Voiceover:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearinghouses around the world. Now, welcome, Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Here in New York City, I find myself pretty much smack dab in the middle, geographically, of my personal and professional life played out on opposite ends of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor, Boston where I grew up, Washington where I worked during the early part of my career, and here in Manhattan where I've been for the past dozen years or so. But I spent about six years during the aughts on a spur of Amtrak's New Haven Line in Connecticut's capital city of Hartford, right down from the train station in the West End Neighborhood.
It was there that I learned the craft of corporate communications at the Hartford Financial Services Group, which still maintains its campus on about 20 acres in the middle of the Asylum Hill Neighborhood. Part of my duties was the area of community relations, working with the mayor, other businesses and residents to support the area with whatever resources and goodwill we could marshal. It was and is an ongoing effort. Now, down Interstate 91 from Hartford is New Haven. President Dwight Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System doesn't really allow the motorist making his or her way from north to south on Interstates 91 or 95 to see a lot of the city beyond the exits.
But the Elm City is an incredible town, one of the first planned cities in America, founded by English Puritans in 1638 with streets laid out on a four by four grid where inventors David Bushnell, Eli Whitney, Samuel Colt, and Charles Goodyear applied their trade, where you can argue who makes the best to Neapolitan pie. Sally's Apizza, Modern Apizza, or my favorite, Frank Pepe. And of course, where you can find the alma mater of presidents William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, and my old boss, Bill Clinton, and both presidents Bush, I'm talking, of course, about Yale University.
The New York Stock Exchange also serves as the centerpiece of its neighborhood on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Lower Manhattan. Like Yale, the exchange's 230 years in this locale has shaped this neighborhood from requiring the streets to be closed to vehicular traffic due to security reasons, to determining the success of small businesses operating in the shadow of our facade. It also means that decisions made by the city or us potentially can impact the other to the tune of millions of dollars and thousands of jobs. This is the sort of relationship seen across the country in communities with anchor tenants of large corporations like here in New York or in Hartford.
But one type of institution has a greater impact on work domiciles than even the largest companies. Universities attract billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of students, thousands of jobs and shape the infrastructure of towns and cities that house them. Our guest today, Yale University President Peter Salovey, is charged with stewarding the 321 year old Institute of Knowledge through the modern world. One of his biggest challenges is navigating the relationship with the City of New Haven, which has served as his home for over 40 years and Yale's home since 1716. The city and school have a symbiotic relationship and depend on the health and viability of each other to continue to grow.
Our conversation with Peter Salovey on his career, the role of university to its community, and Yale's $140 million pledge to New Haven. It's coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Peter Salovey, is the 23rd president of Yale University and the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology. Prior to being appointed president in 2013, Peter served as Yale's Provost, Dean of Yale College, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Peter has authored or edited more than a dozen books. Peter Salovey, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Peter Salovey:
Well, thank you so much. It's great to be with you.
Josh King:
Pizza preference. Are you allowed to voice the support for a favorite?
Peter Salovey:
We eat a lot of Pepe's. We eat a lot of Sally's. We eat a lot of Modern. All the ones that you mentioned and many more. For friends and family who live in West Haven, they like Zuppardi's. These are all Neapolitan, pizza from Naples, thin crust, the New Haven style thin crust, very fresh tomato sauce, usually a secret recipe, brick oven, high temperature, a little charred on the bottom. That makes a New Haven pizza. They're all really good. It's sort of hard to pick a favorite.
Josh King:
You and I just watched The Closing Bell of the New York Stock Exchange. Tough day given what the Fed did. But what brought you the 90 or so miles down to our neighborhood and how often do you get out in the road meeting with potential students, donors, alumni?
Peter Salovey:
I'm probably in New York a night a week actually these days on average and meeting with our alumni. We are in a campaign, so of course, we're talking about ways in which they can support the university. But also today I was at a meeting of liberal arts college and university presidents organization called COFHE last night at a very nice dinner for the Center for Jewish History. It's all kinds of interesting reasons to get down here. Sort of a second home.
Josh King:
The thing about this time of year, Peter, from my own experience at home these days is that it's nail biting time. It's early decision applications arrive to the admissions committee. What's in the minds of high school seniors looking to end the class at 2027?
Peter Salovey:
I haven't seen this year's applicant pool characterized yet because, of course, the applications are coming in. Probably a greater interest than ever before in science, engineering, technology. Yale has preeminent strengths in humanities and arts and, of course, that will always be a strong interest of our applicants. What we're seeing is a desire to combine that with computer science, with environmental engineering, biomedical engineering, and of course, a lot of interest in the social sciences and the way the social sciences intersect with public policy.
I've been at Yale 41 years. I came as a graduate student, and this is the first time in my memory where the number of humanities, social science, natural science, and engineering majors are about in equal balance, a third, a third, a third. Never seen that before.
