Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 4

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the fourth part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 4

The Washington Post was founded in 1877 by a former Northern Democratic supporter of the Confederacy named Stillson Hutchins, with the help of a Mississippi Democrat and former Confederate officer named Lucius Q.C. Lamar, according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years by Chalmers Roberts. The same book also noted that “Hutchins set up shop in the capital because he knew that a Washington newspaper could command the daily attention of men of power in all branches of the national government” and that “Hutchins backed the return to white supremacy in the old Confederacy.”

After the pace at which white supremacy was restored in the old Confederacy accelerated during the 1880s, Hutchins sold the Washington Post in 1889 for $210,000 and concentrated on marketing the linotype machines of his National Typographic Company and on his real estate investments in the 1890s. By the time he died in 1912, the founder of the Washington Post had accumulated a fortune of $4 to 5 million, consisting mostly of real estate.

Between 1889 and 1894, ownership of the Washington Post was shared by a former U.S. Postmaster General in the Republican administration of Chester Arthur and founder of the original New York Press newspaper named Frank Hatton and a Democratic Congressional Representative named Beriah Wilkins. Under the shared ownership of Hatton and Wilkins over a century ago, the Washington Post made annual profits of around $100,000.

After former Washington Post Owner Hatton died of a stroke in 1894, Wilkins became the sole owner of the Washington Post until he also died of a stroke in 1905. Following Wilkins’ death, his son sold 320 of the Washington Post’s 600 shares of stock for $556,000 to a Cincinnati newspaper publisher and former Democratic candidate for Governor of Ohio named John McLean. Between 1905 and 1933, the Washington Post was controlled by representatives of the McLean Dynasty.

John McLean’s father—William McLean—was a manufacturer of steamboats who purchased control of the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper in 1857 before passing his stake of this big money-making Ohio newspaper on to John McLean in 1880. Four years after inheriting the Cincinnati Enquirer, John McLean moved to Washington, D.C. to join its local business Establishment while continuing to supervise his newspaper in Ohio.

By 1892, John McLean was president of the Washington Gas Light Company and, after purchasing control of the Washington Post in 1905, “he co-founded the Washington and Old Dominion Railway in 1911 and was a director and large stockholder in both the American Security & Trust Company and the Riggs National Bank,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years. And by the time John McLean died in 1916, this former Washington Post owner had accumulated around $7 million worth of property: the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper that was worth $3 million; the Washington Post newspaper; $2.7 million worth of U.S. corporate stock; $880,000 worth of bonds; $129,000 worth of jewelry; and only $47 worth of books.

In addition to being into money and property accumulation, former Washington Post Owner John McLean was also into influencing U.S. Establishment politics. He “exercised power with his money and his newspapers” and “for years he bankrolled the Democratic party in Ohio and through his Cincinnati Enquirer influenced his party and state,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years.

After John McLean’s son—Ned McLean—inherited his father’s 320 shares of Washington Post stock in 1916, he purchased the 280 remaining shares of newspaper stock that former Washington Post Owner Beriah Wilkins’ son still owned for $469,000, giving the McLean Dynasty representatives 100 percent ownership of the Washington Post between 1916 and 1933.

Like the Washington Post in the 1990s and 21st-century, the Washington Post under the ownership of Ned McLean in the 1920s was not considered that great a newspaper by many people. As The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years recalled:

“For the most part Ned McLean’s `Post’ was a shallow paper, devoid of any intellectual or artistic ferment, content to chronicle the obvious and that usually in a superficial way. In-depth reporting was a rarity…In the final McLean years there was little anticipatory sense of the gathering storms of fascism abroad and economic woes at home.”

Under Ned McLean’s ownership, the Washington Post supported the Democratic Wilson administration’s decision to enter World War I, supported the domestic repression of U.S. dissident anti-war writers and activists and boosted a corrupt politician named Warren Harding for U.S. president in 1920. When the U.S. Congress began to investigate the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s in which a Republican Harding Administration cabinet official leased government-owned land to a U.S. oil company in exchange for a $100,000 bribe, former Washington Post Owner Ned McLean “was caught in a lie trying to cover up a Teapot Dome conspiracy” and “The Teapot Dome scandal…deeply involved The Post,” according to The `Washington Post’: The First 100 Years.

