Bob Harrison

On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship 

Aside from friendships, I really threw myself into everything Cornell had to offer. I learned how to play squash, became a newscaster and a disc jockey and joined a fraternity. I also got deeply involved in university governance. As a result of the student protests there in the late 1960’s, Cornell completely transformed its governance structure to delegate very meaningful authority to students, faculty and employees.  I was very involved for my entire college career and ultimately got elected to serve on the Board of Trustees as a student. I was also admitted into the College Scholar Program, which allowed me to create my own course of study.  My academic adviser, suggested I read The Presidential Character by James David Barber, which explained presidential behaviour in terms of the personalities of the presidents.  That led me to do my honours thesis on a U.S. congressional committee I had been working for. I interviewed the Congressmen on the committee and gave them personality tests and then wrote my thesis explaining the committee’s behaviour in terms of the personalities of its members.  

It was actually the provost and vice provost of Cornell who encouraged me to apply for the Rhodes Scholarship and even obtained the application for me. Until then, I didn’t know anything about it or any other kind of scholarship and certainly never considered applying. The whole process really came out of nowhere, and I was shocked when I was invited for interviews at the state level at the Lawrenceville School and then at the district level at Rockefeller University. I do remember, when the winners were announced, we were each given a dime to make a call to our parents, and then, one of the members of the committee invited the four of us into the library and poured each of us a brandy, and we spent the next hour or so talking about what to expect in Oxford.  

On career chapters  

I’ve had three careers or chapters in my life: law, investment banking, and then working for President Clinton (University & Arkansas 1968) at the Clinton Foundation. My decision to leave the law came shortly after a wonderful two-year period in my firm’s Paris office. There, lawyers were treated like trusted advisers by their clients, but when I returned to the States, the work was dramatically different. Young lawyers largely drafted, redrafted and proofread documents. Eventually, I went out to dinner with some investment banker friends, and when they heard what I was doing, they said I ought to be doing what they were doing. Given the contrast between my Paris experience and my current life in Big Law, I interviewed with three firms and made the decision to leave law and switch careers to work at Goldman Sachs. Ironically, my start date was 19 October 1987, or “Black Monday”, when the market cratered 22.5% in one day. That night, my bosses at the law firm reached out to suggest that I reconsider.  After a sleepless night, I decided to stay the course, and it was the best professional decision I could have made. As global co-head of the media and telecom group, I was involved in an exciting time in history.  Our clients were establishing global footprints, disrupting old media, and creating the internet infrastructure we take for granted today. But when the bubble burst in the early 2000s, reducing the size of my group was an enormously difficult and painful task.  

It was after that and the trauma of 9/11 that I decided to move into public service full-time. I got involved in the 2003 Democratic presidential campaigns of General Wes Clark and Senator John Kerry in the hope of serving in a Democratic administration. When that didn’t work out, I was approached by the Clinton Foundation and asked to work on a project involving access to water and sanitation in the developing world. I did the research and gave my best unvarnished advice. Then, they asked me to run the project, but my children were young at that point, and I didn’t want to be overseas. Instead, I worked to create the Foundation’s childhood obesity initiative in partnership with the American Heart Association. After about 18 months, President Clinton asked if I would become chief executive of the Clinton Global Initiative. The idea of CGI was to convene leaders from the public sector, private sector, and non-profit sector to address the most pressing global challenges and to require participants to make public commitments to take action against those challenges, rather than just discussing possibilities.  Now, nearly 20 years since inception, CGI participants have made more than 4,100 commitments operating in 190 countries and positively impacting over 500 million people. 

I’m also enormously proud of the work that I was able to get involved with as the Board Chair of Cornell for more than a decade -- in particular, the creation of the university’s College of Business, the expansion of on-campus residential alternatives for 2000 students, and the transformational addition of a technology campus in New York City, Cornell Tech.  My time as chair of the board coincided with some extremely difficult periods, especially following the death of Cornell’s then president, Beth Garrett, after only eight months in office. The pandemic was also challenging, although we were actually able to continue with a hybrid online and on-campus programme that was a huge accomplishment in a country where most universities went entirely online.