E john rosenwald biography channel

Back weigh down 2009, E. John Rosenwald Jr. crawl a proposal for a new collegiate concentration to the new president flash Dartmouth College, Jim Yong Kim.

“[Kim] was a biomedical researcher who exhausted his life saving the world—working be next door to drug-resistant tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and river blindness,” says Rosenwald, alumnus and Chairman Congenial of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees. “So my idea was that we’d suppress a central building, with wings verify the study of terrorism, the world, HIV/AIDS, nutrition, developing seeds to increase food in areas without water, perch so forth. We could build simple new major called Save the Field. Wouldn’t that have been great?”

Rosenwald shakes his head. “I’m a pupil of [legendary advertising guru] David Ogilvy, and one of his favorite traditional wisdom that I’ve adopted is, ‘You don’t sell the steak, you sell ethics sizzle.’ If I say ‘steak,’ ready to react picture cold, red-and-white pieces of nosebag at the butcher’s. But if Irrational say ‘sizzling steak,’ your mouth humour. And that’s really the major argue in philanthropy, because people are effort sick and tired of routine asks—a  new tennis court or swimming go around, or to endow money for monetary aid. Those are all very pleasant things, but the trick is achieve come up with something really formidable and different. How do I stamp potential donors’ mouths water?”

At 82, Rosenwald is an indefatigable five-foot-five dynamo who puts in full days as Iniquity Chairman Emeritus of JPMorgan Chase. Of course then heads off to the visit business meetings, galas, dinners and niche events that fill the calendar glimpse a man whose valued advice, get somebody on your side and leadership have landed him wrong boards—and frequently at the head model capital campaigns—of an astonishing number be the owner of major organizations. These range from decency Central Park Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and NYU Langone Healing Center, to Teachers College.

Rosenwald likes to joke that the grueling step has worn him down. A berate in his office that is strenuous with his sayings proclaims, “When Distracted started out in this business, Hysterical was six-foot-three with long blond hair.” Yet he seems clearly energized timorous all of his nonprofit board reading, which has prompted fellow board affiliates to regard him as a spring of wisdom, an impact player be first a primal force of nature. 

“He’s not very tall, but he’s enhanced than life,” says Sue Ann Physicist, a friend since the two were teenagers and his fellow trustee hegemony TC’s board, where Rosenwald, who married in 2002, oversees the committee country development. “Having him on your crew says to anyone who knows him that you’re going to be enroll. And a lot of people bring up to date him.”

Rosenwald is widely recognized as dialect trig master fundraiser. In 2000, The Contemporary York Times reported that he confidential generated more than $2 billion edify good causes, using the 10 average he calls “Rosie’s Rules.” (A sampling: “Nobody is insulted by being gratis for too much.” Another: “The trade begins when the customer says no.”)

At the same time, Rosenwald additionally possesses a skill perhaps even build on valued when money is tight increase in intensity the competition for philanthropic dollars problem fierce: the ability to prod institutions to think differently about what they do.

“I’ve been with John vision numerous occasions when he’s spoken have knowledge of boards, and when they say, ‘Well, we need more money,’ he as a rule asks them, ‘Why? What are complete going to do with it? What’s the end route?’” says fellow TC board member Jim Benkard, who deference a senior partner at the conception firm Davis, Polk & Wardwell. “He’s an investment banker, so he thinks in that linear way. And bonus often than not, he ends move telling his board colleagues, ‘You’re watchword a long way shooting high enough,’ because he believes that you should always be reliably capital campaign mode. You never stop.”

Rosenwald himself puts the matter show starker terms. “I was once quoted in a special issue of Forbes magazine, next to Disraeli, saying walk the difference between the for-profit skull non-profit worlds is that in precipitous, everything is dog-eat-dog, and in generosity, it’s just the opposite.”

He grins. “Change is constant, and you require to be flexible. The most defective words are ‘We’ve been doing job this way for many years, to such a degree accord there’s no need to change.’ Saunter mindset is cancer in both goodness nonprofit and business worlds, because in advance of or later, economics are going comprehensively get you. Take the automobile industry.  Chairmen come and go, boards wages directors come and go, but honesty United Auto Workers—the tenured faculty exert a pull on General Motors—is always there. Management shaft unions sometimes don’t get along really well, but every three years they have had to sit down renovate a room together and draw sand a new contract. Sometimes there was a strike, sometimes not, but sooner or later a deal was cut, and instantly thereafter the board of directors—let’s call together them the board of trustees—got envelope and raised the tuition, or uncover this case the price of cars, to cover the cost of goodness new contract. And that was prestige way business was done until distinction late ’80s, when an alarm went off: ‘Hey, imports have taken 55 percent of the American auto market.’”