During the 1920s, Ned McLean also began to squander his inherited fortune and flip-out mentally, at the same time the Washington Post turned into a big money-losing operation. In 1929, McLean was put in a Maryland mental hospital and removed as the Washington Post publisher. The American Security Bank, in which the McLean Dynasty had invested heavily, was named to act as trustee for the unprofitable Washington Post. Then, in March 1933, the 50,000-circulation Washington Post was forced into bankruptcy when it couldn’t pay the newsprint bills it owed to the International Paper Company. And in 1941, former Washington Post Owner Ned McLean died in a mental hospital. (end of part 4)

(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 5 (The Meyer-Graham Dynasty Era)

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 3

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Following is the third part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 3

Newsweek magazine was launched in 1933 by a group of U.S. Establishment stockholders “which included Ward Cheney, of the Cheney silk family, John Hay Whitney, and Paul Mellon, son of Andrew W. Mellon,” according to America’s 60 Families by Ferdinand Lundberg. The same book also noted in 1946 that “Paul Mellon’s ownership in Newsweek apparently” represented “the first attempt of the Mellon family to function journalistically on a national scale.”

To launch Newsweek the group of original owners invested around $2.5 million. Other large Newsweek stockholders prior to 1946 were a public utilities investment banker named Stanley Childs and a Wall Street corporate lawyer and director of various corporations named Wilton Lloyd-Smith.

In 1937, Newsweek merged with the weekly journal—Today—that had been founded in 1932 by a representative of the Harriman Dynasty—former Democratic New York Governor and diplomat Averell Harriman—and a representative of the Astor Dynasty—Vincent Astor. As a result of the 1937 Newsweek-Today merger deal, Harriman and Astor provided Newsweek with $600,000 in additional venture capital funds and Vincent Astor became both Newsweek’s chairman of the board and its principal stockholder between 1937 and his death in 1959. At the time of his death, Astor owned around 120,000 shares of Newsweek’s 179,700 shares of stock and Harriman owned about 40,000 shares of Newsweek stock.

Prior to purchasing control of Newsweek, Astor had inherited a fortune at the age of 21 which included $63 million worth of real estate, such as the Waldorf-Astoria, the Hotel Astor, the St. Regis, Astor Place, and offices and apartment buildings in Manhattan. During the 1920s, former Newsweek Owner Astor “sold about half of the family’s real estate holdings in New York City for $40 million.” Yet, “during his lifetime he succeeded in doubling his inheritance through a program of careful diversification” so that by the time he died the estate which he left the Vincent Astor Foundation had an estimated value of $123 million, according to The National Encyclopedia.

In addition to utilizing his inherited Establishment wealth to subsidize the publication of Newsweek between 1937 and 1959, Astor also “built drilling barges for off-shore oil development, invested in oil ventures in the Southwest,” was a director of American Express, Western Union, Chase National Bank, and railroad companies like Great Northern and the Illinois Central, and was the largest shareholder and a director of the United States Line shipping company, according to the same book. Former Newsweek Owner Astor also was Commodore of the New York Yacht Club for nine years and contributed his money to both Democratic and Republican Party election campaign chests.

The 1961 deal that Ben Bradlee set up, which enabled the Meyer-Graham Dynasty’s Washington Post Company to purchase Newsweek from the Vincent Astor Foundation and former Democratic New York Governor Harriman, was arranged and financed in such a way that David Halberstam described it as “one of the great steals of contemporary journalism” in his book The Powers That Be. The same book noted that, although the official 1961 selling price for Newsweek was $15 million, “in the end no more than $75,000 really changed hands.” For arranging the deal that brought Newsweek into the Washington Post media conglomerate’s stable, Bradlee received a finder’s fee.

At the time it was purchased by the Washington Post Company, Newsweek’s circulation was around 1.3 million per week and, within 10 years, its weekly circulation had jumped to 2.5 million. The only other U.S. weekly news magazine with a higher circulation in the early 1970s was Time magazine. By the late 1980s Newsweek’s weekly circulation in the U.S.A. was around 3.1 million—still higher than the circulation of Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report but still lower than Time-Warner’s Time magazine. Around 730,000 copies of English-language international editions of Newsweek were also circulated each week in the British Isles, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia.

Of Newsweek’s 295 full-time editorial staff members in the early 1990s, around 200 worked at Newsweek’s Midtown Manhattan offices in the Newsweek Building at 444 Madison Avenue, where Newsweek then rented skyscraper office space on 18 floors.

