Opinion: NYU Should Rip Trump Backer’s Name Off Its New ‘Death Star’

A dozen blocks uptown from Donald Trump’s trial stands a black behemoth that New York University named after a hedge-fund billionaire the former president has admiringly nicknamed “Money Machine.”

“John A. Paulson Center” read the white letters affixed to the black glass facade at the building’s main entrances—name-checking an alum who is bankrolling Trump’s terrifying attempt to retake the White House.

While many of the students walking in and out of the center had no idea who it is named after or what that person stands for, the building has acquired a nickname among neighborhood preservationists.

“[It] has been nicknamed the Death Star because it really looks like it’s some sort of alien presence that’s come to conquer and subjugate everything around it,” Andrew Berman of the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation told The Daily Beast.

Berman described the building as a “particularly egregious kind of finger in the eye to the community.” Of Paulson, he said, “I think his history and reputation speaks for itself and NYU chose to name one of their most prominent structures after him.”

“I think [it] sort of really says a lot about their priorities,” he added. “Ultimately, they are looking for money. And if you give them enough money, they will, they will honor you.”

And in fact, the university bestowed the honor on Paulson, 68, in recognition of a $100 million donation towards the $1.2 billion structure. Paulson, who graduated from the NYU Stern School of Business, made the gift in 2012, before anybody imagined Trump would someday become president.

The university only publicly acknowledged the gift at the building’s dedication in December 2022. NYU spokesman John Beckman says the delay was unrelated to community protests sparked by the project at its inception. The naming went ahead even though Paulson was by then a major Trump booster.

“It seemed to make sense to make the announcement at a benchmark point in the construction of the building, such as a groundbreaking or—as ultimately turned out to be the case—as the building was opening,” Beckman said. “It seems entirely fitting.”

Paulson went on to become an even bigger booster of a former president whose words and deeds are often contrary to principles the university sets forth in its Code of Ethical Conduct. These include “respect for and compliance with the law,” and ”respect for the rights and dignity of others,” and “conducting business practices with honesty and integrity.” There is also this one in contrast to Trump’s unending desire for vengeance: “promise of no retaliation.”

Trump was following his usual code of unethical conduct during a 45-minute speech at an April 6 “Inaugural Leadership Dinner” that Paulson hosted in his $110 million Palm Beach home that raised more than $50 million to put the four-times indicted philanderer back in the White House.

The presumptive GOP nominee twisted the story of America’s immigrants and told the guests that migrants “are coming in from prisons and jails.”

“They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster,” he said, according to The New York Times.

“Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries?... You know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

We can assume the irony of those remarks was lost on Paulson—whose father was born in Ecuador, arrived in America in 1944 as a 16-year-old orphan, enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II and was wounded in Italy. He changed his surname to Paulson and settled in Queens, where John was born.

John got his start in business there when he was 6, selling Charms candies in the local schoolyard.

“Buying the candy in bulk, he sold each piece at a profit and saved his earnings in a treasure chest,” a Harvard Business School alumni publication notes.“By the time he was 19, he was employing 50 people in his father’s home country, Ecuador, and importing clothing and decorative items to Bloomingdale’s and others.”

Paulson went on to become valedictorian at NYU’s Stern School of Business and receive a Harvard MBA. He made his big score by betting against the subprime mortgage market in the lead-up to the 2008 financial meltdown. He walked away with more than $3 billion as 3.1 million American homes were foreclosed on.

Paulson put some of that astonishing wealth to good use in 2010, when he announced that he was donating $15 million toward a new maternity hospital in his father’s hometown of Guayaquil, Ecuador. The facility, the biggest of its kind in Latin America, was named after Paulson’s father.

“My father embraced his Ecuadorian roots and remained close to his family and friends in Guayaquil throughout his life,” Paulson told Forbes at the time. “My father also cared deeply about improving the quality of life for those in need, especially those from less fortunate backgrounds. Dedicating this hospital in his memory continues his legacy.”

The Alfredo G. Paulson Maternity Hospital opened in 2016, and recorded 12,900 births in its first year. Some of them are possibly among the migrants whom Trump has called vermin.

