Chapter 5: Yale University

After graduating from high school, I went on to Yale University. Without Yale, my life would never have taken the course it did.
 
The names attached to the university belonged to a world utterly removed from the one I had known. On buildings, dormitories, dining halls—everywhere—were inscribed the names of great figures who had passed through Yale since its founding in 1701: statesmen, financiers, industrialists and heads of Fortune 500 companies.
 
Where I grew up, there had been no such elite. The closest I had come was seeing a senator give a speech at our synagogue. "So these are the people," I thought, "who make up the fabric of the establishment, the people who run the country."
 
At Yale, I majored in a rather unusual interdisciplinary program called "Human Culture and Behavior," as it was then known, which combined anthropology, sociology, psychology, biology and related disciplines, all aimed at understanding human behavior in depth. I had always been curious about what makes people think and act as they do, and the major seemed a natural fit.
 
Yet I soon fell behind. My first paper, on English literature, earned a 68 out of 100—barely passing, and close enough to failure to alarm me. The next was worse: a 66, unquestionably failing.
 
Then a young English teacher named Alistair Wood called me in for a conference and told me, gently, "You are not stupid."
 
"You clearly have a brain," he said, "But you don't know how to analyze anything, and you don't know how to write. So I'm going to have to teach you how to do both."
 
From then on, paper by paper, he taught me first how to write and then how to analyze.
 
The effect was extraordinary. A year later, instead of being thrown out of the university, I had made the dean's list, placing among the top 10% of my class.
 
His kindness changed the course of my life. Years later, after I had found success in business, I sought out my old English teacher, who by then 84 was and teaching at a university in Scotland, and thanked him for rescuing my career. I was deeply glad that he remembered me.
 
I came to believe that one of life's duties is to help people who are on the verge of falling behind. At Blackstone, too, I have made it an obligation to help those younger than myself so that they do not fall through the cracks.
 
The confidence my English teacher gave me led me to set a new goal: admission to one of Yale's elite undergraduate clubs, known as senior societies. Skull and Bones stood at the summit of these exclusive groups, which selected students in their final year. But entry was by invitation only and unless you had some conspicuous achievement to your name, no invitation came.
 
The method I chose was the same one I still use today: Do what has never been done before. Let me offer two examples. First, I brought in ballerinas. Yale in those days was still an all-men's college. Bring beautiful women to campus, I reasoned, and the students would surely come flocking. I set my sights on one of the world's finest companies, the New York City Ballet.
 
I slipped backstage at the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch Theater), one of the principal venues at Lincoln Center and home to the New York City Ballet, and made my way into the general manager's office.
 
Claiming to represent a "Yale ballet society" that did not, in fact, exist, I asked the company to come to the university and perform for the sake of their future audiences. To my astonishment, they agreed, provided the troupe could be small.
 
I then invited students from women's colleges nearby to fill the seats. Just as I had hoped, Yale men swarmed in. The performance was a triumph, and my name became known on campus.
 
Next, I helped overturn a ban on women in the dormitories that had stood for almost 270 years. I myself was seeing a student at a nearby women's college and I was eager to do something about the rule.
 
The university's argument was that if women were allowed to visit, male students would grow distracted and lose focus on their studies. "Very well," I thought. I distributed 4,000 questionnaires to discover what the students themselves thought. Ninety-nine percent replied that they wanted no such protection. Within a few days, the rule was gone.
 
The America of the late 1960s, when I was a student, was in upheaval. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and so was Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and widely regarded as his political heir. The anti-war movement, the hippies, women's liberation—all belonged to that time.
 
The birth control pill had begun to reshape relations between men and women, including among the unmarried. What I had done was not an isolated prank but a small reflection of an era in violent flux.
 
I was invited into Skull and Bones. Former President George W. Bush, the Republican who won the 2004 presidential election, was an alumnus, as was John Kerry, the Democratic candidate he defeated. And through the society, I would meet another alumnus who became the starting point of my life as a statesman.

Originally published in Nikkei Asia, October 2026