🔒The ripple effect of David Geffen’s $150M gift to Yale’s drama school

Chantal Rodriguez, associate dean at the Yale School of Drama, describes the stunned and relieved look on the faces of students last month when it was announced that the largest gift in American theater history — $150 million from billionaire entertainment mogul David Geffen — would make tuition free in perpetuity at Yale’s drama school.

Make that the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University, the name change prompted by the gift to the hallowed institution, which celebrates its 100-year founding in four years.

“This changes the landscape with respect to what it means to be a student at the school financially going forward,” says James Bundy, dean of the school. “We hope more people will now think the school is financially accessible to them, and that will change the composition of the applicant pool and therefore the school.”

Since the initial news broke, additional details of the deal have emerged.

Some clarity: The Geffen gift doesn’t totally fund every student’s tuition but rather finishes off the various scholarships and types of financial aid that have already supported many of the 200 students who now attend the three-year graduate program.

Some students already attend tuition-free and since Bundy became dean of the school nearly 20 years ago, average student debt has been halved from $40,000 to $20,000 in 2019, says Rodriguez. Tuition is now $32,800 a year.

“It’s really important and meaningful,” says Bundy, “that places like the Shubert Foundation and the Jerome L. Greene Foundation have given really consequential scholarship support over many years [to Yale drama school students], in the case of the over 70 endowed scholarships, and all of that will continue.”

Private deal

Financial details of the gift between the Geffen Foundation and Yale are confidential. It is not publicly known, for instance, how much of the money will be going into an endowment that will generate annual funds, or how negotiations for the naming rights played out.

Yale President Peter Salovey told The New York Times the gift came about after years of conversations between the university and the Geffen Foundation. Salovey said the university had been aware of Geffen’s interest in supporting higher education and the arts, and had looked for projects that might appeal to those interests.

Salovey said he hopes future needs of the school — such as a new theater (its University Theater is nearly a century old and its classrooms, rehearsal spaces and design sites in various conditions are scattered across the campus), will be addressed — but it would have to be financed through separate fundraising.

Bundy indicated there were opportunities as a result of the gift to finance some of the students’ need-based living expenses, too.

The tuition-free status will also give Yale new leverage to attract students who might have been drawn to financial support offered at NYU, Juilliard, Columbia, Brooklyn College, Brown and Carnegie Mellon.

Geffen philanthropy

Geffen is the founder of Geffen Records, Asylum Records and Geffen Pictures, and co-founder of DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and Jeffery Katzenberg.

Forbes magazine estimates the 78-year-old’s net worth at around $10 billion. Geffen made news last year with his purchase of a 454-foot, $570 million superyacht, where he spent the global pandemic.

Over the years Geffen has emerged as a significant philanthropist, giving more than $700 million since 2002, some to institutions with his name attached, others not.

They include: David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, and $100 million toward the $500 million-plus renovation fund for Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, which has been renamed Geffen Hall.

Other examples of Geffen’s high-spending philanthropy include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art ($150 million), Museum of Modern Art ($100 million), AIDS Project Los Angeles, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and arts education programs of Spelman and Morehouse Colleges.

Naming rights

The Yale School of Drama joins a handful of institutions now offering free graduate programs. One is just a few blocks away.

Under Yale’s previous president, Richard Levin, the Yale School of Music in 2005 received an anonymous $100 million gift ($134 million in today’s dollars) to eliminate tuition there.

It was later learned to be from billionaire couple Stephen and Denise Adams. No naming rights were sought.

Though the free tuition news, for the most part, was welcomed by alumni, some questioned the name change to the school and have commented they would have preferred Geffen’s name be attached to a building and not the school itself.

Yale drama grad and theater critic Charles McNulty wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “This trading on an institution’s cultural prestige, while common practice on campuses across the nation, marks something of a departure for Yale, which has bestowed the names of donors on buildings and institutes but has hitherto avoided rechristening its most illustrious professional schools after benefactors.”

Bundy said he understands the name change took some people by surprise, “but this is nothing but good.”

He said he expects acceptance will come with time.

“This will directly benefit early career artists and that’s pretty rare and special,” Bundy said. “[Tuition-free] does not only increase access, it also underwrites the well-being of students while they’re actually in school. People do better when they are less stressed out about money, so this is an investment in the quality of everybody’s experience and in their ability after they graduate to make the most interesting artistic career choices. I think there would be very few universities in America that would not want to have a tuition-free theatre program.”

As for the efforts to get that new theater/school complex, Bundy says the private fundraising campaign has reached 80 percent of its $65 million goal, but the project is expected to wind up in the nine figures.

In a statement to New Haven Biz, President Salovey said: “Over the past several weeks, many alumni and friends of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale have reached out to me to share their excitement for Mr. Geffen’s generosity and support for our students. I also have been encouraged by the enthusiasm we have heard from many of our donors, so I am looking forward to building on this momentum to raise funds for a new facility for the school."

As for Bundy, his fourth five-year term as dean — the longest tenure by far in the school’s history — ends next year. Has he been asked to continue for a fifth, and would he accept?

“I love this job and I would stay in a heartbeat. There are things I would like to do, such as finish the fundraising. But it’s not entirely my decision,” he said.

In the meantime Bundy can be buoyed at least by the response from future applicants.

Rodriguez says she and Yale’s registrar have received many emails from students almost immediately asking if they can apply to the drama school right now.

“Our website hit an all-time high on the day of the announcement,” Rodriguez said.