Josh King:
When you're not on the road, I mean, I know I'm talking to a pro in the genre of podcasting, one of the ways you get your message out is to host Yale Talk: Conversations with Peter Salovey. Pete and I listened to your most recent episode with Dean Katie Lofton about the renovations of the humanities building. Peter, maintaining and growing the physical plant of the university often becomes a president's job, one. As you look around the facilities here, how did the New York Stock Exchange building compare to 320 York and what's your impression of the trading floor having just watched The Closing Bell?
Peter Salovey:
Well, it was a lot of fun to watch The Closing Bell. Quite frankly, I'd only seen the trading floor on television before. That was my first live experience. Of course, it's very exciting. When the bell rings even on a down day like today, there's still a rush and an excitement and you're seeing markets being made and closing down for the day. We also are in a historic campus. We have buildings dating back to colonial times, and we feel an important role is to steward those buildings well, to keep them maintained, and to use them in ways that inspire our students and our faculty. You were mentioning the 320 York Street.
It used to be our Hall of Graduate Studies. It's now the Humanities Quadrangle. It has a tower in the middle named for David Swensen, our legendary manager of investments, the Yale Endowment. The strategy that we're mostly using is one of bringing faculty and graduate students and other students together who work in similar areas, not necessarily in the same departments. The project that you mentioned brings 15 departments and programs of the humanities plus the Whitney Humanities Center all together in the same building. Collocating allows the historians and the literature professors to teach together, do scholarship together and the like.
Josh King:
Katie was almost giddy about the old architecture of the building being updated. Not a lot of just straight lines in that place. A lot of weird architectural elements that you've been able to preserve.
Peter Salovey:
Absolutely. Weird corners. It's a quadrangle, but it's not a square. It has beautiful ceilings with the history of modern civilization painted on them. It has beautiful woodwork, really beautiful stonework on the ground, wrought iron. The one thing it has that I never liked was the glazed yellow brick, which always looked to me like a subway station in New York.
Josh King:
Nothing wrong with the subway station in New York.
Peter Salovey:
No, nothing wrong at all, or maybe a state hospital even. But they did beautiful things with it and it's a gorgeous, gorgeous renovation. That giddiness of Katie's is not just her natural affect, which in some ways it is, but also this is her project and it's been a huge home run.
Josh King:
Besides something like that, what reward do you get out of hosting the podcast? Listening to it, I mean, you're good at it. You let your guests talk like Katie with all her enthusiasm, but it's also got to be a great way of keeping in touch with both current students, alumni, faculty, and your supporters more broadly.
Peter Salovey:
I love doing the podcast. We do about one a month. Usually it's on something thematic. We'll have veterans during Veterans Day, during November. We'll have our basketball captains during the basketball season. We'll have professors talking about Ukraine more recently. We try to make it topical and current, but we've tried to communicate in lots of other ways. I had a weekly email blast called Notes from Woodbridge Hall. After a while, people stop reading it. I do a quarterly call to our alumni. That has been very popular too. But I don't think anything has been as popular as the podcast.
Josh King:
I mean, it also helps dispel some misconceptions people might have about Yale and the Ivy League schools in general. I mean, you mentioned the Veterans Day podcast that you do. I listened to the one that you did in 2021. You had a Navy Seal, a Marine, and an Army Ranger, all from different backgrounds and different parts of their life as they were talking to you. And then I read in the Yale Daily News the award that you got as a partner in your ROTC programs. I mean, you wouldn't expect to have 60 Air Force ROTC recruits and 40 Naval ROTC midshipmen on the campus of New Haven unless you really knew what was going on in your campus.
Peter Salovey:
We were ranked this year, and I'm always a little skeptical of these rankings, but we were ranked this year as the number one college or university for veterans. We have a very active ROTC unit in Air Force and Navy. We have more and more veterans who have transferred in or come in directly after their service and very active alumni groups, veteran alumni groups. We need to dispel, I think, the myth that universities are only for what? Ivy League Universities are only serving people on the coasts and people from an elite background. When I became president, I said we needed to be a more accessible Yale.
We have doubled the number of our students in the college who are the first in their families to go to college. We are free, free for anyone from a family whose income is in about the lower two-thirds of the income distribution, basically below $75,000 a year, substantially subsidized for quite a bit of the income distribution. Maybe 98% of the income distribution is getting some kind of financial aid. 85% of our undergraduates are graduating debt free. Debt free. It is an accessible place. Now, it isn't easy to get into and that's a challenge.
But if you are admitted, it doesn't matter what background you came from, what neighborhood, anywhere in the world you came from, you can come to Yale. You can afford to come to Yale.
Josh King:
Let's reflect a little bit on this experience that you just had on our trading floor, seeing some of the characters that you saw. I mean, it's the most obviously human aspect of all of the exchange markets in the world still. The only open outcry market that still exists. Market participants, despite using some of the technology that Peter Tuchman showed you on his screen, still act unpredictably.
Your academic work developed the framework for what we call emotional intelligence and how to understand its impact and behavior. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you for your thoughts, professor, on what role emotional intelligence could play in the explanation for why markets don't behave rationally. We just saw that this afternoon.
