Federation Leader Fills a Class Instead of Stadiums

Sunil Gulati was sitting inside his office at Columbia University late Monday morning when a student walked in and began to cry.

This, Gulati later explained, was not particularly unusual this time of year.

Since 2006, when Gulati was voted president of the U.S. Soccer Federation, his public profile and his professional commitments have steadily risen. In 2013, he was elected to the executive committee of FIFA, the powerful governing body of world soccer, and he began to distinguish himself as a reformer. Among his professional goals, he harbors a desire to bring the World Cup back to the United States.

But in that time, Gulati has also cultivated a separate identity - also celebrated, if less widely known - in academia as a lecturer in the Columbia economics department. A major element of this renown, wholly apart from soccer, has been a rousing lecture that he has delivered for years on the final day of each semester in his introductory-level course, principles of economics.

After 27 class sessions barreling through course material, the last lecture is his opportunity to remind students of the inequality in the world, point out their relatively privileged position in it, entreat them to have compassion for others and, as the often-emotional students make clear, tug a bit at their heartstrings.

"It's about getting students to understand that the things we talk about in market economics aren't the only pieces that matter," Gulati said Monday in his office, which is covered in soccer memorabilia, after he delivered his last lecture of the semester. "The distribution issues matter. Equity issues matter. And it's not only to get them to think about those issues but to potentially act on those issues."

The material, which Gulati slyly referred to as "change-the-world stuff," is mostly drawn from his travels and his encounters with global poverty. On Monday, it seemed to touch a latent nerve in Srishti Sinha, a first-year student who felt compelled to find Gulati after the class even though she had a paper due that afternoon.

Sinha worked in Bangalore, India - her hometown - last summer for Storybook Me, a group that promotes reading among children by making them personalized books. Her year at Columbia had given rise to an internal debate, she said, between "helping myself and helping others." The lecture revived it.

"I've always wanted to do more," Sinha said, smiling as she wiped tears from her face, "and Gulati's lecture sort of brought me back that and made me realize that maybe what I was thinking before is the right way to go."

Gulati, 55, teaches another lecture course called global economics and a small seminar focusing on sports business that drew guest speakers this semester like NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. But it is the final lecture of principles of economics, which has about 200 students, that seems to stick with students.

Adam Stansell, who has been a teacher's  assistant for Gulati and will graduate this year with a bachelor's degree in economics, said students gave Gulati a standing ovation when Stansell first attended the lecture.

Aditi Sriram, an adjunct professor of English at the State University of New York College at Purchase, returned to Columbia with an old classmate in 2013, six years after they had graduated, just to hear the semester-closing lecture again.

"You leave on this high," Sriram said, "because he says, 'Stop taking notes; put your notebooks and pens away,' and suddenly he's extemporizing about his family."

Gulati spent the first half of class on Monday in a Socratic exercise, asking students if they would rather create a world in which half the people lived in the slums of Kolkata, India, and the other half in Scarsdale, New York, or one in which everyone were a farmer in Argentina. Gulati had about a dozen students chime in as he paced the room, guiding the discussion.

"I believe that the people in Scarsdale could give to the people of Calcutta to improve their infrastructure and their quality of life," one student said, using the Indian city's former name.

Gulati said, bluntly, "Somebody has to have a response to that," a remark that made the students laugh.

Then, as he does every semester, Gulati turned the discussion to his personal experiences. He spoke about going to Kolkata in 1983 as a graduate student - "I wanted to be shocked" - and visiting a hospital there where half the patients died within 48 hours of being admitted. Days later, as he was watching the sun rise from an opulent hotel in Bombay, the discrepancy between the two environments ate at him.

He recalled his trip to Mexico City for the World Cup in 1986, one year after a major earthquake, to serve as a spotter for the broadcaster Charlie Jones, who needed real-time tutoring in soccer during games. Before the first game, Gulati gave a match ticket to a 10-year-old boy, who froze, confused, because he did not know what was expected of him in return.

Years later, while working for the World Bank in Gambia, Gulati visited a medical clinic where the supplies, he said, were akin to those in a basic first-aid kit. He thought of this years later during the birth of his daughter as six doctors and nurses attended to his wife. Gulati, who also has a son, suggested that mothers in Gambia loved their babies no less but were far less likely to have them survive.

"I used to think that I gave this talk because it would let me sleep better at night," Gulati told his students. "Then I thought it really was making sure all of you didn't sleep well at night. Maybe it's some bit of both."

Gulati consciously steers clear of inserting sports into his class. But to make his final point, he invoked the idea of an athlete who could tolerate pain in a big game.

"It seems to me the mark of a great person is not a tolerance of pain," Gulati said, "but an intolerance of pain in others."

© 2015 New York Times News Service