Langone Asked Faculty For Political Campaign Donations
By Hayley Munguia
Last week, the New York Times made a bit of a stink about some shady political fundraising going on at NYU’s Langone Hospital.
Here’s the deal.
In 2012, Hurricane Sandy transformed Langone from one of the city’s top academic medical centers into a glorified swampland. In some post-Sandy reporting, the Times itself (in a piece headlined as “A Flooded Mess That Was a Medical Gem”) described Langone as smelling “like the hold of a ship — a mixture of diesel oil and water,” and went onto say that Langone “may have been the New York City hospital that was the most devastated by Hurricane Sandy.”
At the time, officials from all different fields took a tour together to assess the damage. Among those present were W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); Dr. Robert I. Grossman, dean and chief executive of Langone; Senator Charles E. Schumer; and, of course, our beloved John Sexton.
After the tour, FEMA approved grants to NYU that totaled about $150 million, but that came nowhere near Grossman’s estimate of $700 million to $1 billion in damages caused by the hurricane. While some people did question whether or not this was the best allocation of FEMA funding, the truth is that Langone needed whatever financial assistance it could get. As NBC reported, financial statements at the time cited that the hospital had about $200 million in untapped credit lines pre-Sandy, but even so, as Sen. Schumer said, “Even a huge and prosperous hospital like NYU cannot, cannot do this on its own.”
Langone was able to make up much of that deficit with government-provided aid that Sen. Schumer and other Senate and House members allocated specifically to NYU. Ever since, Kenneth G. Langone has held campaign fundraisers for representatives who helped pass the bill, and has solicited donations from Langone medical faculty.
Based on the Times article, it appears that much of the Langone administration is in on the campaign efforts. In the piece, Anemona Hartocollis writes that Grossman “discussed the fundraising effort at a routine meeting of department heads, saying roughly, in words confirmed by several of those present, that he knew that not everyone in the room had given. After a few took issue with Dr. Grossman’s comments, he told them that they were free to do as they wished, the attendees said.”
There’s some tricky legal and ethical tightrope-walking going on here. Campaign finance law prohibits companies from requiring employees to donate, but there’s no evidence that any administrator or board member solicited donations without clarifying that it wasn’t required, or as Langone told the medical faculty in an email, “I assure you that if you decide not to join me it will have no effect whatsoever on my respect and admiration for each of you.”
Hartocollis cites Marie Monaco, an associate professor at the medical school as saying that, “There are rules at NYU that no employee can engage in any political activity that involves the school. Some might argue, well, he’s not an employee, he’s the chairman of the board of the medical school. But then you could argue that that’s even worse.”
The political fundraising may be ethically questionable, but it’s not illegal. It’s understandable and entirely precedented. Northeast Utilities, Murray Energy, and even Walmart have been recently “busted” for similar activity, but as the methods are legal, the only real repercussion is some bad press.