Peter Salovey:
It's an interesting question. Of course, Robert Shiller, a professor in our economics department, Sterling Professor, and Nobel Prize winner, he has talked about that issue probably better than anyone. The animal spirits, right? Yes. Markets tend to be efficient and probably more efficient than they used to be. Nonetheless, you are essentially trading based on your optimism or your pessimism about the future.
That can be manipulated and it fluctuates. Your own mood and emotion might make it fluctuate. I had very interesting experience years ago working as an educator within an investment bank. I probably shouldn't say the name of it, but it's one that's no longer with us and its bankruptcy kicked off a huge recession.
Josh King:
I think I saw a great play about that on Broadway.
Peter Salovey:
Yes, you might have. You just might have. Anyway, I used to go in, and these were really hardheaded, rational, analytic people. I used to start my presentation by saying, "How many of you have above average intelligence?" And all the hands would go up. I'd then say, "How many of you have really strong analytic skills?" And every hand would go up. I'd say, "How many of you can do the math that you need to do to be a good, whatever it was, investor trade or what have you?" All the hands would go up. I said, "Well, I don't understand anything. How many of you are going to become managing directors of this company? Shout out a number."
They would say 10%. They'd have some number. I really just don't understand. You just told me you're all smarter than average. You're all more analytic than average. You all know how to do the math. How come some of you are going to make it and some of you aren't? And then I just stopped talking, and people would say, "Well, you got to be able to manage your emotions. You got to be able to be charismatic enough to maintain a client base. You've got to be good under pressure." They start to generate all kinds of things that have to do with regulating your emotions, regulating the emotions of other people, identifying emotions in yourself and others and the like.
These are the skills that are involved in emotional intelligence, and they matter in the world, and they matter even in the most technical and what we might think of as cold environments or environments where you're told to put your emotions on hold. I actually don't believe that. I believe that emotions are a source of information for us. I'm not saying everything should be based on your gut. I think that would be terrible advice to give to someone. But if you combine what your emotions might be telling you with other sources of information, it might give you an edge. We do see that in our research.
Josh King:
I listened to that whole thesis, President Salovey, that you just gave me, and I think about this earlier podcast guest that we had on this show, one of your emeritus professors, Roger Ibbotson, who took his research into investment returns and created a number of products and started Zebra Capital. Did you and Professor Mayer ever think about applying your insights into human behavior and create an investible market strategy and start a business?
Peter Salovey:
No, I don't think we ever did that. I don't think either of us, Jack Mayer or myself, have the background or the knowledge to do that. We were professors running labs in psychology trying to at first get tenure eventually and get promoted and stay funded. In those days, spinning off a venture I think would've been seen as a bit of a distraction. Of course, now I look at our faculty and the number of them who have spun off a venture, particularly at Yale in pharma and biotech, is huge.
There's 60 companies in the City of New Haven right now who just in the last few years have spun something off and are employing people and creating positive economic development, inclusive growth in the City of New Haven. It's great to see. It's great to see.
Josh King:
Instead of doing that, instead of coming to Wall Street where you probably could have created a great venture here, you spent most of your life on college quads, starting in Cambridge, a few miles from where I grew up in Newton. I'm not sure if I can say the H word to a Yale man. By the time this podcast airs, the Bulldogs and the Crimson will have already contested the 138th playing of the game. But was your father studying there? How did his career as a professor take the family around the country?
Peter Salovey:
Both of my parents grew up in immigrant families and working class. My mother's family was from Crown Heights, Brooklyn. My father's family was from a 180th in the cog course in the Bronx. As a kid, when I visited the grandparents, that's where they lived. I'm a product of the American Dream in a way. My dad was educated in religious schools as a K-8 kid. He went to the Solanto Yeshiva in the Bronx, but somehow convinced his parents to let him go to Bronx Science. He went to Bronx Science for free, a great, wonderful school. He went to city college for free, and then he ended up doing graduate work at Harvard and becoming a chemist.
I grew up in New Jersey because his first job was at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, one of the great I was going to call it an R&D factory, but that doesn't do it justice of all time. My mother went to nurses training at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. That's what my parents did. We went from New Jersey where I was a child to Buffalo, New York where I was a teenager and went to the public schools and still in touch with my friends from Williamsville High School North. From there, I finished high school in Los Angeles and my parents lived out their lives in Los Angeles.
Josh King:
What drew you ultimately to think about chemistry, AT&T, Murray Hill, Buffalo. You end up in Stanford and psychology?
Peter Salovey:
My family had moved to California, to Los Angeles and a lot of family pressure to stay on the West Coast at that point. But I was a math science kid in high school, and that's what I thought I would do in college and decided to go to Stanford. I also had a kind of interest in psychology and heard that the psychology department was very good and became a psychology major. The teaching was fantastic, worked in a lab and never looked back. I asked my professors at Stanford, "Where should I go to graduate school?" They said, "Well, look around. Look how many of us went to Yale. You should go to Yale."
I came back. I worked for a year for a small communications consulting firm actually in the Bay Area that doesn't exist anymore. It was called Southgate Associates, and ultimately was absorbed by a fairly small fledgling computer company called Apple. It became part of their communications department was our little consulting company.