Over $225 million worth of ad space was sold by Newsweek each year during the early 1990s. And from the operation of its Newsweek subsidiary, the Washington Post Company took in over $325 million in annual revenues in the early 1990s—around 50 percent of what it took in from operating its Washington Post newspaper subsidiary. About 10 percent of all Washington Post media conglomerate income came from its Newsweek magazine subsidiary operation during the early 1990s.

Given its connection to the Washington Post Company for over 46 years, it’s not too likely that Newsweek magazine will be any more eager in the 21st-century to print many satirical or critical articles about either the Meyer-Graham Dynasty, Ben Bradlee or the Washington Post newspaper than it will be to print satirical or critical articles about the university over which Washington Post Company board member Lee Bollinger currently presides. (end of part 3)
(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 4

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 2

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. And Washington Post Company Chairman of the Board, Donald Graham, also sits next to Columbia University President Bollinger on the Columbia University School of Journalism’s Pulitzer Prize Board.

So don’t expect the Washington Post Company’s weekly news magazine, Newsweek, to put a photograph of any Columbia or Barnard student anti-war activists on its cover in September 2007, like it did once in September 1968.

Following is the second part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which first appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 2

Former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham was the son of a Florida state senator and real estate developer, the half-brother of former U.S. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the husband of the now-deceased former Washington Post Company chairman of the board Katharine Meyer Graham, and the father of the current Washington Post Company chairman of the board (and a current member of Columbia University’s Pulitzer Prize Board)—Donald Meyer-Graham.

After marrying the daughter of Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer in 1940, Philip Graham spent part of World War II in attendance at the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA. Following World War II, Graham’s father-in-law named him publisher and editor-in-chief of the Washington Post at the age of 30. And in the Summer of 1946, Graham’s father-in-law provided him and Katharine Meyer-Graham with the money to make a down payment on a house in Washington, D.C. that had belonged to one of the men most responsible for creating the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]—former Office of Strategic Services [OSS] Director “Wild Bill” Donovan.

Top CIA officials like Frank Wisner, Richard Helms, Desmond Fitzgerald and Allen Dulles were also entertained socially by Philip Graham and Katharine Meyer-Graham during the late 1940s and 1950s. CIA Covert Action Chief Frank Wisner and former Newsweek Owner Philip Graham apparently conceived of the CIA’s secret Operation MOCKINGBIRD program to recruit and use journalists for CIA covert action program support. As a result of the Operation MOCKINGBIRD program, Katharine The Great noted that “by the early 1950s, the CIA `owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS, and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, 400 to 600 in all, according to a former CIA analyst.”

The same book also revealed that “Over a period of months, at the Graham salon and other meeting places, as a former Agency man who attended those meetings recalls, Wisner discussed with him [Philip Graham] which journalists were for sale and what price (`You could get a journalist cheaper than good call girl,’ the former Agency man says, `for a couple hundred dollars a month’) on how to handle them, where to place them, and what sorts of stories to produce;” and “Phil [Graham] recommended target reporters for jobs with other newspapers.” The “former Agency man” also told the author of Katharine the Great that since the Washington Post couldn’t afford to hire foreign correspondents in the days when it was still a money-losing operation, the CIA paid for the foreign trips of Washington Post reporters in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Within four years after Philip Graham’s Washington Post media conglomerate acquired Newsweek, the two men who conceived of the CIA’s “Operation MOCKINGBIRD” mass media program—Frank Wisner and Philip Graham—had both committed suicide. According to Katharine The Great, prior to shooting himself in August 1963, Philip Graham had begun to talk “about the CIA’s manipulation of journalists,” “said it disturbed him,” “said it to the CIA,” and “turned against the newsmen and politicians whose code was mutual trust and strangely silence” so that “now the word was that Phil Graham could not be trusted.” At a June 1963 newspaperman’s convention in Phoenix, for instance, Newsweek Owner Philip Graham had “appeared in the banquet room during a speech, grabbed the microphone and announced to the crowd…that he was going to tell them exactly who in Washington was sleeping with whom, beginning with President Kennedy” whose “favorite…was now Mary Meyer, who had been married to CIA official Cord Meyer…and was the sister of Ben Bradley’s wife,” according to Katharine The Great. One Establishment newsman then telephoned JFK, while other Establishment newsmen apparently hustled Graham back to his motel to be injected with a sedative and rushed to the Phoenix Airport in an ambulance, prior to being institutionalized. (end of part 2).
(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 3

