The Yale Medal is the highest award presented by the Alumni Association honoring outstanding individual service to the University. Recipients reflect the range of service and leadership the Alumni Association strives to recognize with this award. Yale honors Medal winners for their exemplary voluntary service and remarkable contributions to the University.

Since its inception, the Yale Medal, the highest honor presented by the Yale Alumni Association, has been presented to 346 individuals who have shown extraordinary devotion to Yale’s ideals and demonstrated their support through extensive, exemplary services to the university and its schools, institutes, and programs.
John will be officially honored in a special ceremony to be held this fall.

The official citation:

John Jackson ’67

John Jackson ’67 has been a devoted university leader over a 60-year relationship with Yale. He served as regional co-chair for the… and for Yale Campaign in 1991 and currently serves as honorary co-chair on the for Humanity campaign committee. Jackson is a member of the President’s Council on International Activities, which he chaired for eight years. Prior to Yale, Jackson was educated at the Gordonstoun School in Scotland, spent his Yale Junior year abroad in Paris at L’Institut de Science Politiques, and earned an MBA from INSEAD, France.
His career in international business further fostered a keen awareness of world issues, and in 2009 Jackson made a transformative gift to establish the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale. This hub of faculty members and Senior Fellows educating students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels flourished, and in 2019 the Yale Corporation voted to transform the institute into the Jackson School of Global Affairs, the first new professional school created at the university since the School of Management in 1976.

Jackson’s engagement with the new school continues, with service the Board of Advisors. He has also cultivated a strong connection to the Yale University Art Gallery through the gift of his Numismatic Collection, including an endowed curatorship.

Over the years, Jackson’s contributions and advisements have changed the landscape of Yale, helping equip the university to train the leaders of tomorrow to address global problems and to create public policy that will contribute to the world and shape a better future for all humanity.

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Touring Sterling Memorial Library’s Linonia & Brothers Reading Room — in which many of us both studied and napped — were, left to right, Steve Stack ’67, Fred Berg ’66, and Dave Richards ’67. L&B is undergoing a $10 million renovation (requiring hard hats), and all shown here are members of the Librarian’s Development Council, through which these funds are being raised. Fred Berg’s family has made a major gift for the restoration of the entry to L&B, which will now be renamed in his family’s honor. A gift to restore one of the alcoves has been made by the Rossi Foundation, headed by John Raben ’67. When L& B is restored to its former glory (although now with wireless connections and air conditioning hidden behind old bookcases), this ugly green carpet will be replaced by hardwood floors decorated with specially designed area carpets. Let’s see if future generations of Yalies can stay awake in that ever more beautiful Reading Room.

More on the L&B renovation from Yale News: Sterling Library’s L&B Room, a campus gem, slated for renovation.

(Posted April 2023)

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Doug Melamed, Mike Siris, and Marshall Pomer (left to right) had a mini-reunion last month at Stanford, where Doug is on the law school faculty. “By happenstance. it happened to be Doug’s birthday,” says Mike. “Marshall is down in Santa Cruz, and I was out there accompanying my wife, who was competing in a national duplicate bridge tourney in San Francisco.” (P.S. Karen didn’t do too badly, either, earning six more gold points on her way to becoming a Life Master.) (Posted January 2020)

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Speaking of mini-reunions, Bob Lehrer and Adrian Misarti held one a couple of weeks ago in Chicago, where Bob lives and Adrian was visiting his son.

“The first photo is in front of the traditional Christmas Tree at Union Station, one of Chicago’s commuter rail stations, where we met up in the first instance,” says Bob. “The second is at an eatery in Ogilvie Station, an adjoining commuter rail station. Not shown: a post lunch walk from the west end of the Loop east almost to the Lake. (Primer on finding your way around Chicago: The Lake is always east.) Taking in, among other cites, the Hall (City Hall).

“This was a Discussion Group-inspired meet up because we did not know each other at Yale, and have had no contact since – except, recently, via the DG. We had no difficulty recognizing each other, because, really, how many other ambulatory old white guys (one with thinning gray hair, the other with thinning white hair) would be hanging around the Union Station Christmas tree at midday on a Friday? Adrian and I hope to make this an annual event, limited only by the condition that we both are ambulatory.”

(Posted January 2020)

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“Dave Wenner’s Retirement Hobby”

When Dave retired in 2003 from a 30-year career in management consulting with McKinsey & Company, the first item on his bucket list was to learn about “the mysteries of the universe, from the largest scales (astrophysics and cosmology) to the smallest (quantum theory).” This was the delayed fulfillment of a childhood dream Dave had as a boy growing up near Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Dave started by consuming dozens of nontechnical books on the history of physics, astrophysics and cosmology, but soon decided to hire a post-doc to tutor him in physics, while collecting and reading first editions… READ MORE

(Posted November 2019)