Josh King:
This guy, Jobs and Wozniak, they're never going to...
Peter Salovey:
Yeah, who knew? This was after I had left and was now a graduate student at Yale. I came as a graduate student. My wife was a graduate student in the public health school. We met, and I never left in part because every year I was at Yale, Yale got better. Every year I lived in the City of New Haven, the City of New Haven became an even better place to live.
Josh King:
Given the way the Salovey's are at that moment in their lives, your lives, I mean, you're in graduate school, Marta is pursuing her public health graduate experiences. I mean, how did your engagement with local social services help shape your view about the New Haven community and what might be possible in that city?
Peter Salovey:
Yeah, no. My wife in particular worked in community based public health. She's Latina. Her family's from Puerto Rico. Very interested in the huge disparities in many cities, including New Haven, in health outcomes and infant mortality between Black and Brown population and the white population in town. She got me very interested in what could we do? Me personally, how could I use psychology and the psychology of communication and what we called health cognition and health behavior, what could we do to design communication programs that would help people do things that would protect their health?
That was my first interest. Over time, of course, this is my home. Despite growing up in New Jersey and in Buffalo and in California, I think of my hometown as New Haven, Connecticut and wanting to make it a better place and wanting Yale to play a role in the development of New Haven as a better place. New Haven and Yale are joined at the hip. When New Haven thrives, we can recruit faculty and students to Yale. When Yale thrives, we're creating jobs. We're creating economic growth. We're eating in restaurants. We're supporting the major cultural institutions in town. It is a symbiotic relationship between the two.
Josh King:
You joined the faculty, I guess, in 1986 as an associate professor. Way fast forward to the news in November 2012 about your appointment as Yale's president, which highlighted your credentials, I'm going to quote it here, "Plays upright bass in the Professors of Bluegrass, a band that includes both faculty, colleagues, and students." I want to hear quick cut from the band.
Peter Salovey:
Five more minutes here. We've been given the warning, so we're going to do another Bill Monroe number called Little Georgia Rose. [Singing 00:24:52]
Josh King:
Peter, are the Professors of Bluegrass all tenured?
Peter Salovey:
Some are tenured, some are not, some are students. Does that sound like music of a Jewish kid from New Jersey?
Josh King:
That sounds great.
Peter Salovey:
We have a lot of fun. It's been my hobby. I always liked acoustic music. My parents were part of the folk revival in the '50s and '60s. We grew up listening to that, to Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and Odetta and that kind of thing. That got me into American Acoustic music. And then from there, I learned how to play the banjo. I wasn't very good. A banjo player who we played with showed me how to play bass. We've been playing, well, since about late '80s, early '90s.
Josh King:
How many gigs a year do you do now?
Peter Salovey:
Now about one, but there was a time we had a regular monthly gig at local club in New Haven. It's been a great hobby for me. I chaired the board of the International Bluegrass Museum and Hall of Fame in Owensboro, Kentucky and have a lot of friends down.
Josh King:
Home of the fancy farm barbecue.
Peter Salovey:
Let me tell you, barbecue in Owensboro is a serious business. Mutton barbecue in particular.
Josh King:
I love my mutton down in Owensboro.
Peter Salovey:
That's it. For a boy who didn't grow up eating mutton, that was as eye-opening as the music scene. But it's been a vehicle really for faculty and students to do something together. We cut a CD about eight, nine years ago.
Josh King:
How are your Spotify revenues?
Peter Salovey:
You know what? I think in the lower two digits with a decimal point before the two digits. I think we sell about five of them a year maybe and I probably give away about 15 of them a year. Actually it's a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun.
Josh King:
Music ability aside, as much as it was promoted during the announcement of your session to the presidency, you came into the role celebrated both for your connection with students as a popular professor, also your operational experiences at provost. What did you see as your mandate as you took on the role from Dr. Richard Levin?
Peter Salovey:
Yale had very much become a more international university, was very much a better partner with its host city, and had made up for lost time in maintaining those beautiful buildings that you talked about earlier under Rick Levin. He was a fantastic president of the university for 20 years. I wanted to build on what he accomplished, but take it in some extended directions. That first day when I was president, I said, "Yale needed to be more innovative. Yale needed to be more accessible. Yale needed to be more unified."
What I meant was in terms of innovation, the ability for those professors who wanted to do it commercialize their research in ways or the implications of their research in ways that would have an impact on society, whether it was through new medications and treatments or new technology, whatever they were doing. If that's what they were interested in doing, let's have an impact. Let's make a difference, an immediate difference in the world. There'll always be a place at Yale for knowledge for knowledge's sake, for traditional areas of scholarship that aren't necessarily commercializable, but let's commercialize what we can.
Second more accessible, pledged to double the number of first generation college bound students at Yale to dramatically increase financial aid for them, to double the number of students eligible for a Pell grant. And we did that as well. And then more unified, Yale is a little bit more conceptual, but the idea is let's not let our boundaries get in the way, whether they're boundaries of discipline or undergraduate graduate or other kinds of borders and boundaries. Let's bring the pieces of Yale together. We're not that large a university, but we're a very broad university, dozen professional schools, 53 I think PhD granting departments.
