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JOEL KLEIN ’67
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY
COLUMBIA COLLEGE TODAY JOEL KLEIN ’67
“I still feel like America is falling down in
education, particularly for the most challenged kids.”
The year was 1963, and the ambitious teenager was just
beginning to display the drive that later would empower
him to challenge monoliths and monopolies,
from mighty Microsoft to powerful teachers’ unions.
That moment almost 50 years ago also exposed Klein’s nascent
appreciation for the transformative power of education.
Decades later, as chancellor of the New York City Department
of Education, the nation’s largest school system, that appreciation
gave rise to a conviction to champion kids — much like himself
— whose only foothold out of tough circumstances could be
found in a classroom. But education, while Klein’s signature issue,
represents only one facet of an extraordinary and somewhat
dizzying career. He has morphed from Beltway Democratic insider,
vetting a Supreme Court justice for the Clinton administration
and taking on Bill Gates in a monumental anti-trust case, into
one of the country’s leading and most controversial educational
reformers — only to vault early last year into the executive towers
of the conservative-leaning media titan Rupert Murdoch.
“My resume looks like it kind of got mixed and matched from
three or four people,” the 65-year-old Klein says while taking a
break over a cup of hot tea in his Midtown office at News Corporation
headquarters.
He began with law, graduating from Harvard in 1971 and
working as a law clerk, first for David Bazelon, chief judge of the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and
then for Justice Lewis Powell of the U.S. Supreme Court. Following
work at several law firms, in 1981 he co-founded a boutique
D.C. firm, where he made his mark as a litigator: Klein argued 11
cases before the Supreme Court, and won nine of them.
When people talk about Klein, they describe a man who
thrives amidst adversity, all the more when many eyes are trained
on him. One of the people who worked in Klein’s law firm in the
1980s was Peter Scheer, now the executive director of the First
Amendment Coalition.
“What he’s especially good at is being able to think very clearly
in the midst of a crisis, where there’s a lot of pressure and the world
is watching,” Scheer told Politico last year. “He’s able to stay focused,
and he’s almost stimulated by all that pressure and media
attention.”
Those attributes are likely what caught the eye of President
Bill Clinton in 1993 when he convinced Klein to become deputy
White House counsel, tasking him with guiding the nomination
process of Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59L to the Supreme Court. He
also oversaw the Clinton White House’s responses to the Whitewater
inquiry.
Being tapped by Clinton caught Klein off-guard. “It struck me
as strange because I’m not a political guy,” he recalls. “There was
a certain amount of apprehension. I mean, the White House is a
very hothouse place and [the people there have] very sharp political
elbows.”
Klein’s ability to more than hold his own in such a setting
would come into play in his next posting, in 1995, to the Justice
Department. Within two years he was named chief of the antitrust
division, where he challenged Microsoft’s monopoly in
what Forbes magazine called “one of the largest and most dramatic
antitrust battles in the nation’s history.”
In June 2000, after a federal judge ruled to break Microsoft into
two parts, Klein sat with Jim Lehrer of PBS and reflected upon
the victory. “I do think the notion that anything goes, even in the
new high-tech economy, is a notion that is very corrosive and insidious,”
Klein said. “It will be harmful to our markets, harmful
to our consumers and ultimately harmful to our economy. When
you use economic power to coerce people to stay out of the market,
to basically tie up distribution channels, when that occurs ...
you can count on the United States Department of Justice and I
believe the federal courts [should] put a stop to it.”
The victory was reversed on appeal, and by then the Bush
administration had no interest in pursuing the case. But Klein’s
reputation as the guy who went toe-to-toe with a corporation
then valued at $619 billion — more than Apple is today — never
waned. In his four years at the head of antitrust, he established
a record to stand on: Through 220 criminal price-fixing cases, 52
executives were sent to prison, corporations paid $1.7 billion in
fines and individuals paid an additional $21 million. Klein also
blocked or altered about 170 proposed mergers.
The Los Angeles Times dubbed Klein a “giant killer.” And in assessing
his legacy at the Justice Department, The New York Times
heaped praise on him in a September 24, 2000, editorial: “Mr.
