Joseph I. Lubin

The late Joseph I. Lubin, born in 1899 in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and cofounder of the Manhattan accounting firm Eisner & Lubin, was the eighth and youngest child of hard-working immigrant parents. From the age of five, he was taking odd jobs to help the family make ends meet. As an eighth grader, he worked from 6 p.m. to midnight as a page boy at the Hotel Astor on Times Square, traveling an hour each way from Brooklyn to earn $3 a week plus tips.

His family’s financial situation forced him to begin working full-time before he’d finished his first year of high school. Nevertheless, Lubin was driven to earn his diploma, which he did in three years studying in a night program.

After graduation he spent a year in the tire-picking business before enrolling in a CPA training program at Pace Institute. He spent the next three years combining night school with full-time accounting work, first with Ernst & Young and then with Klein, Hinds & Finke, where he met his future business partner, Joseph Eisner. The two went into practice together in 1924.

By the early 1930s they’d enlarged the practice and built a sterling reputation. In the 1940s, Lubin and his partner began making significant and farsighted investments in New York City real estate.

Lubin’s affiliation with Syracuse University began when his daughter Ann decided to attend the university. In 1952 Lubin received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from SU, and he was elected a lifetime trustee of the university the following year. The university’s real estate holdings more than doubled while he was an active trustee; in 1964, he acquired and donated to the university the stately Manhattan mansion now known as Lubin House.

In fall 2003, Joe Lubin’s daughter Ann Goldstein '48 BA (Visual and Performing Arts) and her husband, Alfred Goldstein '85 DHL (Honorary), created an endowment to honor Joseph Lubin’s legacy at Syracuse University. Their gift gave the Whitman School of Management one of the few named accounting programs in the nation – the Joseph I. Lubin School of Accounting – and included funds for endowed professorships and initiatives to directly impact student learning and increase the visibility and competitiveness of the accounting program.