There's probably 85 majors that an undergraduate can study in. Let's bring those together. It doesn't matter what department you're in. If you do anything in the neurosciences, if you study human cognition, you're going to be in our Wu Tsai Institute. That's all in a building. If you're in the humanities, two out of every three humanities scholars is in that quadrangle we talked about. If you do quantum work, we're building a building now on our science hill. It's in the planning stages. For anybody who does work on quantum, whether you're a theoretical physicist, an applied physicist, a mathematician, an engineer, a computer scientist, a data scientist, we want you together.
That's a more unified Yale. Those three terms, and there was a fourth, I said we need to be even more excellent. That's not a strategy. That's a first day on the job kind of right bite and I admit that, but much of what we do really trace itself to those four ideas.
Josh King:
If you think about those three or those four ideas that were animating your thinking as you took office and meld that with the feeling that you and Marta were having in your many years from associate professorship up to the presidency and your sense of place in being in the City of New Haven, you now then seem to have transitioned that thought onto your colleagues, encouraging them to live in the town as well through the Yale Homebuyer Program. How does that help Yale employees buy homes, while also providing this great benefit to the city?
Peter Salovey:
Our desire to have a closer relationship with the city and to have the city grow along with the university, that feeling of partnership really dates back this point I would say 25 years. Some of the initial programs were organized around home ownership in the city. Any staff or faculty member living who wants to buy a home in much of New Haven can get a subsidy from the university to do so. And that has created a lot of home ownership, but not just in faculty, among our custodians and our physical plant workers, facilities folks, dining hall, white collar workers, et cetera, all living within city limits.
We wanted to do more with schools. We have a program called the New Haven Promise. We're giving $5 million of scholarships to New Haven Public School graduates with a B or better average and good attendance that they can take anywhere in the state. They get that for four years with 250 or so new students that you're getting. That's schools. The third area at the time that this all started was the retail environment around campus. How could we get people to come in from the suburbs and spend some money in New Haven, eat in our restaurants, shop in our stores, while maintaining an environment that also students wanted to shop at and our staff and faculty wanted to be a part of.
That's where it began 25 years ago. But of course, that's not enough. We're the number one employer in town. The big employers, the phone company, gone. Most of the utility company is gone. A lot of the heavy industry that you talked about, Winchester Rifle, U.S. Repeating Arms, Goodyear Rubber, Olin Chemical, they're not in New Haven anymore. They were all here when I first came to New Haven. They're all in New Haven when I first moved there. They're not there anymore. We have a responsibility as the large employer in town to make sure that we're contributing to what our mayor, Justin Elicker, calls inclusive growth.
That is creating jobs, providing good jobs ourselves, but doing things which everyone in the city can benefit. That has many dimensions itself. Cultural institutions, the art gallery is free. The Center for British Art free. The Peabody Museum of Natural History when it reopens after its renovation will be free. Number one most visited place by a school child in Connecticut, the Peabody Museum of Natural History. All free. Meanwhile, yes, our faculty spinoffs will create jobs for technically trained people, but also all those support jobs, all those restaurant jobs when people go to lunch, all those retail jobs, that's what we need to do.
As part of all of that, we have a commitment to hire New Haven residents. We have a special commitment to hire a targeted number of residents in neighborhoods of need, underserved neighborhoods. We have job training programs to get New Haven residents into our workforce. Really trying to build on the partnership that really was begun by my predecessor and by the mayor's predecessors and do even more.
Josh King:
You mentioned Mayor Justin Elicker. We're going to talk more about him after the break. Peter Salovey, President of Yale University, and I are going to talk about the $140 million commitment that the school has made to the City of New Haven. That's all coming up right after this.
Voiceover:
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, I was talking to Peter Salovey, President of Yale University, about his career and his life in New Haven and many of the accomplishments the university has done with the city over the last decade, 25 years. You mentioned before the break Mayor Justin Elicker. I want to listen to him, to Mayor Elicker, at a press conference last year.
Justin Elicker:
Today's a historic moment. It's a historic moment. This is a really big deal. Today, Yale President Peter Salovey, Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers and I are announcing a historic commitment between Yale University and the City of New Haven that will see the university contribute an additional $52 million in voluntary payments to the City of New Haven over the next six years and partner with the city in an effort to build a more equitable New Haven for all. This is the most significant commitment that Yale University has ever made to the city, and I'm grateful for Peter Salovey, your partnership and your team's partnership in making this happen.
Josh King:
The amount mentioned, Peter, more than $140 million committed at that press conference. Impressive number from Mayor Elicker. He explained how it's going to be given and the details of how it's going to be used.
