Recruiting ‘Academic Superstars’
In just a few years, Dean Burton Malkiel brought six future Nobel laureates to Yale SOM's faculty—and changed how the wider academic world saw the school.
The Historian’s Notebook: 50 Years of Business & Society is a blog series created in honor of 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.
By the time William Donaldson stepped down as Yale SOM’s first dean in 1980, the school was on strong footing. It had graduated three classes of students and inaugurated a permanent campus. Donaldson “put the school on the map,” said Burton Malkiel, SOM’s next dean, who served from 1981 to 1987. But there was still much to be done.
Malkiel faced a new set of challenges, including a decree from then Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti that SOM become an institution where knowledge is “created,” rather than simply learned. SOM needed to have a faculty that was on par with that of Yale Law School, Giamatti said, one that advanced scholarship with original research.
To that end, Malkiel—a widely respected scholar himself and the author of the 1973 investment classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street—hired six economists whose work would eventually earn each a Nobel Prize: Oliver Williamson (who won in 2009), Robert Shiller (2013), Bengt Holmström (2016), Paul Milgrom (2020), and Philip Dybvig and Douglas Diamond (both 2022). Stanley Garstka, the school’s longtime deputy dean, described the group as “academic superstars.”
“We had, pound for pound, the best faculty on the planet,” he said.
Although only Shiller won the Nobel Prize as an SOM faculty member, all six economists did formative work while teaching at the school. “It was a very intense, critical time in my research,” noted Holmström. That was equally true for Dybvig and Diamond, who formulated and published the Diamond-Dybvig model of bank runs while Dybvig was on the faculty at SOM.
Looking back, former Yale President Richard C. Levin credited Malkiel with elevating “the visibility of the school in the eyes of academics.” For an adolescent school still finding its way, Malkiel’s hires would provide the credibility and institutional footing required to grow into a center for scholarship.
