The Effect Of The Geffen Gift To Yale School of Drama

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 ….CONTINUED