To an institution with a $30 billion endowment, $100 million may seem like chump change. But it’s not. In fact, the $100 million donation from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to the Yale School of Management is a potential game-changer. The purpose of the Broads’ gift, announced in early December, is to develop teaching […]
To an institution with a $30 billion endowment, $100 million may seem like chump change.
But it’s not. In fact, the $100 million donation from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to the Yale School of Management is a potential game-changer.
The purpose of the Broads’ gift, announced in early December, is to develop teaching and research programs to strengthen the leadership of the nation’s public-education system.
The gift will enable the establishment of the Broad Center at Yale SOM. A nonprofit that recruits and trains educators for the mission of reshaping urban public school systems — the Broad Center has operated out of Los Angeles, where the Broads live, for the past two decades.
The donation will also fund a tuition-free master’s degree program for budding education leaders and facilitate the creation of both a leadership training program and a research initiative. SOM Dean Kerwin Charles announced the donation in a Dec. 5 letter to the SOM community.
“I am confident that the center’s ambitions will also resonate with most of [the student body], given the school’s distinctive aspiration since its founding to educate leaders for all sectors — public, private, nonprofit — and the animating belief shared by us all that leaders who attack problems with analytical rigor, energy and caring have profound impact on society,” Charles wrote.
Charles’ words may have been chosen with a nod to history. When Yale decided to join the business-school sweepstakes in the early 1970s, the university deliberately set out to create a model outside the Wharton/Harvard mold. Instead of training Brooks Brothers-clad, wingtip-shod princelings for Wall Street, SOM (originally an acronym for the Yale School of Organization & Management) offered not a standard MBA sheepskin, but an MPPA (master’s in public & private management) for a new breed of business leader for the nonprofit and government sectors.
That changed in the 1990s, as the school in many ways regressed to the biz-school mean (surrendering to the MBA standard in 1999). Now, in christening a new academic center with a mission to advance the cause of public schools — which are both in and of the government sector and non-profit — SOM has in a sense steered the ship full-circle back toward its original raison d’etre.
