alumni spotlight alumni spotlight S T U D E N T I N T E RV I E W W I T H L U I S U B I N A S ’ 7 8
David Kersey h’98: In seventh-grade history,
Lamplighter
we do a whole section on immigration, including a research project. It involves using the Ellis Island database, which consists of ship manifests written by hand. It’s fun but also difficult. Our seventh graders have a new appreciation of what Ellis Island is and provides for us in school. Once I realized that you had taken up a new role as the Chairman of the Board of The Statue of LibertyEllis Island Foundation, I said we must have a chat.
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Soham: Tell us what you have been doing since your time at Allen-Stevenson.
Luis Ubinas ’78: I can’t begin to describe
what happened after until I talk about how wonderful an opportunity attending AllenStevenson was.
I loved my time at A-S. When I was at AllenStevenson, I was very poor, and living in the South Bronx, which was unfathomably dangerous at the time. A-S was the first place that served as a safe haven for me – in large measure thanks to great teachers, like Mr. Kersey. After Allen-Stevenson, I went to Collegiate, Harvard College, then Harvard Business School. I worked for two years at Booz, Allen, a consulting firm, then, after graduate school, went to work at McKinsey, another consulting firm. I like to describe consulting as being a doctor for companies: we would go and make companies better. Sometimes that meant helping companies
grow, and other times meant saving them from going bankrupt. I did that for almost 20 years, living in Boston and San Francisco.
how to work with very different people with very different motivations. By learning to be flexible, it makes you more effective in each of the sectors.
At that point, my wife reminded me that I didn’t want to just work in business – I wanted a more dynamic career. She told me that I should find a job in the non-profit sector, so I became the head of a very large non-profit, The Ford Foundation, which had me moving back to New York. I ran The Ford Foundation at a really important time, during the 2008 financial crisis. I was able to take the organization through the crisis and make sure it came out the other side healthy and prepared for the future. I’m very proud of that work.
William: You described your library as a ‘palace
Seven years later, with the crisis over and having turned 50, I decided not to take another job. Instead, I decided to focus on doing work across sectors, in government, non-profit and business.
DK: Perhaps I could interject and say, one of the
things I like about these meetings between alumni and boys is that they start to think, ‘Well, he did that…maybe I can do that.’
Soham: Yea – it’s inspiring. LU: Let me just give you a few better examples
between the different sectors: government, non-profit and private. In the non-profit sector, I’m on the Board of the New York Public Library. I run the Finance Committee, so we have to make decisions like how much are we going to spend on rebuilding buildings, how many hours are we going to stay open, how many books are we going to buy? It’s really exciting. We can do things like reminding ourselves that many of the libraries in New York’s poorer neighborhoods are too small and, in some cases, run down. We are renovating many of those libraries in low-income neighborhoods. In the government sector, I was on the United States Trade Commission during the Obama administration. On this Commission, you can help people think about how to treat other countries in their trade relationships. For example, it turns out the Chinese were stealing a lot of our digital ideas and making copycat versions. The Board asked the Trade Commissioner to have a conversation with China, so they would stop doing that.
Sebastian: You talked about
the non-profit and government sectors. Which one did you like more?
LU: Well, truthfully, what I like most is working across sectors. It forces you to learn
Luis in 7th Grade
of books’. How do you feel about the Public Library, and why do you think we need it in New York?
LU: The first answer is, there are times when
there isn’t a single bookstore in the lower-income parts of the Bronx. So, when you think about accessing books, libraries play an important role. In fact, that’s why Andrew Carnegie and others founded and expanded the New York Public Library system over 100 years ago. Back then, there were hardly any bookstores or ways to get books, so having a system of libraries available was revolutionary. The second answer is that the books from the library are free.You can go into the library, pick something you’d like to read, sign it out and leave the library with it. There are millions of books from which to choose. Some people can’t afford books; it’s easy to forget. The third answer is that the library is a public space. It doesn’t matter who you are; you can just walk into the library and be welcome. If a book on the shelf interests you, you can ask to borrow it and take it home. And it’s not just books. The library is a place you can go to study in a safe, warm environment, or a place you can access the internet or use a computer, if you don’t have one. That’s why the library and public spaces are so important.
William: So, you’re basically saying that the library is also an escape from reality while also providing knowledge. LU: Exactly! DK: I used to go with boys to Ellis Island on the Circle Line before they redid it. There were ghosts, and paint was peeling; you couldn’t even go into half of it. It was structurally unsound. But there were some park service people there to help. It had such resonance then — signs in Yiddish. Sebastian: You’ve recently taken on the position as the Chairman of the Board of The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. What does this position entail? LU: The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are government properties. The government does a good job of taking care of the day-to-day, but they haven’t always had the money to preserve those spaces. The Foundation was started in the 1980s because the Statue of Liberty was in danger. I was told that the arm of the Statue was years away from falling off! It’s made out of copper and had been sitting out in the Atlantic Ocean’s salty air for 100 years. The Foundation rebuilt the Statue
