About thirty years ago, I had a conversation with one of America’s great labor leaders, who told me that people at elite universities always misunderstand the power structure of their institutions.

When you’re at a university, you imagine the place as a pyramid, with the students at the bottom, faculty in the middle, deans and provosts and such in the upper section, and the president at the top. You imagine, in other words, the power structure of the university to reside entirely on and within the campus.

The real power structure of an elite university, he told me, is an upside-down pyramid. The president—the only person within the pyramid representing the campus—is at the bottom of the pyramid, the board of trustees stand above and around the president, and the rest of the power elite of America radiates out from there. Students and faculty and workers aren’t a part of anything.

I’ve been thinking about this conversation this morning as I was looking through the biographies of the Columbia University Board of Trustees. Reading their stories, I thought to myself, how did anyone, including myself, ever think this institution would have acted other than it has? One trustee works at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, the law firm that has also chosen the path of cooperation with the Trump administration. A bunch of trustees work in some combination of the aerospace, defense, biopharmaceuticals, and biotech industries, that is, the kinds of people whose entire existence is caught up in money from the federal government. Another significant portion work on Wall Street and in private equity. And there’s a smattering of PMC types, working in national public radio, the White House (whenever a Democrat is in control of it), and philanthropy.

Interestingly, for Columbia, few of the trustees have any kind of international profile or footprint; most of them sit squarely within the domestic political economy and culture. With one exception, all of them seem as banal as they are benign, precisely the kinds of people who would cooperate with the Trump administration without thinking twice.

That one exception: One Andrew F. Barth, who goes by “Andy,” and who, in addition to retiring at the age of 56, after earning a gazillion dollars managing other people’s money, seems to have an outsized passion for…wrestling.

Paragraph upon paragraph of Andy’s bio is devoted to the topic, from the wrestling he did while an undergraduate at Columbia and a graduate student in the Business School, to the state, regional and international honors he achieved in “Greco-Roman wrestling,” whatever that is, to his world-making contributions to Committee to Preserve Olympic Wrestling (CPOW), which managed, apparently, to keep wrestling in the Olympics, at a perilous moment when it was in danger of being eliminated.

Perhaps one day Andy will use his passion for wrestling to wangle or wrangle a better deal from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, whose life is also rooted in wrestling, albeit of a different sort. But I doubt it. For all their networking and connections, their experience in wheeling and dealing, these are not people who know how to use their private power for the public good.