There are a few ways to become a real estate developer in New York City. One: Be the spawn of a dynastic family. Two: Strike it rich in another field, put that money into buildings, and learn on the go. Three: Pay $110,000 in tuition and fees to attend graduate school.
At least, that’s the pitch for Columbia’s Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) degree in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, or GSAPP. There, for a year, those unable to follow path No. 1 or 2 study in an auditorium in the basement of Avery Hall. Under the singular and sometimes controversial leadership of Patrice Derrington — who helmed the program until the end of the 2024 spring semester — up to 187 would-be builders learned how to conquer the winner-takes-all game of New York City real estate.
“Since its inception, the MSRED program has filled a critical void in real estate development education by training the next generation of urban developers to push boundaries and innovate at the intersection of design and feasibility,” SL Green’s CEO Marc Holliday said. Holliday is a graduate — as is his daughter. He endowed a professorship, and one industry source referred to him as the program’s “guardian angel.”
But in May, GSAPP Dean Andres Jaque decided not to push for Derrington’s tenure after nine years and removed her as head of the degree program. She was allowed to remain a professor but told not to teach any classes.
Columbia University declined to comment on Derrington’s departure or tenure, citing its policy to not comment on personnel decisions.
Disputes in ivory towers are not normally water cooler conversations for the real estate industry, but Derrington was not just any academic. She once managed the real estate assets of David Rockefeller and is a licensed architect with a Harvard MBA and a Ph.D. in architecture and civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
Derrington inherited the curriculum, and over the years she finessed it to add more coursework in finance, technology and environmental sustainability. She’d find out from industry contacts what skills new hires needed, and she recruited adjunct professors from her Rolodex (including The Real Deal’s Amir Korangy). The industry considers MSRED the top program of its kind.
While program affiliates say they have been left in the dark without official explanations of her departure, a number of students, alumni and adjuncts blame it on an epidemic at college campuses: woke-ism, the lay term for critical theory, or the art of breaking things down. The architecture school was already a more esoteric place than the development program it housed, and now a new strain of activist urban planners and radical architects who found private real estate development sinister have taken over, some allege.
Jaque, the dean, remarks that “architecture’s central issue is to be dissident with respect to the system of centralized power,” and “patriarchy and technocracy are regulating our professions.”
“We are here to fucking kill it — make as much money as we can.”
Columbia University and the graduate school have yet to publicly announce any changes to the program. A Columbia spokesperson said it added new finance and investment classes this year.
“[MSRED] is a preeminent program uniquely positioned to prepare students with the critical skills to become successful industry leaders both in New York and globally,” the spokesperson said.
While it may be impossible to judge, or even know, exactly what put an end to Derrington’s time at the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the commotion at MSRED points to the tension at the heart of the program, or maybe at the heart of all academically housed professional programs, especially at a time when academia has arguably made a turn for the impractical, the weird and the incomprehensible: Is this worth anything?
The teacher
Patrice Derrington was born a rule follower.
Her father served on a state supreme court of Queensland in Australia. One student compared her to a drill sergeant. She prizes eye contact and punctuality. Her outfits are stylish in a muted, almost British way.
One of Derrington’s goals for the development program when she joined in 2015 was to establish a set of best practices for an industry without many rules.
Historically, New York City real estate attracted immigrants who earned their fortunes in other businesses, often textiles. Constructing, selling, buying and managing buildings required a mastery not of English but of the language of dealmaking. First-generation machers passed their skills and buildings to their more genteel kids and grandkids.
Even today, the skyscrapers are often built by men of hustle, chutzpah and street smarts over formal education. The image of Joseph Chetrit or Simon Dushinsky, two of New York’s most active developers, sitting in a classroom scribbling down notes about urbanism is material for a comedy skit.
But the field is becoming more institutionalized. Private equity firms like Blackstone, Brookfield and KKR are taking a large share of New York real estate. (Columbia University is either the largest or second-largest private property owner in the city: It owns 288 buildings and 16.6 million square feet of building area with a total value of $1.6 billion, according to a TRD analysis.)
Private equity has ventured into corners normally reserved for the small-guy investor. Take Carlyle, which has spent over $500 million buying more than 100 small walk-ups in Brooklyn and Queens for a few million a piece. Blackstone purchased a chunk of the real estate loans from Signature Bank, the favored lender of midsize landlords.
These types of firms, Holliday’s SL Green included, want to recruit polite, trained college graduates.
MSRED was supposed to provide the solution. Founded 35 years ago, its classes introduce students to different parts of the real estate universe: finance, architecture, public policy and construction.
“It’s important to be able to walk out of a degree knowing you can sit across from someone, understand their perspective — you can understand what they are solving for, and understand what their end game is,” Daniel Dishi, an MSRED alumnus and founder of Queens Equities, a real estate investment firm, said.
Derrington delivered on this promise for many.
“You could not find someone more invested in architecture than Patrice — she believed in the marriage of these practices,” said Cara DePippo, another MSRED alum.
Others found Derrington abrasive, saying she clashed with students and sometimes faculty. Some former students say she occasionally called students with gripes “admission mistakes.” She would slam laptops shut and snatch cellphones out of hands. A few complained to the dean.
Others believed she was just preparing students for the sharp-elbowed, no-holds-barred world of New York real estate. A number of students TRD spoke to said she gave them their break in a closely guarded industry. Adjunct professors respected her.
She “had always been extremely professional,” Raquel Ramati, a former director at NYC’s Department of City Planning and an adjunct faculty member at MSRED, said. “She always wanted to know what I was doing and how it was going,” she added.
