as Vice-Chair since 2018;” and “Dr. Tisch is also a Trustee of Barnard College.” And according to the same SUNY website, Barnard College Trustee Tisch’s husband is James Tisch.

Coincidentally, the husband of SUNY Board of Trustees Chair and Barnard College Trustee Tisch is the president and CEO of the for-profit Loews Corporation conglomerate; and he has been a member of the Board of Directors of CNA Financial Corporation, of Diamond Offshore Drilling Company, of Loews Corporation and of the General Electric Company in recent years.

And, also coincidentally, Barnard College Trustee and SUNY Board of Trustees Chair Tisch’s husband has also been “a Chairman Emeritus of the Board of WNET, parent of WNET Channel 13 and WLIW Channel 21,” “a member of the Board of Directors of The New York Public Library” and “a member of the Council on Foreign Relations ”in recent years; as well as “an Honorary Member and past Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel, past Chairman of the Board of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, past Chairman of the Board of United Jewish Communities, past President of UJA-Federation of New York, and a former director on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,” according to the Loews Corporation’s website.

Ironically, although Barnard College Trustee and SUNY Board of Trustees Chair Tisch’s husband has been a “chairman emeritus” of New York City’s “non-profit” public broadcasting television station in recent years, his father--former Loews Corporation Co-Chairman of its Board of Directors and former NYU Board of Trustees Chairperson Laurence Tisch (who died in 2003)--was the owner of the for-profit CBS corporate media conglomerate in the early 1990’s; when the administration of the now-deceased former NYC mayor and former Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs Professor David Dinkins, coincidentally, gave CBS a $49 million tax break after “two relatives of Laurence Tisch donated $10,000 to the Dinkins campaign fund” in December 1992, according to the March 24, 1993 issue of the [now-defunct] Manhattan Spirit publication.

Prior to Barnard Trustee and SUNY Board of Trustees Chair Tisch’s father-in-law purchasing CBS in 1985, Billionaire Laurence Tisch and his brother Preston Tisch (who died in 2005) had gained control over the Loews Corporation in 1960. The two brothers had become wealthy during the 1950’s; after utilizing the $125,000 [equal to around $1.7 million in 2021 U.S. dollars] that their father, a garment manufacturer, gave them in 1946 to purchase the Land-In-The Pines hotel in Lakewood, New Jersey in 1948 and, subsequently, the Grant Hotel summer resort in Highmount, New York. Then, after MGM was forced by an antitrust lawsuit court settlement to sell off their Loews movie theater chain in 1959, former Laurence Tisch and his brother purchased 43 percent of the stock of the Loews Corporation—whose current president and CEO is the husband of Barnard Trustee Tisch.

However, according to Christopher Winans’s 1995 book, The King of Cash: The Inside Story of Laurence Tisch, both the Laurel-In-The Pines and the Grand Hotel “were destroyed by fire within two years of each other in the mid-1960s.” And the same book also recalled:

“The Grand…was damaged beyond repair and torn down in 1965. As Lakewood entered the twilight years, Laurel-In-The Pines became the scene of a series of suspicious fires, the last of which occurred in 1967 and, as one local resident put it, was `successful.’ The Tisches were never questioned about the cause…The Tisches recovered both losses through insurance.”

In addition, The King of Cash: The Inside Story of Laurence Tisch book observed that Barnard Trustee Tisch’s father-in-law’s “investment formula” was apparently to “exploit hidden tax benefits;” and that, after Laurence Tisch’s Loews Corporation also purchased a tobacco industry subsidiary, Lorillard, in 1968, during the 1970s and 1980s “Loews would come to depend heavily on the cigarette business for much of its earnings.”

Prior to purchasing CBS in 1985, the Tisch family’s Loews, which owned 80 percent of CNA Financial Corporation’s stock in 1980, had fired 1,400 CNA workers. So, not surprisingly, once 25 percent of CBS stock was then owned by Laurence Tisch and his brother in 1986, “hundreds of employees, from pages and security guards to top managers,” were fired at CBS; and 200 people from the CBS News division were laid off by Barnard Trustee Tisch’s father-in-law in the late 1980’s, according to the 1991 edition of Louis Rukeyser’s Business Almanac.

According to the Loews Corporation’s website, one of its current subsidiaries, Boardwalk Pipelines, “primarily transports and stores natural gas and natural gas liquids for its customers” and “owns and operates approximately 14,095 miles of natural gas and liquids pipelines,” as well as “natural gas and liquids underground storage facilities.” Yet, according to the December 2020 Sailing To Nowhere: Liquefied Natural Gas Is Not An Effective Climate Strategy report of the Natural Resources Defense Council:

“Overseas export of U.S.-produced liquefied natural gas (LNG), gas kept in a liquid form for ease of transport, is rapidly expanding….LNG is neither clean nor particularly low in emissions. In addition, the massive investments in new infrastructure to support this industry, including pipelines, liquefaction facilities, export terminals, and tankers, lock in fossil fuel dependence, making the transition to actual low-carbon and no-carbon energy even more difficult. ..In fact, if the LNG export industry expands as projected, it is likely to make it nearly impossible to keep global temperatures from increasing above the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold for catastrophic climate impacts.” (end of part 5. To be continued).