NYU's Historical Michael Steinhardt, Wall Street and Syrian Oil Connection Revisited: (1)
"Movement organizers...don’t think...university school of `Culture, Education and Human Development' should be named in honor of...billionaire who...collaborated with...Israeli power structure."
“…Hedge fund manager Michael Steinhardt has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion in 2012. He is known to be the founder of the hedge fund company, Steinhardt, Fine, Berkowitz and Co…In 2010, he started working for Israel Energy Initiatives Ltd (IEI) as the Chairman of the Board….”
--from The Richest.com website in 2014
“Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI) announced in March 2011 a project to transform shale into oil...IEI's planned operations in the Elah Valley include digging five kilometers of trenches through farms and vineyards to expose the shale rock, which would then be heated…If carried out as planned, IEI’s project would constitute one of the least energy efficient forms of oil production ever devised…Heating the shale…could release at least 15 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. .”
--Macdonald Stainsby in the Nov. 30, 2011 issue of The Dominion
“New York University will celebrate the naming of the School of Education in honor of Michael and Judy Steinhardt...The Steinhardts’ $10 million gift, the largest in the school’s history, will create an endowment…The school will be named The Steinhardt School of Education…[then-NYU President] Oliva said: `Our New York University community is enormously proud that our School of Education will bear the name of Michael and Judy Steinhardt…’…A former Wall Street financier, Mr. Steinhardt is a member of the NYU Board of Trustees, chairman of the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University…Mrs. Steinhardt is a Trustee of the NYU Institute of Fine Arts and co-chair of the American Friends of Israel Museum…”
--from a Mar. 26, 2001 press release of NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development
“In 1991 the SEC began investigating four hedge fund managers–Steinhardt, Soros, Robertson and Bruce Kovner–for colluding with Salomon Brothers to corner the market in two-year Treasury bills. Robertson and Soros were eventually dropped from the investigation, but in 1994 Steinhardt, Kovner and Salomon agreed to pay to settle the allegations. Salomon coughed up $290 million–then the second-largest fine in Wall Street history–while Steinhardt Partners paid $70 million, 75% of it coming out of Michael’s personal pockets…”
--from a Feb. 10, 2014 Forbes magazine article
Most U.S. antiwar, Palestinian solidarity, anti-corporate and environmental Movement organizers in the 21st-century don’t think that a New York City university school of “Culture, Education and Human Development” should be named in honor of a billionaire hedge fund operator—who apparently made his fortune by speculating in the institutionally racist, sexist and classist Wall Street business world of the late 20th century.
Nor do most Movement organizers inside and outside the United States think that a U.S. university school of “Culture, Education and Human Development” should be named in honor of a U.S. billionaire who apparently collaborated since the 1990s with a militaristic Israeli power structure that denied Palestinians their human rights; and who, early in the 21st-century, involved himself in an oil corporation that apparently threatened the ecology of Palestine and hoped to make big money from drilling for oil in the Golan Heights region of Syria, which the Israeli military continued to illegally occupy.
Yet since 2001 the name of New York University [NYU]’s school of education division has been linked to a a former NYU trustee named Michael Steinhardt in some way; and in 2025 this division—in which nearly 6,000 students were enrolled, historically, in 2014—still apparently operates under the name of “NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.”
One reason might be because the administration of tax-exempt and “non-profit” NYU apparently received, historically, millions of tax-exempt dollars from Michael Steinhardt since 2001. As a Dec. 23, 2006 press release that was posted, historically, on NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development’s website historically noted:
“New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education has received a $10 million gift from Wall Street financier Michael Steinhardt... and his wife, Judy, a Trustee of the NYU Institute of Fine Arts…The donation matches their $10 million gift in 2001, when the school was named in honor of the Steinhardts. The combined $20 million is the largest gift in the history of the school…In March 2007, the Steinhardt School of Education will be changing its name to the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development…”
And, coincidentally, another $5 million was received by the NYU Institute of Fine Arts—on whose board of trustees Judy Steinhardt then sat—from the Steinhardts in 2013.
In his 2001-published autobiography, titled No Bull: My Life In And Out of Markets, former NYU Trustee Steinhardt indicated how he obtained his personal wealth from being a Wall Street speculator who apparently profited from U.S. capitalist economic recessions historically:
“Much of my life’s focus has been on my performance as a hedge fund manager…Since the age of 13, stocks have held a magical fascination for me…I started buying bonds on the premise that the economy would weaken faster…In the early 1980s, I managed about $75 million in my two hedge funds—the flagship Steinhardt Partners, LP, and an off-shore fund, SP International…We invested $50 million of the funds’ cash and borrowed another $200 million to buy a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of intermediate 10-year Treasury bonds…Bond bulls—investors like myself—hoped that the money supply would stop growing. This would indicate that the economy was slowing down and possibly heading into recession, good news for bondholders…Our bond investment of $250 million, on $50 million of equity capital and the rest borrowed, made a profit of $40 million…”
Much of the money that former NYU Trustee and NYU Big Donor Steinhardt used when he first began his speculation activity on Wall Street during the early 1960s was money that his father, Sol Frank Steinhardt, apparently gave him. As Michael Steinhardt recalled in his No Bull autobiographical book:
“…My father began loaning me money to start investing. Before long, I had a stock portfolio worth $200,000, a substantial sum of money for a 20-year-old in the early 1960s…He would give me, say, $10,000, all in $100 bills (in early 1960s-valued money)…I never asked where the money came from. I simply took the money…to begin investing for him. Occasionally, he would come up with more than $10,000. Once, he handed me a substantially larger amount, which I stuffed in my pockets….It heightened my consciousness to be carrying stacks and stacks of $100 bills through the streets and subways of the city…Investing my father’s money allowed me to invest in the stock market without feeling undue pressure…” (end of part 1. To be continued.)