Without Derrington there, at least three adjuncts say they will likely leave and are no longer willing to sacrifice time with family or at work to teach.
“Why am I giving up Fridays in the summer?” one adjunct faculty member said.
Whatever they thought of her style, many argue that Derrington held the program together, not just in terms of administration or job placement. She also acted as a bulwark against academic abstraction seeping in from the architecture school. More than 70 recent alumni sent a letter to Columbia leadership asking for Derrington’s reinstatement.
Derrington balanced theory with practical industry application, according to Holliday.
“Patrice Derrington has done an excellent job of executing on a robust curriculum to address these issues head-on,” he said. “Any effort by Columbia GSAPP to promote ideology over merit, competency and proven success would be damaging to the program.”
Culture clash
There was natural hostility between theoretically minded architects and real estate pragmatists at the graduate school, some alumni and two adjunct professors said.
A MSRED student said that in design classes run by the architecture school, she was called a sellout. MSRED was commonly referred to as the “dark side” or “full of the sons of real estate developers.”
One matriculant said Jaque told students he wanted a more “global” perspective for the school, which seemed like code that the program would no longer be geared toward preparing them for big-ticket dealmaking in New York City.
That didn’t land well.
“We are here to fucking kill it — make as much money as we can,” the student said.
Adding fuel to the fire, MSRED had few resources. Derrington had just one other full-time faculty professor during her first five years. At one point, she taught most of the core curriculum herself while also running the program. The basement room where classes were held had no windows, which students viewed as symbolic of its stature.
But somehow the whole thing mostly worked, at least until May. On a campus already tense with protesters in encampments, the MSRED program exploded when Derrington was removed.
“The abrupt absence of such a pivotal figure has left current students in disarray, questioning the stability and direction of their academic pursuits,” the alumni letter stated. A top signatory of that letter was MSRED alum Blake Hutcheson, CEO of OMERS, one of Canada’s largest pension plans. Those who applied to the program thinking Derrington would be the director were especially concerned.
Over the summer, students were called into a meeting with Jaque. They wanted answers. What was happening to the program with Derrington’s exit? Would it still offer finance classes?
One student went home before the meeting and changed into traditional business attire. He thought it would be like in the professional world.
But when he arrived, he spotted Jaque wearing a glittery orange shirt, Balenciaga shoes and baggy pants.
“Any effort by Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to promote ideology over merit, competency and proven success would be damaging to the program.”
“This is New York real estate,” said the student. “We are talking about billions of dollars.”
Jaque became dean in 2022, succeeding Amale Andraos, who runs the design firm WORKac.
“Architecture needs to go back to its political mission, in other words creating the structures for distributing well-being rather than serving as a handmaiden to the super-rich,” Jaque said in an interview with Pin-Up magazine this year.
He would not likely be a developer’s choice to design a tower on Billionaires’ Row.
“Every single time he would give a speech, it was around ideas of anti-capitalism,” one recent alum said.
One of Jaque’s projects, “Ikea Disobedients,” has appeared in MoMA. The exhibit included a performance using Ikea furniture as an improvised set. It served as a criticism of Ikea’s “social structuration.”
This was practical, Jaque’s website claimed: The work helped stop cases of eviction in Madrid after the 2008 financial crisis.
Deconstructing Derrington
Tenure decisions are usually made at the end of a professor’s fifth year. Derrington’s tenure review was delayed during the Covid era. By 2024, she had published a textbook about the history of the global real estate industry called “Built Up.” Many tenured GSAPP faculty supported Derrington’s tenure, but Jaque ultimately decided against putting her forward. He only told her there was a “negative decision.”
Not every professor gets tenure, and decisions about who does are frequently opaque.
“The tenure review process at Columbia University is extremely demanding and rigorous, as expected of a university of its importance and reputation,” said a spokesperson for Columbia.
Derrington was then told to pack her bags. She was told her services would no longer be needed as program head or as a professor, and she could take her salary over the coming year or as a lump sum. No written explanation was given.
In the months that followed, alumni campaigned to move MSRED into Columbia’s Business School, perhaps a better fit for its ethos. Derrington took a part-time, non-tenure-track role at Harvard University. Adam Lubinsky, a principal of the architecture and design firm WXY, became the interim program director, but a longer-term plan has not emerged.
“I have not heard anything explicit about the intended direction of the program under its urban design leadership,” Derrington said in a statement.
The traditional order
Students of business still admire the robber barons, like John Pierpont Morgan Sr., and the corporate raiders, like Carl Icahn. But success in the current corporate world today mostly involves mastery of Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint. Junior analysts on Wall Street spend the day — and night — perfecting PowerPoint slides.
The consultant track has overtaken MBA programs, as McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group attract grads with $200,000-plus salaries to tell operators everything they do wrong.
Then, if you do make it, you go to board meetings on Zoom. Power suits and ties sit in garment bags, while leaders wear white-soled Cole Haans and quilted puffer vests.
Anyone looking for meaning has to stay away.
In this world, real estate is still mythic. It matters. You can have style. Towers go up, and they change their environments. Design sets the scene for existence; better design improves life and work. Housing is economic mobility.
Young people gravitate toward the field because of the potential riches, but also because they hope to find purpose.
Can they find it in the Ivy League? Can anyone really teach real estate grit — how to get up in the morning when your lender backed out and your anchor tenant reneged?
At least for a moment in time, MSRED offered this to a type of hard-working, ready-to-hustle student who had no other way into this lucrative and hard-to-access business. If the institution can survive as a place for pragmatism, maybe the answer is yes. If it ventures into the land of obscure, abstract academic theory, the path might become impossible.