Nearly 80 distinguished Columbia Business School alumni, faculty, and staff members gathered at New York’s Le Parker Meridien hotel in Midtown for the School’s biennial Professorship Celebration on March 28. The event connects alumni who have supported endowed professorships and the professors who hold those chairs.
This year, Dean Glenn Hubbard highlighted the fact that the School has created 34 endowed professorships during the current capital campaign — an 83 percent increase in the number of endowed chairs since the campaign began in 2004. Hubbard added that he would like to see every tenured faculty member at the School receive an endowed professorship, which would require the creation of three more professorships in the near future.
After the dean’s remarks, Mario Gabelli ’67 spoke about the importance of giving back to the School. Gabelli recently made a gift, matched with the last remaining funds in the Arthur Samberg ’67 Faculty Development Challenge, to create the Regina Pitaro Associate Professorship of Business (named for Gabelli’s wife, Regina Pitaro ’82, who was also in attendance). The Pitaro Associate Professorship was established in 2011, with Stephan Meier of the Management Division as the inaugural recipient. In addition to Gabelli, the following members of the Board of Overseers attended the event: Louis Bacon ’81, Geoffrey Colvin ’78, Professor Meyer Feldberg ’65, Bill Lambert ’72, Eugene Lang MS ’40, John Martin ’94, Alan Patricof ’57, and Richard Paul Richman ’73.
Highlighting the quality of the School’s chaired faculty members, Senior Vice Dean Gita Johar, the Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business, recognized the recent awards received by Eric Johnson, the Norman Eig Professor of Business, Tano Santos, the David L. and Elsie M. Dodd Professor of Finance, and Patrick Bolton, the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business.
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