Klein blocked a series of mergers — between Lockheed Martin
and Northrop Grumman, WorldCom and Sprint, and Northwest
and Continental — that had the potential to harm consumers. He
also broke up price-fixing cartels, notably between international
vitamin companies. He has not forged bold new antitrust principles
or direction. What he has done is take antitrust enforcement
seriously. For that alone he warrants the nation’s gratitude.”
For many years while the high-powered lawyer was racking
up legal victories toiling in Washington, he also played
on a different court with the same tenacity. The basketball
league at the Washington Y had a roster of lawyers that included
Larry Lucchino, now CEO of the Boston Red Sox.
“We played in a serious league,” says Klein, who stands 5-foot-
6. “I’m lucky I didn’t break a leg.”
Between hoops and law, Klein kindled his passion for education,
teaching at Georgetown Law School. Unlike most adjunct
professors, Klein didn’t opt for an evening seminar; he taught a
daytime class in civil procedure to first-year students.
One of his students was Michael K. Powell, who later was
chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and is the
son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. “Joel was an extraordinary
teacher who had a mastery of complex subjects and
the ability to make them simple,” Powell told The New York Times
in 2002.
Teaching was not new for Klein. When he was at Harvard in
the late ’60s, he had taken a short leave to take education classes
at NYU and to teach math to sixth-graders at a public school in
his old Queens neighborhood. But despite these leanings toward
the classroom and a chalkboard, he says he was flustered when
he answered a phone call in 2002 and heard the voice of New
York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, asking him to consider tak-
ing the post of schools chancellor.
“I said, ‘Mike, you must have the wrong name. You clearly got
one name too few in your Rolodex.’ He said, ‘No, no, we were
thinking of people outside the box,’” Klein recalls.
At 56, the former corporate lawyer and trustbuster found his
calling: To take charge of a public school system of 1.1 million students
and to grapple with the complex realities and controversies
of urban education.
“He has the leadership skills,” Bloomberg said at a news conference
introducing Klein in summer 2002. “He has the intergovernmental
skills. He has the feeling and compassion for people.
He is incorruptible. He is a visionary. And I believe that he will
deliver to this city what we promised, a quality education for all
of our children.”
Bloomberg handed Klein the reins of a school system beleaguered
by low test scores, high dropout rates and a shortage of
teachers — a tough assignment that struck a chord not only with
Klein’s politics but also with his own past.
“I still feel like America is falling down in education, particularly
for the most challenged kids,” Klein said recently, when
asked to look back on his tenure as chancellor. “And this was a
chance to really give back to the city and the school system that
had given me so much. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for
what teachers in Astoria did for me.” (Klein in fact credits his
physics teacher, Sidney Harris, with changing the arc of his life:
“In my junior year, he took me aside and said, ‘You’re doing fine,
but you can do better. Why don’t you stay after school and we’ll
study Einstein’s theory of relativity, which will prove to you that
you can play this game at a different level.’” Harris also pushed
him to apply to the College rather than the obvious choice of
CUNY’s campus in nearby Flushing.)
As schools chancellor from 2002–10, Klein gave more power to
principals and pushed for accountability, stamping schools with
A-through-F grades in annual report cards, taking a stand against
the widespread practice of social promotion of students up the
grade levels and making city schools a model for data-driven
teaching and policymaking. He also created more than 300 new
small schools and charter schools for parents to choose from.
“I’m a big, big believer, whether it’s for my children or anybody
else’s children, that people want choice,” Klein says. “I used
to ask people all the time, ‘Of the 1,500 schools in New York City,
how many would you send your own kids to?’”
Time and again, he hit on this point, allying himself with the
schoolchildren and their parents’ hopes and dreams for them.
“Whose kids should go to the schools we wouldn’t send our own
kids to?” he asks. “Whatever community you live in, whatever
your economic circumstances, you want your kid to have a shot.
And education is one of those places where you can change lives.
The politics of Washington — those sharp elbows — served as
the ideal boot camp for the intensity, unrelenting media scrutiny
and controversy that came with leading a huge public school system.
Not one to shy from confrontation, Klein attacked the city’s
Klein participates in a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the opening of a school in Middle Village, Queens, in 2010.
PHOTO: COURTESY JOEL KLEIN ’67
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