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COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
Stand and Deliver
Joel Klein ’67 looks back on extraordinary
career as attorney, educator, reformer
B y Chris Burrell
Joel Klein ’67 was 16 when he made the leap from William Cullen Bryant
H.S. in Queens to the Columbia campus, just a 6-mile car ride from one
borough to the next but a world away from the public housing apartment
where he grew up.
In that first week, then-dean of the College David Truman sat Klein
and his father down for an advising session and tried to dampen the
freshman’s academic expectations. “My father was a postman, and it
was a pretty daunting experience to meet with the dean,” says Klein.
“Truman said to me that given my background, I could expect — if I did
really well — to graduate in the middle of the class at Columbia.”
Such a prognosis didn’t sit too well with the younger Klein, who piped
up with this rebuttal: “I said, ‘I don’t know where I’ll graduate, but my
teachers at Bryant H.S. didn’t send me here to graduate at the middle of
the class. They sent me to graduate at the top.’”
The brazenness took his father aback, and afterward he asked how
Klein could say that to the dean.
“I said, ‘Well, Dad, that’s the truth.’ Anyhow, Truman and I became
good friends.”
FALL 2012
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