Yale School of Management - Board of Advisors

Herbert M. Allison, Jr.

Herbert M. Allison, Jr. is chairman, president, and chief executive officer of TIAA-CREF. Mr. Allison joined TIAA-CREF in 2002 after a 28-year career span at Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., where he last served as president and chief operating officer until 1999.

His professional career began with Merrill Lynch in 1971. He first served as an associate in investment banking in New York and also held posts in Paris, London, and Tehran. He became president and chief operating officer and a member of the Board in 1997. During his tenure there, Mr. Allison ran both the Investment Banking and the Corporate and Institutional Groups. He also served at various times as head of human resources and as chief financial officer.

After leaving Merrill Lynch in mid-1999, he served as national finance chairman for U.S. Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign.

In 2000, he accepted a leadership role in a start-up academic organization, the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, Inc., a joint venture of Oxford, Stanford, and Yale universities. There, as president and chief executive officer, he helped build an online learning organization for adults that provided the highest quality college-level courses.

Mr. Allison is chairman of the Business-Higher Education Forum and serves on the advisory board of the Yale School of Management as well as the advisory council of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is on the board of directors of the Conference Board and the board of trustees of the Economic Club of New York. Governor Spitzer recently appointed Mr. Allison to the insurance working group of the New York State Commission to Modernize the Regulation of Financial Services.

He is also a member of the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, the Council of Graduate Schools Advisory Committee, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s International Advisory Committee.

He previously served as chair of the Vietnam Education Foundation, as well as on the boards of the United Negro College Fund and the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, he served on Governor Pataki’s New York State Commission on Education Reform.

Mr. Allison earned a BA in Philosophy from Yale University. Following a four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, including service in Vietnam, he earned an MBA from Stanford University.