Benno Schmidt Jr., leader who guided major changes at Yale and CUNY; at 81
Benno Schmidt Jr., a constitutional law scholar who became one of the country’s leading education executives, bringing difficult but necessary reforms to Yale and the City University of New York, died Sunday at his home in Millbrook, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 81.
His daughter Elizabeth Hun Schmidt confirmed his death but said the cause had not been determined.
A child of Manhattan privilege with a pristine academic pedigree, Mr. Schmidt seemed destined to lead a university such as Yale. He was president there for six years, during which he fought with the faculty over painful but necessary budget cuts, changes that left many people bitter but the university better off in its finances and academic direction.
He spent much longer turning around the beleaguered CUNY, a sprawling system of two- and four-year colleges and graduate programs that once competed for the city’s brightest minds. It had fallen into disarray by the time Mayor Rudy Giuliani put him in charge of a rescue task force in 1998.
“CUNY was in a very sad state — it had no energy, no ideas,” Matthew Goldstein, a former chancellor of CUNY who worked closely with Mr. Schmidt, said in a phone interview. “We got hardly any students from Bronx Science or Stuyvesant” — two of the city’s most selective public high schools — “or any of the city’s top schools.”
In 1999, Mr. Schmidt and his colleagues presented a plan to gut-renovate the system, and over the next 17 years, first as vice chair and then as chair of its board, he executed that vision.
He hired faculty by the hundreds. He created an honors college and several graduate schools. He boosted SAT scores of admitted students and brought up the bar-exam pass rate at CUNY’s law school to nearly 80 percent from about 25 percent.
Most education executives focus on either the K-12 or college level. Mr. Schmidt did both. He left Yale in 1992 to become CEO of Edison Schools, a new company with a plan to build a nationwide network of 1,000 for-profit private elementary schools.
Edison never achieved its goal. But under Mr. Schmidt and the company’s founder, entrepreneur Chris Whittle, Edison helped change the landscape of primary and secondary education by opening the door to charter schools and to other for-profit ventures.
The two men left the company in 2007 but regrouped in 2011, with Alan Greenberg, to found Avenues: The World School, an international network of private for-profit institutions, starting with a 10-story school along the High Line in Lower Manhattan. (Whittle left Avenues in 2015.)
Mr. Schmidt had already achieved renown as an expert in constitutional law when Columbia University selected him to be dean of its law school in 1984. Less than two years later, Yale named him, at age 44, as its 20th president.
He inherited a troubled institution, with a ballooning deficit, crumbling buildings, and a frosty relationship with the surrounding city of New Haven.
Mr. Schmidt arranged for Yale to invest $50 million in neighborhoods around campus, primarily in affordable housing. He started a $500 million revamp of Yale’s physical plant. And he went on a whirlwind fund-raising campaign, nearly doubling Yale’s endowment during his six-year tenure, to $3 billion from $1.7 billion.
Although he retained the support of Yale’s board and alumni, he clashed repeatedly with parts of the faculty and student body, who found him aloof and imperious. He forced through major changes at Yale’s business school and, later, in its philosophy department, taking over decisions about hiring and tenure that were traditionally left to faculty.
And although he lived during the week in New Haven, he returned to Manhattan on the weekends, leaving the impression among some that he was not fully committed to the university.
In early 1992, Mr. Schmidt announced that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would need to cut its budget significantly both to shrink the school’s deficit and to make way for expansion in the hard sciences. The plan was, for many, the last straw.
He met with hundreds of disgruntled faculty members, and he pointed out that a majority of their number supported what he was doing. But the criticism remained that he had begun major changes without doing the hard work of consensus building.
“Benno was a leader who often didn’t take the time to get his troops to understand what he was doing,” Sam Chauncey, the former secretary of Yale, said in a phone interview. “He had a lot of good ideas, but he was impatient.” Whittle first approached Mr. Schmidt about joining Edison in 1991, and a year later, just before commencement, he announced his departure, shocking the Yale community.
“I began to feel it was responsible for me to consider leaving Yale,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1992, “because while the university may have been in a kind of emotional upset, the basics of the situation had been stabilized.”
Although Mr. Schmidt continued to have his detractors, many people say Yale is a much better place because of him. Today, the university is world renowned in the medical and hard-science fields, and its endowment is more than $42 billion.
“Benno was president during a really important transition for Yale,” Peter Salovey, the university’s current president, said in a phone interview. “He helped push the university from being a college with strong professional schools into a university with outstanding professional schools and a college at its center.”
Benno Charles Schmidt Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., on March 20, 1942. Benno Sr. was a founding partner at J.H. Whitney and Co., considered the world’s first firm to specialize in venture capital — a term the elder Schmidt is credited with coining. Benno Schmidt’s mother, Martha (Chastain) Schmidt, was a homemaker. After his parents’ divorce, she remarried.
Benno grew up among Manhattan’s upper crust, attending St. Bernard’s School on the Upper East Side, then Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.
He studied history at Yale and, after graduating in 1963, went directly into its law school, from which he emerged three years later at the head of his class.
He clerked for Earl Warren, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, then spent two years working for the Justice Department before joining Columbia Law School in 1969.
His first three marriages — to Kate Russell, Betsy Siggins, and Helen Whitney — ended in divorce. Along with his daughter Elizabeth, he leaves his wife, Anne McMillen; his son, Benno Schmidt III; another daughter, Christina Whitney Helburn; his stepdaughters, Leah Ridpath and Alexandra Toles; his brothers, John and Ralph; his stepsister, Ruth Fleischmann; five grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.
At Columbia, Mr. Schmidt established his name as an expert in First Amendment law, both inside the academy and with the general public. Working with lawyer Floyd Abrams and Fred Friendly, a professor at Columbia’s journalism school, Mr. Schmidt created and hosted a series of televised panel discussions about the Constitution for PBS.
He also took a turn at acting, with brief character roles in two films by Woody Allen: “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) and “Husbands and Wives” (1992). And he became known at small venues around New York as an adept folk musician, playing both solo and in a group.
Mr. Schmidt stepped down from the CUNY board in 2016 and left Avenues soon after.
He never lost his commitment to change in education.
“I’d rather take the risk of being wrong,” he told a group of Yale faculty and administrators in early 1992, “than go down in history as the president who did nothing in the face of the real conviction that there was a problem.”