The Historian’s Notebook: The First SOM Follies

The Historian’s Notebook: 50 Years of Business & Society is a blog series created in preparation for the 50th anniversary of Yale SOM in September 2026. The series is written by Yale SOM’s resident historian, Michelle Spinelli. Reach out if you have an idea for a blog post, memories or photos to share, or an inquiry about SOM history.

On a Friday evening in the spring of Yale SOM’s first year, Jeffrey Yudkoff ’78 breathed a sigh of relief as the curtain fell at the conclusion of The SOM Follies of 1977 and the audience erupted in applause. Around 200 members of the SOM community had come to watch Yudkoff’s first theatrical venture—a skit-based variety show that parodied the nascent school’s faculty, staff, and academic culture. What he didn’t know, as he took his final bows, was that the Follies would become a cherished SOM tradition for the next decade.

Yudkoff had brainstormed the show’s skits and songs for several weeks and rehearsed individual scenes with his performers. But the first Follies really took shape just 12 hours before the performance, when he and his roommate Patrick Von Bargen ’78 created a master storyline on yellow lined paper.

Yudkoff, who had no theatrical experience prior to enrolling at SOM but later worked in the entertainment industry on Sesame Street and for Muppets creator Jim Henson, created the Follies to combat the “cliquishness” that he felt grew out of SOM’s working groups, which were assigned during orientation and consisted of six to eight students each. He found that students in the groups stuck together socially as well as academically—studying together, eating together, and taking the same classes— and hoped that a collective creative exercise would make his class closer. In the end, he was successful, with 35 out of the 49 members of the Charter Class participating as performers or behind the scenes.

The Follies, which became an annual event for the next decade, continued to bring people together. Ralph Earle ’84 says that the show “enhanced the personal bonds” among students that SOM had already created through its intense culture and small size. It also served as a “pressure relief valve” that promoted—through laughter—the idea that “we not take ourselves too seriously, which was very consistent with the early days of the school.”

The first Follies follows a fictionalized version of Donaldson, played by Yudkoff himself, as he travels though time—from the Garden of Eden, where he is tasked with creating a new graduate school, to the year 4440—seeking guidance on whether the school should focus on business administration or public policy.

Donaldson’s first stop is the Age of Reason, where he finds himself in the court of Louis XVI with two (fictional) advisors, Cardinal Flug and Mac, who offer opposing viewpoints on how best to run an economy. While Cardinal Flug favors regulation and threatens “the judgment of God” if he is not listened to, Mac advocates free markets. “If you don’t listen to me,” Mac warns, “I’ll nag you to your dying day.” Mac’s name referred to Paul MacAvoy, an SOM faculty member and future dean of the school, who had been nicknamed “the nag” when he served on the Council of Economic Advisors under President Gerald Ford. The audience erupted in laughter at the inside joke.

Unconvinced by the arguments made by Cardinal Flug and Mac, Donaldson continues his quest for inspiration to early America, where he encounters Thomas Jefferson working on the Declaration of Independence with some ahistorical help from a character named Judy Stein, in homage to a real-life editor on staff at SOM who worked with students on polishing their writing and tightening their arguments. In the scene, Stein gives Jefferson advice that would have created a very different founding document, telling him to adhere to “standard memo format,” skip the poetic language, add an “exhibit” with numbers, and cut the number of signatures at the bottom of the document. “This isn’t a group assignment,” she says.

Donaldson next visits the Titanic, where the crew must employ a decision tree to figure out what to do when the ship hits an iceberg; he also swings by a television studio where contestants play a game show called The Price May or May Not Be Right Depending on the Elasticity of Demand. In between, Donaldson drops in on the “present day,” where he finds John Miller, SOM’s first admissions director, reviewing applications for the Charter Class. When the applicants ask about the difference between an MBA and an MPPM, the degree that SOM originally offered, the student playing Miller stands on a chair and sings, “You know we’re not like them, so hard and cruel, those other business schools.”

The dean’s journey ends in the future, where he finds the “Entrepreneurians” battling the “Probonians.” To the delight and surprise of the audience, the real Donaldson—who had secretly agreed weeks earlier to make a cameo—appeared onstage as “The Don,” a character who brings peace and reconciliation to the private and public sectors. Donaldson recited part of a real speech that he had given earlier: “I see a school that combines fully, within a single educational setting, the fundamental concerns of a traditional school of business administration, and those of public administration or public policy.”

“He had a lot of trust,” Yudkoff says. “He agreed to participate in the show even though we could only give him his own lines, and not a full script."

After the cameo, performers launched into the show’s last song, “Hooray for Management.”

“It’s not a question now of us or them,” the lyrics declare, “but it’s a matter of you and me, in unity. Hooray for SOM.”

After a standing ovation, a drumroll indicated that the event was not entirely over. To Yudkoff’s surprise, his classmates presented him with the “Don Award for Best Dramatic Musical and Comedy Production.” Accepting the award, Yudkoff remarked that although he had been up for three days straight preparing for the show, “I find it hard to believe that I’ll ever be happier than I am at this moment.”

The Follies hasn’t been seen since the mid-1980s, but today students stage Business and Society: The Musical each spring. Yudkoff is encouraged by this theatrical renaissance at SOM.

“I’m sure that today’s students will cherish the memories of this show as much as I and my classmates still do ours,” he says.