News Feature

The Best Minds: Four Alumni Discuss Broadening Access to Columbia

July 27, 2007

In the summer of 1999, the testimony of one white undercover narcotics officer led to the convictions of ten percent of the black population of Tulia, Texas, on drug trafficking charges. Despite a lack of evidence, the defendants received sentences of 20 to 341 years. According to one observer, the court cases unraveled as a riveting legal thriller, resembling a modern–day To Kill a Mockingbird. Theodore Shaw ’79LAW, director–counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), now oversees the cadre of lawyers who proved that the officer had lied in court and won the Texas governor’s pardon for 35 of the 38 defendants.

LDF’s victory shed light on how the judicial system and the nation’s war on drugs can go awry for people of color. The Tulia cases are among the LDF battles that illustrate what Shaw sees as the core civil rights issue for the 21st century: “Whether or not it’s going to be legal and constitutional in this country to do anything, voluntarily and consciously, about racial inequality.”

For Shaw, who grew up in a Bronx housing project during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, attending Columbia was not a foregone conclusion. Finally admitted to the school after being wait–listed, he was able to trace the paths of two of his heroes. “I wanted to practice civil rights law and was aware that Jack Greenberg [’45CC, ’48LAW] and Constance Baker Motley [’46LAW] had gone to Columbia Law School. I knew about the connection that Columbia had to Brown v. Board of Education through them.”

A Charles Evan Hughes fellowship for people likely to serve in public interest enabled Shaw to attend the law school. He credits Columbia contacts with leading him to his two dream jobs—at the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and LDF.

“It’s important to make sure that Columbia affords opportunity across the board,” says Shaw, who teaches at the law school and supports the Paul Robeson Scholarship, “particularly given the kind of stratification along lines of wealth that increasingly characterizes our country.”

“If I hadn’t received the graduate fellowship from Columbia,” Ellen Lumpkin Brown ’85BUS says, “I would not have been able to have the career of public service that I’ve had. I probably would have taken very corporate jobs so that I could pay back loans.”

As an economic development program officer for the Ford Foundation, Brown funded organizations to facilitate financing in low–income communities from Chicago to Miami to Nairobi. She also spent five years in post–apartheid South Africa issuing grants to support inner–city and rural microenterprise and business development, before returning to the United States in 1998. Today, as chief operating officer of the Newark–based New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ), Brown directs economic initiatives that are changing the social capacity of urban centers and dismantling barriers for the unemployed.

She recalls a Columbia international business course in which Professor Michel Amsalem impressed upon her that business could be an agent of change, “that one could do well and do good,” she says. In her spare time, this wife and mother of three has parlayed her love for sewing handcrafted felt dolls into an online business called the Doll Loft. “Both at NJISJ and in my own business, I continue to use Professor Amsalem’s four–part analytical model to this day,” she notes, “a model that has helped me look for risks and opportunities that others don’t seem to see.”

Domingo C. Nuñez, MD, ’76CC, ’80PS, considered Columbia a magical place when he was growing up not far from campus. The financial aid that Nuñez, a New York Regents Scholar, received enabled him to realize his dream of practicing medicine. After majoring in biology, minoring in anthropology, and playing lightweight football at Columbia, he is now a leading gastrointestinal surgeon and director of surgery at St. Luke’s Hospital.

“I want other students to have the opportunity I had,” Nuñez says about his having given more than $60,000 to the College Fund, including scholarships, and to the football program. “Besides, I met my wife at Columbia!” he adds. The University truly has become a family affair: he and his wife, Sandra Nuñez, a Teachers College graduate, are the parents of both a Columbia football Lion (Justin Alexander Nuñez ’07CC) and a Columbia College alumna (Manelle Victoria Nuñez Martino ’00CC).

Many alumni whose families had the means to cover full tuition, such as Jonathan Lavine ’88CC, are just as passionate about the role that scholarships play in drawing the best, brightest, and most varied students to campus.

“Columbia exposed me intellectually as well as socially to so many new experiences, people, and ways of thinking about the world,” says Lavine, who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. “It helped me develop an intellectual openness and a curiosity that changed my life.”

Attending an investment banking presentation his senior year upon a classmate’s insistence, Lavine postponed law school to begin working on Wall Street at Drexel Burnham. He now heads Sankaty Advisors, the global fixed income and credit business of Bain Capital, a global private investment firm whose assets under management have grown from $300 million in 1993 when he joined to over $45 billion today.

Lavine has pledged $2.5 million to help endow financial aid at Columbia so that the college’s critical need–blind admissions and full–need financial aid policies can be guaranteed in perpetuity. He says proudly, “Giving students who can’t afford to go to Columbia the opportunity to have the wonderful experience I had is one of the best ways I can give back.”
— Regina Lewis Barboza ’84JRN