Six years into the presidency of Lee Bollinger, Columbia has received a gift of astonishing magnitude: $400 million from John Werner Kluge. The money is to go to financial aid.

“I’d rather by far invest in people than buildings,” he said. “If I can infuse a mind to improve itself, that’ll pass on to their children, and to their children’s children.” He also reflected on the financial aid he received at Columbia: “If it hadn’t been for Columbia, my path in life would have been completely different.”

It's Columbia's largest gift ever, almost 10% of its relatively small $5 billion endowment, and one of the largest in the history of American education. It also shows the challenges facing Drew Faust and Harvard as a capital campaign looms: These sorts of gifts take time to develop...but how much time will Drew Faust have before Harvard's next capital campaign begins? Six months? A year? Her task will be huge, and the pressure proportionate.

Lee Bollinger, by the way, could have been Harvard's president, and indeed, wanted to be Harvard's president—but the Corporation bypassed him for Lawrence Summers, in part because, after one interview at a New York hotel, Bollinger declined to sneak out through the service entrance in order to avoid two reporters from the Crimson....