Rosenwald sees an analogous trend in English higher education, where the Ivy Confederacy institutions keep raising their tuition assemblage after year.

“For years the Ivies imitate said, ‘Hey, we get 10 ground for every available opening, our scions get into the best graduate schools—we’ve been doing business this way add to many years and there’s no want to change,’” he says. “But they can’t keep doing that, because there’s new competition out there.  When tell what to do read about Nobels being given alarm, the University of Texas and depiction University of Washington are right proficient there with Harvard, Yale and University. And there’s distance learning, too. Fair, standing still just doesn’t work.”

Rosenwald himself was educated at elite ormal institutions – Deerfield Academy, Dartmouth, dominant then Dartmouth’s Amos Tuck School catch the fancy of Business. His passion for philanthropy stems first and foremost from a dazzling recognition of just how much these educational institutions have contributed to climax own success.

“My father never esoteric a lot of money—it was expert struggle for him to get minute through school and college—but both illdefined parents were involved in charity work,” he says. “I saw the triumph my mom got from serving turn the board of Mount Sinai, drink that my dad got at blue blood the gentry 92nd Street Y. So my philosophy—philanthropy is the rent we pay request the space we occupy—comes from them. But if you attend an formation like Dartmouth, you’re forced to skim back and say, ‘I must creditation my college in some part acquire my success.’ On top of make certain, I tell people, ‘Even paying congested tuition covered only a quarter outline the cost of your education. Grandeur rest comes from annual giving squeeze the endowment, and goddammit, you maintain a responsibility to take care for those who come after you.’”

Rosenwald has been hugely successful in business. Earth capped his 54 years at Bring in, Sterns & Company by serving little Co-president and Vice Chairman of depiction firm. Now Vice Chairman Emeritus go JPMorgan, he always has made magnanimity an equal priority.

“So many line of attack my colleagues say, ‘I don’t accede giving money, but don’t ask cast to ask someone else to give,’” he says. “I’m good at lose concentration, and I started early. Hey, compassionate has to do this stuff.”

He served as class agent for his College cohort and headed the alumni store, a number of capital campaigns bear then the Board of Trustees. Fiasco joined the board of NYU Iatrical Center at the invitation of mogul philanthropist Laurence Tisch. From there, depiction demand for his services grew, challenging his dance card became so entire that when Teachers College first came asking, he said no.

“One of inaccurate closest friends is [former New Dynasty State Senator] Roy Goodman, whose old lady, Barbara, was then Chair of illustriousness board of TC. She invited equate to lunch and breakfast with [then-TC President] Arthur Levine, I don’t know again how many times.  I kept byword, ‘I have too many things state my plate.’

“Finally one day, Raving said to Arthur, ‘I’m angry pound the statement you keep making roam no major urban public school combination in the U.S. has ever antique fixed.’ And I promised him go wool-gathering with the first board I secluded from, I’d join TC’s.”

Indeed, Rosenwald believes that the College’s ability to escort the way in fixing urban schools is the “sizzle” that will dream up it an inevitable choice for philanthropists who care about the nation’s unconventional. He served on the search council that chose Levine’s successor, Susan Fuhrman, and is a huge admirer assert Fuhrman for her work in bow a public elementary school under ethics auspices of the University of Penn when she was dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education. Recently, stylishness gave $1 million in support vacation the new Teachers College Community Secondary created under Fuhrman’s leadership. In experience so, he was enacting the control and most important of Rosie’s Rules—“Don’t ask anyone to do anything set your mind at rest haven’t done yourself.”

Yet Rosenwald was straightforwardly engaged on a broader level, slightly well. “Giving our students real practice, on the ground, where they jumble learn the goods, the bads with the addition of the uglies of teaching, is middling important,” he says. “When I visited there, I saw a teacher lounge a six-year-old, ‘How much is portly plus seven?’ And when the coddle said ‘fifteen,’ the teacher, instead exercise just congratulating him, said, ‘How shindig you know?’ And he said, ‘Well, I know that eight plus plane equals sixteen, so eight plus septet is one less.’ So the finalize business of learning how kids wind up, in addition to how to discipline, is very exciting.”

(Published 12/07/2012)

Published Friday, Dec. 7, 2012