Peter Salovey:
Yale, even before we made this commitment, was the university in the country that provided more to its city in voluntary payments than any other. We're number one. What was really important here was the city. The city needs our financial support, but it needs more than our financial support as we've been discussing, and it needs more than just Yale's financial support. We were part of a very important partnership with the State of Connecticut. The state legislature voted to change the way in which towns and cities were reimbursed for non-taxable property, basically non-profits, colleges, universities, hospitals, churches, synagogues, et cetera.
Of course, the cities have more of that than the towns and suburbs, so the cities lose more of their property tax revenue because of it. Because the state changed the formula, because the federal government was providing stimulus money, we could be part of that and help the city be a financially robust entity. What we did is about doubled the voluntary payment that we make to that city. The $140 million figure that you used is our payments over a six year period. But we did a couple of other things. We pledged to build a center for inclusive growth that would be jointly run by the city and by the university that would explore how to make sure that economic growth in the city benefited everyone.
Our school of management faculty and particularly our dean are going to play an important role in that center. We helped alleviate an anxiety in the city, and that anxiety is about, well, what happens when Yale needs to expand? You buy a building and it was a building that paid property tax, and now it's a Yale building so it doesn't pay property tax. What we agreed is we would make the city hall for a period of time after such a sale. I think that took the anxiety around Yale growing away. It's not part of the equation. Yale's growth is in everybody's interest.
By the way, what's interesting about that partnership, the people at that press conference, Justin Elicker, a graduate of our school of management and our school of the environment, Tyisha Walker-Myers, President of the Board of Alders, that's what we call our city council, a Yale employee and leader in one of our employees unions. Everybody was able to get behind this. We all live in the town. We all work in the town. We are all part of Yale in some way or another and part of the City of New Haven.
Josh King:
Speaking of impacting city funding, COVID put a massive hole in city budgets across the country. But by the street traffic outside the exchange today, you see a bounce back. You saw a bounce back on the floor when we were just watching The Closing Bell. I saw a tweet from you a few weeks ago, you and your wife getting your COVID booster shots. Is COVID still having an impact on the activities of Yale and how did the pandemic hasen the school's move into online and remote learning?
Peter Salovey:
Yeah, sure. Let me start with that last one. We switched over to online learning very quickly in spring of 2020, in March 2020. Our faculty were trained on essentially offering their courses online, and we gave students a lot of choice. At that moment, they had to stay home, but they could stop out for a while if they wanted to, take a semester or a year off. They could the next year come back to campus and be online, stay home and be online. They had many, many options. The idea was do what's right for you. We also did not take it out on future classes.
In other words, we knew that was going to create a bubble of enrollment later, but we pledged to take the same size admission class every year subsequently so that it wouldn't become harder to get into Yale. We found out a lot of things about ourselves. Lots of us pitched in and did jobs that weren't our actual jobs. We had dining hall workers running our testing facility. We had all kinds of people get trained up to do contact tracing. We had people doing health communication around mask wearing. Everyone pitched in and cooperated. It was really a more unified Yale. The result, we never had a major outbreak on our campus.
We never overran the Yale New Haven Hospital. We never were the vector of transmission of COVID between campus and the city, which is something that was very important to us even still.
Josh King:
Did you mobilize and help the city in certain ways that they probably weren't ready to take care of themselves?
Peter Salovey:
We did. The city did a great job too. I would have to say Governor Lamont may have had the best state response of any state in this country. Of course, our professors were major advisors to him in that response. Very good response from the city, very good response from the state, cooperation from the university. It was a real team effort, and it's not over. Obviously with the availability of vaccines, and I've now had five at this point, the consequences of getting this virus are far less serious and we are requiring our students to get inoculated before spring semester. We follow the data. Our approach was this. We have experts who know how to model epidemics, who did a great job in past epidemics.
We had a flu epidemic planning exercise already on the shelf and we started with that. We built a field hospital in our gym before anyone even thought you would need one. You could walk in and get tested at any point at Yale very easily. No waiting. No cost. Of course, the vaccines themselves, no waiting, no cost. We're not completely out of the woods, but we are now teaching in a more normal way. We are offering the full panoply of activities and all our sports teams are out there performing. I hope by this time we'll have beaten Harvard in the Yale-Harvard football game. It's back to normal in that sense, but we've learned a lot about how to keep our campus healthy.
Josh King:
There's still work to be done. We were talking a little bit about your wife's work in the public health space. COVID did highlight for all of us this thin line of support that we have for essential workers, nurses, teachers, social workers for weeks and months. The same group that you saw on the podium today at the New York Stock Exchange, we would have nurses and frontline workers come in to ring the bell to show our at least appreciation for them beyond other things that we could do for them.
Peter Salovey:
I loved seeing that. That was great. We, by the way, are investing right now in our nursing school and in our public health school.
Josh King:
I wanted to ask about Yale's Pathway to Science and New Haven Promise helping students to succeed.
Peter Salovey:
Those are actually bridge programs to help students, particularly those New Haven residents, think about the idea that they could have a career in scientific research, in the medical and health fields. They could come to Yale on a Saturday and roll up their sleeves and participate in some kind of science education activity. They can come to Yale in the summer and learn about health professions. At this very moment, we are expanding our School of Public Health. We are investing in our school of nursing.
