Yale News

Jack Callahan ’80, Yale’s inaugural senior vice president for operations, will retire this year, the University announced on Tuesday.

His eight years at the helm of Yale’s operations were marked by administrative accomplishments, such as advancing the University’s transition to the Workday platform and launching OneFinance. They were also characterized by a series of challenges, from the COVID-19 pandemic to pro-Palestine campus protests to now-emerging threats to University funding from the federal government.

The VP of operations role was created in 2016 to streamline the business side of the University. Former Yale President Peter Salovey’s goal for the position was to give a single leader the administrative power to develop a cohesive strategy for finance and administration.

In an interview with the News, Callahan said it was the right point in his life to retire. He does not plan to take on another full time job, but said he may linger on the boards of Notre Dame High School and the Yale New Haven Health system. He said that challenges such as the Trump administration’s efforts to slash university funding and campus protests did not motivate him to retire, and that in fact, he enjoys handling moments of crisis.

“This is much more about life, planning with my wife and just thinking that this is the appropriate time,” Callahan said.

The senior vice president plans to retire this year but will remain in his role until a search process to identify his replacement is completed, per a retirement announcement from University President Maurie McInnis.

Defining his role

In 2016, when Callahan got a call asking if he would be interested in joining Yale, he had been running businesses for 30 years. He was six years into building an operating company, S&P Global, and previously held leadership roles at companies including PepsiCo and General Electric after graduating from Yale and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He had no plans to leave the business world, but was struck by the idea of being in an environment he saw as youthful and ambitious, and decided to jump ship.

“In my old roles, in a C-suite of corporate, I was clearly the boss. I was not the boss here,” he said. “I think what it takes to make the shift from a corporate leadership role to a role of higher ed is that you have to have a little less ego and a little bit more commitment to the academic mission.”

Colleagues and former teammates said that as a leader, Callahan exuded warmth and knew how to delegate responsibility and act decisively in critical moments.

Anna Maria Hummerstone, a School of Medicine administrator who worked with Callahan, noted that his demeanor was friendly and casual despite his senior role.

“You run into him on the street, and you’d be like, ‘Hi, Jack,’” Hummerstone said “He’s very down to Earth and very personable and genuinely interested in you. He’s just Jack.” 

Tim Pavlis, who reported to Callahan as head of academic business operations and as associate vice president for strategy and analytics before leaving Yale in 2022, remembered that Callahan once moved to a worse office in order to be on the same floor as the provost, with whom he worked closely, to improve their collaboration. Pavlis took that moment as indicative of Callahan’s commitment to advancing Yale’s mission.

In an email to the News, Provost Scott Strobel commended Callahan for spending the last phase of his professional life “giving back” to the University after his career in business.

Former Yale administrator Sam Chauncey ’57 — who also served as Callahan’s first-year undergraduate advisor in 1976 — said that as Yale became a larger and more complex organization, many senior leadership positions were added. Salovey saw a need to centralize the roles under one person, and Callahan’s position was created to provide a center of gravity for those administrators to work together.

Nine areas of the University officially fall under the operations office. Facilities is the largest of these units, and the others are public safety, hospitality, New Haven affairs and University Properties, IT services, utilities, finance and audit, human resources and administrative operations. Callahan’s job goes beyond the central campus areas that he directly manages, also roping in administrators from the professional schools and the medical school to coordinate strategy.

Callahan said he worries that business operations can be viewed as out-of-touch decision-makers, powerful but detached from the rest of the University. He said that rather, he sees academic leaders as “setting the tone,” and considers himself to be more of a facilitator of Yale’s mission.

Administrative accomplishments

Marc Ulan, who worked at Yale until 2019 in the office of the Chief Information Officer, worked with Callahan when the senior vice president served as the interim CIO for a brief stint in late 2016 and early 2017. 

“His focus was on trying to get the operations of the university to be more efficient and get a better relationship between the operations of the university, and then the various departments that actually run the university,” Ulan said. “Those things have always been at odds.”

Ulan described a long-standing tension between front-facing departments — students, faculty and alumni — and the “back office” running the University’s systems and processes. According to Ulan, Callahan “did a lot of listening” and communicating between these sectors of the University.

Callahan himself noted that he prioritizes listening to differing perspectives.

“I like to work with people,” he said. “I didn’t grow up in a very hierarchical organization, so I like to talk to people at various different levels of the organization, because they all tell you different things and you learn a lot.”

