Video: The First Students

Founding Dean William Donaldson called the first students to enroll in the newly created Yale School of Organization and Management an “intrepid, highly qualified group of entrepreneurs.” Why intrepid? These first students, later called the Charter Class, were taking a huge risk in starting a two-year program at a school that hadn’t yet taught a class.

As for “highly qualified”—these students, 34 men and 16 women who ranged in age from 21 to 38, brought with them an array of educational and professional experiences. As undergraduate and graduate students, they had majored in fields ranging from economics to the fine arts. Professionally, they had an average of four years of full-time work experience behind them, with the public and private sectors being almost equally represented. In an early class on marketing or accounting, you might very well have found a professor of Japanese history sitting between a community activist and a partner in a commodities trading firm.

As diverse as their backgrounds were, members of the Charter Class developed a strong sense of camaraderie while at SOM and created an ethos of collaboration that became part of the school's DNA. Their close-knit community was fostered inside the classroom, with courses like Individual and Group Behavior (IGB)—a favorite—and outside, with activities like the Follies and an intramural soccer team. Helping them along was an almost-universal sense of “not taking ourselves too seriously,” said one student. In fact, this was one of the hopes of Donaldson, who believed that “in the heart and soul” of SOM is “a sense of fun that matches a heightened sense of service.”

In the spring of 1978, 47 students—the SOM pioneers—received the world's first-ever MPPM degrees, charting the course for the school and the generations of SOMers who would follow.