Columbia University's Washington Post Company/`Newsweek' Link & `Newsweek' Magazine's Historical CIA Connection--Part 1

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger currently sits between RAND Corporation Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald Olson and Coca-Cola Company board member Barry Diller on the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s board of directors. Yet, as I noted in a June 1, 2007 blog posting:

“The RAND Corporation think-tank was recently given a $210.6 million `cost-reimbursement plus fee-for need contract' by the U.S. Air Force `to provide for RAND Project Air Force,' which produces studies and analyses for the U.S. war machine. Coincidentally, Donald Rumsfeld was a Trustee of the RAND Corporation from 1977-1987, 1988-1998, and 1999-2001, before serving as the Bush Administration’s Secretary of Defense between 2001 and 2006.”

And the Coca-Cola Company is also currently the target of an anti-corporate boycott campaign (http://www.killercoke.org/) because of its apparent involvement in human rights violations in Colombia and elsewhere around the globe.

Washington Post Company Chairman of the Board, Donald Graham, also sits next to Columbia University President Bollinger on the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism’s Pulitzer Prize Board. So don’t expect the Washington Post Company’s weekly news magazine, Newsweek, to put a photograph of any Columbia or Barnard student anti-war activists on its cover in September 2007, like it did once in September 1968.

Following is the first part of an article about the Washington Post Company and Newsweek magazine’s hidden history which originally appeared in the February 17, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative newspaper, Downtown:

Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 1

Downtown telephoned Newsweek magazine’s switchboard in February 1993 and asked to speak to a press spokesperson for the magazine. Newsweek’s switchboard receptionist then connected Downtown to the answering machine of a Newsweek media writer named Josh Hammer, and Downtown asked Hammer for an official comment on whether Newsweek has ever acted as a tool of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since 1948 and whether there’s ever been any CIA connection to Newsweek?

“I’ve got nothing to tell you. It’s a ridiculous question, to begin with. And, second of all, I’m a media writer here and I have no idea why you asked me that question in the first place…But I can tell you it’s a ridiculous question. There’s been no involvement here with the CIA. And I don’t know why you’re suppositioning that,” the Newsweek media writer replied when he returned Downtown’s telephone call.

Yet in his 1983 book, The Imperial Post: The Meyers, The Grahams and The Paper That Rules Washington, Tom Kelly wrote the following:

“Newsweek did have a CIA connection. One CIA agent who worked in Paris…recalls that agents were told quietly that purposeful stories, true or false, could always be planted in the `Periscope’ column.”

Although Newsweek magazine likes to pose as an independent, politically liberal newsweekly, the Central Intelligence Agency connections with Newsweek and its Washington Post newspaper parent company have apparently been extensive since the late 1940s.

Newsweek’s European correrspondent in Paris between 1953 and 1957 was Ben Bradlee. After 1957, Bradlee worked for Newsweek’s Washington Bureau as a reporter, until he was named to be Newsweek’s Washington Bureau Chief in 1961. By 1965, Bradlee was also a Newsweek Senior Editor. Between 1965 and 1991, Bradlee was the managing editor or executive editor of the Washington Post newspaper of Newsweek’s parent company. During the 1990s, Bradlee sat on the board of directors and was a vice-president of the Washington Post Company.

Bradlee has denied any past connections to the CIA. But during the 1980s, former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis came into possession of a set of revealing Justice Department documents. According to the second edition of Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and `The Washington Post’, “the documents show” that in the early 1950s, “Mr. Bradlee went to the Rosenberg prosecutors in New York under orders of `the head of the CIA in Paris,’ as he told an assistant prosecutor, and that from their material he composed his `Operations Memorandum’ on the case, which was the basis of all propaganda subsequently sent out to foreign journalists.”

The grandfather of former CIA Director Richard McGarrah Helms—an international financier named Gates White McGarrah—“was a member of the board of directors of the Astor Foundation which owned Newsweek” prior to its sale to the Washington Post Company in 1961, according to Katharine The Great. The same book also revealed that in 1961 Bradlee “is said to have heard from his friend Richard Helms, who heard it from his grandfather that Newsweek would be put up for sale.” Bradlee then obtained a check from the Washington Post Company head at that time, Philip Graham, for $1 million, to give to former CIA Director Helms’s grandfather as a down payment for the purchase of Newsweek.

