Trump attacks Columbia prez over expansion

Donald Trump

Donald Trump is speaking out against Columbia University’s controversial 17-acre, $6.3 billion expansion into Manhattanville, according to the Wall Street Journal. Trump said that Columbia came close to buying a nine-acre property from him on the Upper West Side in 2002, and he is still angry about the deal falling through. “They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,” Trump told the Journal. He also wrote a letter to the Columbia Spectator’s Eye magazine, deriding the school’s president Lee Bollinger for rejecting his land. Trump described him as “horrible” and a “total moron,” when he spoke to the Journal. Bollinger acknowledged that discussions had taken place about the Lincoln Center-area land but declined to comment further. “All I can say is that we now have far more property for far less money in an area we care about and is proximate to our existing campuses, which is critically important to great academic research and teaching,” he said.

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