Yale College, New Haven, Connecticut
When we were freshmen, we were required to eat most of our meals in a huge dining hall called Commons with a four- or five-story ceiling so high that the lights on the tables couldn’t reach it. It made us feel gloriously insignificant. It made one of our classmates, Steve Schwarzman, feel “lonely,” as he put it in his memoir. Some fifty years later, he bought the place for $150 million and renamed it the “Schwarzman Center.” It is no longer the Yale Commons. Some of us unreconstructed revanchists continue to call it Commons, like the guys who still call it Idlewild Airport.
Walk across the campus and you arrive at the Geffen School of Drama. If you were looking for the Yale Drama School, you would never find it. David Geffen paid some $200 million to put his name on a sign. It is actually a little bigger than the Schwarzman Center sign, about a third bigger.
Double back a bit, past Mory’s, and there’s the newly refurbished graduate school building, and its imposing tower, the Swensen Tower, named after David Swensen, for all the money he made for Yale managing its substantial endowment, which continues to trail the Harvard endowment. That is a moving target that Yale never seems to get ahead of, in spite of its better performance.
Last Saturday, we attended an event at Commons with a dear classmate. For us it will always be Commons, not the Schwarzman Center. It was a performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring created by the young dance department, with the Yale Symphony Orchestra providing the music. Modern music, modern dance. I prefer raucous Broadway musicals, myself, where I can hum some of the tunes. But you gotta stretch sometimes. Anyway, it was free, and I can’t pass on a bargain.
At first I thought it was the music that was making me uncomfortable, or the dancers doing the Twyla Tharp/Martha Graham thing. Then I looked around and saw an enormous portrait of Mr. Schwarzman HimSelf, hanging on the wall above me, with a spot light directly on his suburban-Philadelphia image, giving him an ethereal celestial glow. We promptly moved to the other side of the auditorium, in medias res, for fear of getting too close to the sun. The painting has that creepy effect of the eyes that follow you around the room.
More interestingly, we noticed the names of the dancers on the program. And there was Leila Blavatnik. That got us thinking. We looked it up and, sure enough, came up with Leonard Blavatnik. Another oligarch. This one was born in 1957, so Laila could be his daughter, or granddaughter possibly. His connections to Yale are numerous, as well as to Harvard, Oxford, god knows what else. He contributes to every part of the political spectrum. And to all sorts of medical and scientific projects. Wow, you gotta love the guy. And yet…and yet we keep wondering why Yale is in bed with him. Never mind, we know why: he’s probably going to make an offer for the whole thing. Why didn’t Steve think of that? No worries, he can still buy Sarah Lawrence College, complete with naming rights and all the girls we used to know.
For God, for country, and for Blavatnik.
Che Boludo (Blavatnik University, ’69)