We are providing donor matches to the medical, nursing, and public health schools in the amount of $50 million. The world sees how important the health professions are, and it's a big part of Yale University. We're trying to do everything we can to reinforce that part of the university.
Josh King:
Staying in a similar theme, I want to drill a little bit deeper into something we were talking about earlier. The programs are going to support this long pipeline of talented scientists who I'm sure you want to stay and they in many ways want to stay in the local area where they grew up. Can you talk a bit more and drill a little deeper into New Haven's biotech scene? In recent times, we've seen Pfizer, which is NYSE ticker symbol PFE, spin out Biohaven among other large businesses. I mean, the things that are going on are just amazing just right within city limits.
Peter Salovey:
Yeah, that's right. We have organized an operation at the university called Yale Ventures. It's run by Josh Geballe, who started I believe at IBM and then had a few startups of his own that then had very successful exits, from which he had very successful exits. He then went and became essentially Governor Lamont's COVID guy and also was the commissioner of the administrative aspect of the state. He knows how to run things, and he is running Yale Ventures, and that is an umbrella organization that looks at corporate partnerships, industry funding, but also commercialization and tech transfer.
That might include IP and patenting. That might include setting up your own company that might include selling IP or essentially on a royalty basis allowing IP to be used by another company. There are, I don't know exactly what the time period is, two or three years, 60 startups in New Haven based on IP of Yale faculty members and employing people in New Haven, some of them even becoming quite big. Alexion, that's a publicly traded company, that is a Yale professor who started that company. Arvinas, publicly traded company, that is a Yale professor who started it. You mentioned Biohaven.
Many, many others. We have a very strong medical school and very strong research in the life sciences. More than any other sector, they tend to be in biotech and pharma. Fitbit guys were Yale guys. Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, the CEO, just became my chair of the board. He was the founding CEO of Pinterest. He's a Yale guy. Controlled for size, there is more venture capital coming to former undergraduates of Yale than all, but one or two other universities. When people think of Yale, they think of the humanities. They think of the arts.
They think of our great drama school, our great music school, our great art school, our great architecture school, a fabulous English department, a fabulous history department. You know something? All of that is fabulous and it's great. We don't rest on those laurels. We continue to invest in that preeminence. We also are a powerhouse in these other areas and I think people just didn't know it. I don't think we communicated it very well.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about little ventures started by Yale alumni, this little thing that this guy Steve Schwarzman started with Pete Peterson called Blackstone. Another one of our guests on this show, Yale class of '69, wrote about how he created the Davenport Ballet Society Dance Festival on campus, talking about the humanities. Now he's helping the campus even further with his $150 million gift to renovate the historical Commons and Memorial Hall. What's the role of alumni today broadly to help maintain and grow the physical plant?
Peter Salovey:
Sure, sure. Well, first of all, I'm incredibly grateful to Steve Schwarzman for his gifts. They actually total over $160 million at this point all in. We have a beautiful new campus center, campus hub, that's a hub for students, any students, undergraduates, graduate students, professional school students. We're dedicating it as we sit here. It'll be this weekend. I have enormous gratitude to Steve for helping create this. The place is crowded day and night, most popular place to eat on campus and a beautiful historic Commons.
At night underneath that Commons in basement space that was largely wasted, now a beautiful place for students to stud, students to snack, student performances, and it is also one of our major venues for the arts in general on campus. I'm really thankful for that. When you talk about university endowments, what are university endowments? They are a collection of gifts given largely, not entirely by alumni, but largely by alumni. They're invested and they grow, and they allow the university to be generationally neutral. That is to in the future guarantee the same kind of advantages that we're able to provide in the present.
That endowment spins off every year enough money to fund a third of the university's budget. We target a spending rate from that endowment of five and a quarter percent. People don't understand that those are gifts that are such a leverage, right? We're growing gifts. We're growing gifts in order to make sure that this 321 year old university for the next 321 years can provide the education that I received in graduate school at Yale and that so many others have received.
Josh King:
As we begin to wrap up here, Peter, beyond the edge of campus, Yale is also looking to help small businesses that support New Haven as well. How has the Yale University Properties, which manages this vast network of commercial property owned by the school, help transform the downtown?
Peter Salovey:
Yeah, it's an interesting story. We hadn't planned to be in the retail real estate business, but there was a bankruptcy in the '90s. I believe it was the FDIC who sold us essentially a lot of property along Chapel Street, New Haven, if you know New Haven, and York and Broadway. We try to manage that in a way that creates a wonderful retail climate, creates employment, creates revenue for the city. Do you know during COVID, we didn't lose a single tenant? We kept everyone going. Now, sometimes that meant renegotiating rents and providing concessions, but we kept our retailers in business during COVID.
Very, very important. The climate around campus, that retail climate, is managed not as a profit center, not as a revenue source. We're happy to break even on it. On the other hand, what we really like to be able to do is keep a vibrant environment. When I came to New Haven, there was one place to have breakfast. There was one place to have a fancy dinner. There were boarded up shops on Main and Downtown Street. That just isn't the way it looks anymore. Even after COVID, it is a vibrant economic scene in the city. Everywhere I look, I see residential apartment complex growing up.