As reported by the Migration Policy Institute, an annual average of more than 3,500 Ecuadoreans were apprehended by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol between 2012 and 2018. The number spiked to 97,000 in 2021. Roughly half the apprehensions involved adults with minor children.

As ever more Ecuadoreans followed his father’s route to greater opportunity, Paulson remained a fan of Trump, who gave him his nickname in January after winning the Nevada GOP primary.

“So, Money Machine,” Trump said to Paulson in his victory speech. “Maybe we’ll put, you know what, put him at Treasury. You want to make a little money?”

Other billionaires who supported Trump in 2016 had withdrawn their support for him over the travesty of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2020, and his persistence in furthering the fiction that the 2020 election was stolen. Not Paulson.

“The 2020 election is in the past, but I do believe there were legitimate concerns raised about election integrity,” Paulson told The Financial Times last month. “Going forward, it’s very important that people believe in the fairness and integrity of elections.”

Billionaire John Paulson’s Divorce Gets Even Nastier

As for Trump’s indictments, Paulson followed the MAGA line, saying, “I never thought it would be happening in the U.S. that our judicial system would be used for political purposes.” He even suggested the prosecutions were a plus.

“When people understand the nature of these cases, they feel that Trump is being politically prosecuted,” he said. “Instead of harming him, it’s creating enormous support for Trump.”

The April fundraiser at his Palm Beach mansion near Mar-a-Lago was described in the New York Post as a “come-home-to-Trump moment” for the uber-wealthy. Tickets went for as much as $814,600 for those who wanted to sit at Trump’s table. Melania Trump made a rare appearance and posed for a group photo outside the mansion with her husband, plus Paulson, and the nutritionist he is expected to marry after he secures a divorce from his wife.

At one point in his remarks, the man whom Paulson so strongly supports told the gathering that he might not be able to use the Resolute Desk when he returns to the Oval Office. He actually suggested that President Joe Biden had defecated on it.

“It’s been soiled,” Trump said, according to an account in The New York Times. “And I mean that literally, which is sad.”

The Trump campaign proudly announced the Palm Beach event raked in $50.5 million, an all-time record for a single political fundraiser, and nearly double what the Biden campaign reported from a New York City event that included former President Barack Obama and Former President Bill Clinton.

According to Bloomberg, Paulson and fellow billionaire Howard Lutnik are hosting another big fundraiser on May 14 in New York City. Paulson will no doubt again live up to the moniker Money Machine.

Meanwhile, at NYU, there are at least a handful of students who are disturbed that the school honored Paulson, who did not respond to a request for comment.

In the view of Molly Koch, a 20-year-old NYU junior from Maryland who writes for the student newspaper, Washington Square News, many students are unaware that the building is named the Paulson Center even though they stride past the name in white letters whenever they enter or exit.

“They call it the Mercer building because it’s on Mercer Street,” she reported.

Koch was looking for something to write about for the paper earlier in the semester and decided to research the names adorning the university’s buildings—including the Paulson Center.

“I just came across who it’s actually named after and realized he’s just a terrible person,” Koch told The Daily Beast.

Washington Square News published an opinion piece by Koch titled “The case for renaming The Paulson Center.”

“The Paulson Center is one of many examples of universities catering to wealthy donors in an effort to secure financial stability, even when those donors go against what these academic institutions stand for,” Koch wrote.

Koch added that Trump’s “aggressive immigration policies, record of xenophobia and racism, and history of sexual misconduct should make him someone the university wants to stay far away from. Paulson’s allegiance to these ideas goes against NYU’s mission of building an inclusive university community.”

Speaking to The Daily Beast, Koch allowed that the university had the right to name the building after Paulson, “since they were given all this money for this building.”

“It just sucks that he is the person that it is,” Koch said.

Sounds like NYU could learn a thing or two from one of its students.

There is plenty of precedent for removing donor names from buildings. Princeton stripped Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school for “racist thinking and policies.” The Sackler family name was pulled by Yale after its role in the opioid epidemic was revealed. Princeton took Ron Perelman’s name off a dorm when he didn’t pay what he promised.

NYU, which has an endowment of almost $6 billion and costs $87,000 a year to attend, should also consider whether Paulson’s $100 million is a price worth paying to turn its back on its own code of ethics.

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