At the urging of former Newsweek Washington Bureau Chief Bradlee in the mid-1960s, the Washington Post published “the Penkovsky papers, a CIA concoction which had been offered through a legitimate publisher as the authentic revelation of a Soviet double agent,” according to The Imperial Post: The Meyers, The Grahams and The Paper That Rules Washington.

A former wife of CIA European Covert Operations Chief Cord Meyer—Mary Pinchot-Meyer—was the sister-in-law of Bradlee between 1956 and Pinchot-Meyer’s mysterious death in 1964.

Katharine The Great also contends that when Bradlee was the Washington Post’s executive editor during the early 1970s, he directed the investigation which pressured President Nixon to resign in 1974 because “the leaders of the intelligence community” wanted “the president of the U.S. to fall.” Katharine The Great also asserted that “there is no doubt that the use of the Washington Post to take down Nixon was both a counter-intelligence operation of the highest order and the dirty trick par excellence.”

During the 1950s—even before it became a subsidiary of the Washington Post Company—Newsweek had “connections to intelligence,” according to Katharine The Great.

The CIA covertly set up Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to broadcast CIA propaganda to Eastern Europe and Russia in 1950. In 1976, the former vice-president for radio and television of Newsweek’s parent company—John Hayes—was named to be the chairman of the Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty board of directors.

During the early 1960s, “a secret CIA task force” was set up “to explore methods of beaming American propaganda broadcasts to China,” according to Katharine The Great. The Newsweek-affiliated John Hayes was “named to this secret CIA task force,” as was former CBS News president Richard Salant, now-Schumann Foundation President Bill Moyers, the ex-husband of Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law [Cord Meyer], CIA Chief of Station in Ethiopia Paul Henze and former Columbia University Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski ("who had been on the agency payroll for several years”), according to Deborah Davis’ Katharine The Great book.

Prior to adding Newsweek to his company’s stable of media properties in 1961, the Washington Post’s publisher from 1946 to 1963—Philip Graham—worked closely with CIA officials. According to Katharine The Great, in a 1977 Rolling Stone magazine article, Carl Bernstein reported “that Agency officials…thought of Philip Graham as `somebody you could get help from,’ meaning he helped arrange journalistic cover for agents.” Graham was also “one of the architects of a now widespread practice, the use and manipulation of journalists by the CIA;” and “individual relations with intelligence had in fact been the reason that the Post Company had grown as fast as it did after the war” since “Philip Graham’s commitment to intelligence had given his friends Frank Wisner and Allen Dulles an interest in helping to make the Washington Post the dominant news vehicle in Washington, which they had done by assisting with its two most crucial acquisitions, the [Washington] Times-Herald and WTOP-TV radio and television stations,” according to Katharine The Great [WTOP-radio was later sold and WTOP-TV was later exchanged in the 1970s by the Washington Post Company, for other media properties]. (end of part 1)
(Downtown 2/17/93)

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 2

`Poison In The Air'

“There’s poison in the air
Right near the factory!”
And children start to die
And mothers start to scream
And fathers start to weep
And workers start to shout:
“The Union Carbide plant—
Its gas is pouring out!”

It went to India
To use the cheap labor
And thousands it did kill
When its poison gas did pour
“Safety, it costs too much”
The bankers all did say
And the silent spring of death
Won’t affect the USA.

The pesticide for insects
Murdered people now instead
The methyl isocyanate
From the storage tank it fled
Morgan Guaranty Director Brown
And Chase Manhattan Director Ferguson
Directed Union Carbide
To use the cheapest gas.

Each day another horror
Or a new atrocity
There is no regulation
As they destroy the air we breathe
Today they poisoned India
Tomorrow your city
A monument to profit
A tribute to corporate greed.


To listen to the "Poison In The Air" folk song, you can click on the following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Protest+Folk+Songs/Poisin+in+the+Air

The Poison In The Air protest folk song was written shortly after the late 1984 disaster at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Since that time, Union Carbide was purchased by Dow Chemical in 2001; and in the 21st-century there’s a Students for Bhopal group (www.studentsforbhopal.org) which is still fighting for justice for the victims of U.S. corporate greed in India. Coincidentally, a member of the Dow board of directors in recent years, Jacqueline Barton, apparently also used to sit on the board of trustees of Barnard College (whose board of trustees currently includes Columbia University President and Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate board member Lee Bollinger).

