Woodford, who received one of the early “if you were interested” calls, was a new kind of target for Columbia. The department had traditionally gone after high-profile economists like development guru Jeffrey Sachs or Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. (Both are nominally at Columbia but have little day-to-day involvement with the department.) In 1998, Columbia had stuck with that model, going after Harvard’s Robert Barro, an economics star who writes regularly for BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal and occasionally opines on television. “Especially in a place like New York, there is a big temptation to go for assembling people who will be on Charlie Rose, get written up in The New Yorker,” says David Card, who’s credited with helping rejuvenate Berkeley’s economics department. “But that has nothing to do with younger people doing research”—the true measure of a top program.

In contrast to the likes of Barro, who spurned Columbia, Woodford is part of a dying breed of world-class economists almost anonymous outside the field. He was known to be a nurturing mentor at Princeton. That would make him a draw for future hires, who tend to value collaboration with prominent senior faculty above all else.

But taking a position at Columbia would have meant a significant drop in prestige from the top-ranked Princeton. Fortunately, prestige isn’t everything when it comes to recruiting.

Stephen Zeldes, one of Woodford’s good friends from grad school, heads the in-house economics department of Columbia’s Business School. He had been periodically nagging his friend about a possible move to Columbia for years. But, by early 2003, Zeldes realized he had an opportunity. In the world of academic recruiting—particularly the cutthroat business of hiring star economists—universities are constantly searching for advantages not necessarily related to professional considerations. And one of the biggest sources of leverage tends to be job prospects for a candidate’s spouse. As it happened, Woodford’s wife, Argia Sbordone, is also an economist and was up for tenure at Rutgers. Zeldes reckoned that if she didn’t get it—and the indications weren’t good—Woodford might be open to a move to New York.

In 2003, the tenure decision broke Zeldes’s way just as Davis secured his funding from the administration. On cue, Zeldes began evangelizing to Woodford about the transformative push the department was making, and about how, as the first high-profile economist to make the leap, he could play a huge part in shaping it. Zeldes also began poking around New York for places Woodford’s wife might land. He got a tip that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York might be interested.

Zeldes was right: Woodford was intrigued. At 47, he figured he had one more big move in him. He also felt he had only a few years to make it, since he would have been reluctant to uproot his 10-year-old daughter once she started high school. Columbia brought him to New York for a week that fall to present a paper and meet with prospective colleagues. Later that month, at a conference in Japan, Woodford spent several evenings with Vice-Chairman Dave Weinstein mulling the department’s future over sushi.

In effect, Davis and his team were trying to convince Woodford that an economics department could be jump-started the same way Woodford had argued an economy could: By making an unprecedented number of job offers within a short period of time, Columbia could attract people based on what the department could look like, not how it currently stacked up. Woodford, they insisted, would not end up a computer salesman in a community of dirt farmers.

Woodford is at heart a scientist, and to him, the rare opportunity to test his esoteric theory in the real world proved irresistible. “If you’re in a position to make a big push, I think that you can do something,” he told me as we sat in his well-appointed office on the tenth floor of Columbia’s public-affairs school. Incremental changes, by contrast, “make it very hard to get very far because of this coordination issue.” Over his shoulder was a whiteboard full of incomprehensible equations, as if to underscore the mathematical precision with which he’d worked it all out.

But before Woodford would fully agree to make himself a guinea pig in his own experiment, he wanted to test the department’s commitment to making him happy. Woodford negotiated for a 20 percent raise over his Princeton salary—putting him in excess of $250,000 for the nine-month academic year—and substantial command of the department’s in-house research center and its $250,000 budget. Even so, the deal almost fell apart when Woodford and his wife became displeased with the apartment the university offered them. (Most of Columbia’s faculty receive a university-owned apartment at a highly subsidized rate.) It took weeks of back-channel appeals to the university’s provost to finally land Woodford a spacious penthouse apartment on 110th and Broadway. “It’s one of the premier apartments at Columbia,” says Zeldes. “We were pleased that in the end the provost came through. It was at the last minute, with e-mails flurrying around.”

Woodford finally accepted in April 2004. The following year, Columbia made fourteen offers to some of the top economists in the world. Even the wealthiest, most prestigious departments bat only .250 in these situations. But Columbia had twice that success rate: seven acceptances at the senior level. Moreover, Davis persuaded three sought-after junior faculty to choose Columbia over top-ranked schools.