Yale announced eight members of its search committee for a new president, prompting a somewhat comical complaint that the committee "includes 5 corporate executives."
The search committee is a group of 12 — four Yale faculty members yet to be named, and eight other members who were named.
Those eight are:
Francisco G. Cigarroa '79, chancellor, University of Texas System
Peter B. Dervan '72 Ph.D., the Bren Professor of Chemistry, California Institute of Technology
Donna L. Dubinsky '77, founder and board chair, Numenta, Inc.
Charles W. Goodyear '80, president, Goodyear Capital Corporation
Paul L. Joskow '70, M.Phil, '72 Ph.D., president, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and former Chair of the Economics Department of MIT
Indra K. Nooyi '80 M.P.P.M., chair of the Board and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc.
E. John Rice, Jr. '88, founder & CEO, Management Leadership for Tomorrow
Douglas A. Warner III '68, former chair of the board, JP Morgan Chase, and chair of the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Of those eight, three are businesspeople — Dubinsky, Goodyear, and Nooyi. Two — Rice and Joskow — are non-profit executives. Two — Cigarroa and Dervan — are academics. One — Warner — is a retired businessman who is now more of a health-care guy. So you have a 12-person search committee with three people — a mere 25% — mainly engaged in for-profit business activity, and eight people — 66% — who are either academics or non-profit executives, and the complaint from the alumni activists is that there are too many businessmen on the committee. Never mind who the next president of the university is going to be — the petitioners somehow got out of Yale without being able to count.