Business School Benefit

Helping hands abounded at the Columbia University School of Business’s annual benefit dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Ballroom on Monday.

“We’re networking here,” Daniel Cain, Class of 1972, said as he passed a business card to Ed Harris, Class of 1986. Both work in health care finance.

“It’s about community; people don’t have personal agendas, they look out for you,” a first-year student, Erwin Thompson, said of the school’s zeitgeist.

That attitude has turned into a management style for the chairman and chief executive of Coach Inc., Lew Frankfort, a 1969 graduate who was honored at the event.

“We hire optimistic people, people who demonstrate good energy, and most of all who are nice,” Mr. Frankfort said.

The chancellor of the New York City schools, Joel Klein, the other honoree at the event, said he hopes to bring more business school-type thinking to his workplace:

“All this talk of innovation and leadership: it’s not the world I wake up to every morning,” Mr. Klein, a graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Law School, said from the podium. “The future of the nation is going to require an entirely different, entrepreneurial approach to public education,” he said.

The event raised $3 million with the help of the dinner chairman, David Zalaznick, class of 1978, and benefactors Lulu Wang, Class of 1983, Russell Carson, Class of 1967, and Henry Kravis, Class of 1969, and also included rousing speeches from the business school dean, R. Glenn Hubbard, and the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger. Notably, both current students and recent graduates were among those filling the table. Among them was Bakari Adams, who graduates on Sunday and is going to work in private equity real estate.

Their Hips Move When They Support Reading

The Literacy Partners gala on Monday was pages of fun. Chapter 1 was a program of readings by actors Frank Langella and Vanessa Redgrave, detective novelist Alexander McCall Smith, and former ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff. The Chapter 2 was dinner, and Chapter 3 was a solid hour of highly danceable music from the Bob Hardwick Orchestra (including “We Are Family” and “Play that Funky Music”). The movers and shakers who moved and shook on the dance floor included HarperCollins chief executive, Jane Friedman; the executive editor of William Morrow, Henry Ferris; the senior vice president of publicity and marketing at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jeff Seroy; the president of Hearst Magazines, Cathleen Black, who also serves as chairwoman of Literacy Partners, and designer Arnold Scaasi. The final chapter — well, it was actually hundreds of chapters— came in the bags of books passed out to more than 500 guests as they departed: “Evening” by Susan Minot (Vintage), which has been turned into a movie starring Claire Danes, Meryl Streep, and Ms. Redgrave that is due out this summer; “The Book That Changed My Life” (Gotham Books), an anthology, and “The Good Husband of Zebra Drive” by Mr. Smith (Pantheon).

So just who were the authors of this charitable saga? Mr. Scaasi, his partner, Parker Ladd, and columnist Liz Smith have served as chairmen of the event for 20 years, raising more than $20 million for the organization.

agordon@nysun.com