Yasmine Halmane, Photography Editor

The Jackson School of Global Affairs is set to open in fall 2022 after meeting its fundraising target this spring. The Jackson School will be the University’s 13th professional school and the first established at Yale in over 40 years. 

“Yale has for generations turned out incredibly impactful leaders in the policy space and now we will have a school that will be training them. I’m confident that Jackson will be convening the top talent in the world,” Professor Jim Levinsohn told the News in January 2022. “We have the chance here to create a new school from the ground up, and that is an opportunity that is rare.”

Levinsohn, formerly the director of the Jackson Institute, will serve as inaugural dean of Jackson School beginning July 1. Under Levinson’s leadership, the Jackson Institute established the undergraduate Global Affairs major, the Kerry Initiative and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. 

The Jackson Institute for Global Affairs was established after a $50 million dollar gift from John Jackson ’67 and his wife Susan. At the Institute’s founding, the University committed to naming a potential school of global affairs after the pharmaceutical giant. 

The University also agreed at the Jackson Insitute’s founding to transfer the existing budgets of the masters and undergraduate international relations programs to the Institute, allocate $24 million of its existing endowment and raise an additional $10 million dollars for new professorships. The University agreed in 2009 to to match Jackson’s initial donation of $50 million with $24 million of its own funding — an additional to $2.4 million each year. 

Before the creation of the new professional school was solidified, some raised concerns that the new school would draw resources from existing programs. In 2018, the Chevalier Committee, a committee convened in 2018 to guide the institute’s transition to a professional school, recommended that the school be funded primarily by external gifts to avoid diverting resources from other University priorities and to avoid the initial financial strain experienced by other professional schools. The School of Management, for example, had to repay Yale with funds from its endowment until the mid-1980’s after its founding in 1976 strained the University’s central budget, professor of the practice of management Stanley Garstka told the News in April 2009. 

Vice President of Development Joan O’Neill told the News in February 2021 that the University should be able to raise $210 million of its targeted endowment of $400 million by the school’s planned opening in 2022. 

The University’s International Security Studies and the International Leadership Center joined the Jackson School in October 2021. The ISS program was established in 1988 by history professor Paul Kennedy to connect faculty studying international security in history and political science. Twelve years later, the ISS established the Grand Strategy Program, which is currently the independent Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. The ILC supports the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program — which brings global professionals to the University campus to take classes, teach and mentor — and Petraeus-Recanati-Kaplan Fellowship, which brings special military operators to the University to develop their understanding of global affairs. 

“I think the model that the Chevalier committee has recommended … will ensure interconnectedness within Yale,” Levinsohn told the News in April 2019. “Faculty [members] will be interconnected, Jackson students will take classes at other schools, and we will welcome … other students to take classes at Jackson.”

According to Levinsohn, at least three new faculty members for the Jackson School will arrive in the fall including Amit Khandelwal, an international economist at Columbia University. Additionally, Lorenzo Caliendo at the Yale School of Management and Penny Goldberg in the Economics Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will join the governing faculty of the School, moving half of their appointments to Jackson.  

Newly recruited faculty will hold joint appointments with the Jackson School and another Yale school or department.