Of course, we have the challenge of many cities of affordable housing, and that's going to be an important part of the future equation as well. But so many more places to live now in New Haven. The city has positive growth. As you said, you're up and down the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington. I would argue that there is no better food at a randomly selected restaurant in New Haven as compared to anywhere else on the Northeast Corridor. I know you're probably going to get...
Josh King:
You stop at Union Station and you're on your feet. Where do you go?
Peter Salovey:
Well, I can't tell you. I don't want to endorse any particular restaurant, but within a mile radius of that train station is some of the best Italian food you'll ever eat, wonderful farm to table restaurants, a great French influenced restaurant, Caribbean, much more Asian of all kinds, Japanese, Chinese of different tribes, even now Korean. It is really, really good. Bad restaurants don't make it in New Haven because it's such a great food scene. I hope people take your advice. They just take the train up and they get off and they eat.
They go to the Yale University Art Gallery, and they go to the Center for British Art, and they go to the Peabody Natural History Museum, and they see a play at the Yale Rep and maybe a musical event in the evening that our School of Music is behind, that go to the New Haven Museum and Historical Society. There is so much to do in New Haven. It's unbelievable.
Josh King:
All right, you've sketched such an incredible picture of Yale at present. Let's look a little bit more into the future, Peter. I mean, a few years ago, just to give some perspective from what we're doing here in New York, the Downtown Alliance proposed that the streets around this exchange, which has so long been closed to vehicles, could be redeveloped to improve access, enjoyment, and greenery. Those efforts have been stalled by COVID. They've also been stalled by the nature of the city bureaucracy. But tell us what might be happening that Yale's proposed public walkway on High Street, what that might be like if it gets created and done.
Peter Salovey:
Absolutely. As part of our understanding with the city, that included the financial deal and included the Center for Inclusive Growth, we also agreed to a long term lease from the city of actually, ironically enough, a street. It's a street called High Street, but it crosses a street called Wall Street. The street called Wall Street we turned into a pedestrian and bike pathway. It's got beautiful pavers on it and wonderfully landscaped. It is an east-west access through campus. And then this new street, we want to be a pedestrian access north-south through campus. The idea is not to wall the city off from the campus.
The idea is to make it welcoming, to make it an obvious way to stroll through our campus from the east and west, or this one on High Street from the north or the south. That will be completely open to the public 24/7. We want the residents of New Haven to not be put off by neo-Gothic architecture, by what looked like doorways that might have drawbridges and moats around them. We love that architecture. It's wonderful looking and it's inspiring and it's fun, but we want it to be welcoming.
I think these two, the new High Street pedestrian path, which we're planning right now, and the existing one on Wall Street, changed the feel of campus to a visitor, to a city resident, and of course, to our own community of students and faculty and staff.
Josh King:
On this journey that you and I have taken here, we've talked about specific buildings on campus. We've talked about the campus as a whole. We've talked about the city that surrounds it. As we wrap up, let's just expand the aperture not just to New Haven or the State of Connecticut or even the United States, let's look at the whole world. Earlier this year, Yale opened its first professional school in nearly 50 years. How does the Jackson School of Global Affairs help Yale students, and what do you hope will be its impact?
Peter Salovey:
I'm so glad you mentioned it. It is the first new professional school at Yale in 50 years. It is a school devoted to the study of international relations, geopolitics. It'd be a great place to study for anyone who is doing international business, who wants to be a diplomat, public service, or private sector work. All can study at the Jackson School. They run an undergraduate major called Global Affairs. They run master's programs and the like. What's unique about it though is the teaching is done both by scholars who have joint appointments in political science, economics, law, history, and elsewhere in the university, but also by practitioners, policy makers who have been in the trenches, so to speak.
Everyone from military leader like Stanley McChrystal, to a leader in government service like John Kerry, to a diplomat like John Negroponte can and does teach at the Jackson School. We are nonpartisan. Very important to us that people represent all parts of the political spectrum and very much put parts of the political spectrum in conversation with each other so that students learn that good ideas come from all kinds of sources, and that they learn how to engage them rather than be afraid of them.
Josh King:
If only I was 22 again and could sign up for classes with Professor Kerry and Professor Negroponte, I'd be filling out my application now.
Peter Salovey:
The two of us really. Youth is wasted on young, and I'd love to go back to college.
Josh King:
Well, it's been fun going back to college in a manner of speaking over this last hour. Peter Salovey, President of Yale University, thank you so much for joining us Inside the ICE House.
Peter Salovey:
It has been a pleasure talking with you, and I thank you so much for your interest in Yale and your interest in the City of New Haven.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Peter Salovey, the President of Yale University. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. If you got a question or a comment you'd like us to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @icehousepodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash, with production assistance and engineering from Ian Wolff. The director of programming and production for the New York Stock Exchange and ICE is Marina Stanley. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
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