(Bloomberg) -- Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University and a key figure in transforming a part of Upper Manhattan, is stepping down after more than two decades, the longest tenure in the Ivy League. 

Bollinger, 75, will leave in June 2023 and remain at the school to teach full-time, he said Thursday in a statement. He joined Columbia in 2002 from the University of Michigan.

Bollinger raised $13 billion and expanded the school’s footprint with a new 17-acre development in Manhattan, north of Columbia’s main Morningside Heights campus. It’s now home to the Columbia Business School. The move changed the neighborhood, which had become a collection of warehouses, garages and parking lots after being a bustling industrial area in the late 19th century.

“There is no more fitting metaphor for Lee’s leadership than the successful construction of Columbia’s Manhattanville campus,” Lisa Carnoy and Jonathan Lavine, the co-chairs of Columbia’s trustees, said in a statement. “Lee’s appetite for action and his ability to turn ‘why’ into ‘why not’ drove the vision for Manhattanville,” they said.

An alum of Columbia Law School, Bollinger interviewed for the job on Sept. 11, 2001 and “the horrible events of that day could have easily scared him away,” they wrote. “For Lee, it made him want to return to Columbia even more. He saw a strength in New York and was eager to play a role in the rebirth of Columbia University.”

Columbia’s endowment was valued at $14.3 billion as of June. Bollinger has been among the highest paid university presidents in the U.S. His earned $2.8 million in total compensation for the year ended June 2020, according the school’s tax filing. In that year, as the pandemic roiled Columbia’s finances -- and that of many universities -- Bollinger took a pay freeze and the school suspended new hiring. 

Columbia plans to establish a search committee for his replacement in the next few months.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.