In this spirit, Callahan oversaw much of the University’s efforts to shift its enterprise reporting platform — on which University employees can be recruited, paid and managed — to Workday. 

The transition to Workday began in 2015, before Callahan assumed his position at Yale, through transferring HR Payroll benefits, according to Hummerstone, who works in faculty administrative operations.

When Callahan became vice president for operations, he oversaw the second large push to the platform in 2017 — Workday Financials. Hummerstone said that a large part of Callahan’s role was in making sure the new Workday systems worked for all its users across the University.

“Jack used to say, Yale University is like an archipelago, just a bunch of islands,” Hummerstone recalled. “Where is the administration? We’re the bridges that are supposed to connect all those different islands, particularly when it comes to administrative operations and finances.”

Hummerstone described Callahan as supportive, appreciative of his colleagues’ work and proficient at prioritizing and allocating resources. 

Callahan said that the transition to Workday has allowed for Yale’s financial system to be updated on a regular basis, whereas before it was static and difficult to change.

“We still have work to do to better use the tool to better simplify our processes in terms of how we use it,” he said. “But we now have a stable operating system that we can continue to evolve for the future.”

Aside from the Workday rollout, Hummerstone said that OneFinance, an initiative to strengthen internal financial processes and controls, was one of Callahan’s biggest focuses.

OneFinance was launched after a former School of Medicine administrator was arrested for embezzling $40 million from the University in an eight-year money laundering scheme. The initiative was explicitly announced as a response to a “call to action” by School of Medicine administrators after the scheme came to light.

According to Hummerstone, Callahan was persistent in treating the embezzlement scheme as an event to learn from, but “not the only reason” for OneFinance’s implementation. 

Stephen Murphy ’87, the University’s vice president for finance who reports to Callahan, oversees OneFinance and helped launch Workday at Yale. He characterized his boss as a “seasoned, thoughtful, strategic leader” with a sense of humor and a drive for progress.

“His love and devotion to Yale are boundless and infectious,” Murphy wrote to the News. “As SVP for Operations he has had an enormous positive impact on the university.”

For his part, Callahan said that increasing Yale’s voluntary contribution to New Haven in 2021 was a milestone for him during his time at the University. He expressed hopes that the development will set the groundwork for increased commitments to the city.

Pandemic-era perseverance

Pavlis, who helped run Yale’s response to the pandemic, described Callahan leading a “huge team effort” to bring the operations team together as a group.

“The hierarchy broke down a lot during that time, because it was all hands on deck kind of moment. I think Jack really orchestrated that and allowed us to all step up in various ways.”

Callahan served on the University’s “policy board,” a collective of senior officials which participated in negotiations with Local 34 and Local 35 —  the unions representing Yale’s clerical, technical, service and maintenance staff. Joe Sarno, Yale’s labor relations director, called Callahan “phenomenal” to work with, and described him as a collaborative negotiator with “natural instincts on labor,” especially in his role conducting bargaining sessions over Zoom during the pandemic.

Callahan said that he frequently found Yale to be “siloed” among different staffs; he took it upon himself to break down the walls of non-communication.

“COVID showed us how we had to work together in new and different ways,” Callahan said. “I think it’s been a lasting lesson.”

That lesson was tested last spring, when student protests over divesting from weapons manufacturers rocked campus. Callahan said that he worked with Yale Public Safety to maintain security in “the most fair and equitable way that we thought possible.”

“We all were collectively attuned to the issues and the concerns of everyone on campus and also committed to safety and public expression,” Callahan said.

Chauncey believes Callahan’s role has continued to prove important recently as Yale has expanded its investment in the sciences, including projects such as a plan to transform Science Hill.

A University-wide email from McInnis on Monday announcing Callahan’s retirement highlighted Callahan’s “exceptional agility” in adapting and supervising University operations during the pandemic, as well as his “commitment to the community” in shaping Yale’s landmark $140 million investment in New Haven. 

Callahan believes he should not be involved in finding a successor for his position, but that the efficacy of the role he inaugurated is cemented. 

“I think everyone has now seen the value of having someone who is the leader across a number of the staff to run them in a more integrated way,” he said.

Sarno was more explicit in his expectations for Callanan’s successor. 

“Jack’s a great person to work for, and that makes work a lot better,” he said. “So I hope they find someone very similar to Jack.” 

As senior vice president for operations, Callahan sits on the University president’s cabinet.