Next: Columbia University’s Washington Post Company/Newsweek Link and Newsweek Magazine’s Historical CIA Connection—Part 1

`Non-Profit' Columbia University Teachers College Paid Five Professors Over $210,000 Each In Annual Salaries In 2005

In its Form 990 “return of organization exempt from income tax” for 2004, the Teachers College of Columbia University noted it “receives assistance from the state of New York as well as grants and contracts from a variety of federal, state, and local agencies for its exempt purposes.” Yet between September 1, 2004 and August 31, 2005, the tax-exempt Teachers College of Columbia University apparently paid some of its professors a lot more per year than the annual salaries received by either the typical New York City public school teacher, the typical university grad school teaching assistant or the typical non-tenured adjunct college professor.

According to its Form 990 report for 2004, at least five Columbia University Teachers College professors were paid annual salaries of more than $210,000 between September 2004 and September 2005. Columbia University Teachers College Professor Sharon Kagan, for instance, was paid an annual salary of $274,835, while Columbia University Teachers College Professor Henry Levin was paid an annual salary of $239,729. In addition, during the same period Columbia University Teachers College Professor Ruth Vinz was paid a salary of $216,763, Columbia University Teachers College Professor Thomas Bailey was paid a salary of $213,327 and Columbia University Teachers College Professor Charles Basch was paid a salary of $210,617.

The “non-profit” Teachers College of Columbia University also apparently used its tax-exempt status to pay some of its top administrators a lot more per year than your typical New York City public school teacher receives for actually teaching inside a classroom during the academic year. Between September 2004 and September 2005, the then-Columbia University Teachers College President, Arthur Levine, was paid a $315,600 annual salary, while the Dean of Columbia University Teachers College, Darlyne Bailey, was paid a salary of $270,000. In addition, the Vice President for Finance and Administration at Columbia University Teachers College, Fred Schnur, was paid an annual salary of $241,000, while the Vice President for Development and External Affairs at Columbia University Teachers College, Joseph Bosnan, was paid an annual salary of $240,000 between September 2004 and September 2005. The Assistant to the President of the “non-profit” Columbia University Teachers’ College was also paid an annual salary of $149,300 between September 2004 and September 2005.

Next: Poison In The Air lyrics

`Non-Profit' Columbia University Teachers College's Assets Increased By $12 Million In 2005

For the 2004 fiscal year, the Teachers College of Columbia University filed a “return of organization exempt from income tax.” Yet, according to its Form 990 for 2004, for the year beginning September 1, 2004 and ending September 1, 2005, the Teachers College of Columbia University’s total revenues of $161.5 million exceeded its total expenses of $153.4 million by over $8 million. Although claiming to be a “non-profit” educational institution that received $18.1 million in government grants between September 2004 and September 2005, the Teachers College of Columbia University also earned $4.7 million in dividends and interest from its portfolio of stocks and bonds during this same period and gained an additional $11.8 million in revenues from the sale of some of its assets.

Despite selling some of its stock assets during the fiscal year, between September 2004 and September 2005 the market value of “non-profit” Teachers College of Columbia University’s investment portfolio increased from $174 million to $192.1 million. Over $58 million worth of common stocks and over $68 million worth of hedge fund investment fund holdings were contained in Columbia Teachers College’s portfolio as of September 1, 2005. The “non-profit” Teachers College of Columbia University also owned a “for-profit” education industry business in Japan called TC Kyoika Services/TC Educational Services. The net assets of the tax-exempt Teachers College of Columbia University increased by over $12 million between September 2004 and September 2005, from $191.6 million in 2004 to $203.8 million in 2005.

Besides sitting on the board of directors of the for-profit Washington Post Company/Newsweek media conglomerate (which owns Kaplan Inc./Kaplan Higher Education’s $1.7 billion education industry business), Columbia University President Lee Bollinger also sits on the board of trustees of the Teachers College of Columbia University; and the Teachers College of Columbia University apparently shifted $564,512 from its bank account to Columbia University’s bank account between 2004 and 2005.

The former president of Columbia University Teachers College, Arthur Levine, used to sit on the board of directors of Blackboard Inc., while the current Columbia University Teachers College President, Susan Fuhrman, is also a member of the audit and nomination committee of the for-profit Pearson educational publishing firm—which makes a lot of money from the sale of college textbooks and educational materials to the U.S. educational system.

Next: “Non-Profit” Columbia University Teachers College Paid Five Professors Over $210,000 Each In Annual Salaries In 2005