Former Vassar College President Catharine Bond Hill GRD ‘85 will serve as the next senior fellow of the Yale Corporation, the University announced on Thursday. Venture capitalist David Sze ‘88 and Joshua Steiner ‘87, a senior advisor at Bloomberg, L.P., will also join the Corporation as successor trustees.
The new slate of trustees arrives as Yale continues to determine its institutional priorities for the next capital campaign, a process that was recently marked by the long-awaited release of a University-wide Science Strategy Report. Sze and Steiner will join Michael Warren ’90, who was elected as the Corporation’s next alumni fellow earlier this summer, as the latest additions to the 17-member Corporation, Yale’s highest governing body.
To lead the Corporation, Yale has chosen its own resident higher education expert. After serving as president of Vassar and provost of Williams, Hill is now managing director of Ithaka S+R, a nonprofit research and consulting group that serves universities and cultural institutions. After serving five years as an alumni fellow, she will replace Donna Dubinsky ’77, who is retiring from the Corporation, as the main conduit between the trustees and University President Peter Salovey.
The senior fellow is chosen by the University president in consultation with the trustees, according to the Yale protocol on “Board Roles & Selection Processes.”
Like many of the current trustees, the incoming fellows are no strangers to America’s elite. Steiner has worked with one of Yale’s most prominent donors — Blackstone founder and Donald Trump confidante Stephen Schwarzman ‘69. Steiner serves as an honorary trustee of the New York Public Library, where Schwarzman sits on the board. While Steiner was vice chairman of that board in 2008, the library system named its Fifth Avenue main branch in honor of Schwarzman, after receiving a $100 million donation from the Wall Street mogul.
Steiner also worked as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen during the Clinton administration, and served as an economic policy advisor for the presidential transition team of former U.S. President Barack Obama.
Sze is managing partner of Greylock Partners, a California-based venture capital firm. He led the firm’s investments in some of the most popular social media websites and apps, including Pandora, LinkedIn and Facebook. For multiple years in a row, he was named to Forbes’ Midas List, a ranking of the best technology venture capitalists.
The venture capitalist is also a trustee at the biomedical research institute Rockefeller University, whose president received an honorary degree from Yale last May.