Gordon Haines Taylor – 50th Reunion Essay

Gordon Haines Taylor

3 Deerfield Road

Asheville, NC 28803

ghtvt@aol.com

802-356-4954

College: Branford

Fifty years? What a wonderful journey it has been. Thanks to Yale for making it possible and thanks to all of you for sharing it with me.

After Yale, I earned an MBA degree from Dartmouth in 1971, and spent the next 33 years in finance and investment banking. My first job was with a Connecticut bank, but I soon moved to Wall Street and a succession of jobs with various firms—White, Weld & Co., Warburg Paribas Becker, Salomon Brothers, AIG—a stint with the Resolution Trust Corporation, and several years as the co-founder of an advisory firm focused on Latin America. In the process, I helped to create the global mortgage- and asset-backed securities businesses—chronicled in Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis—and lived and worked in London for nearly a decade.

In 2004, I left finance for higher education, working first at Dartmouth as associate dean and executive officer, then as associate dean for finance and administration at the University of Oregon and, since 2016, as executive dean at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. I enjoy higher education, I like being engaged with the world, and I do not intend to retire anytime soon.

Between jobs, I frequently worked full time as a ski instructor and ran the operations of Farms for City Kids Foundation as executive director, hosting 800 inner city children on a 1,000-acre Vermont dairy farm in the summers, milking cows and making world prize-winning cheese.

Outside of work, I have been a trustee at Choate and a trustee and treasurer of the Vermont Land Trust. Currently, I am a director of 13th Avenue Funding, a non-profit that champions income-based college tuition financing programs. So far, we have worked with several institutions, including Purdue, and Harvard Business School has written two case studies about what we do.

On the personal side, I met my wife, Catherine, on a ski lift in Vermont in 1997, and we have been happily together ever since, marrying in 2000. Our family includes my two daughters, Jennifer and Connie, and Catherine’s three sons, Tim, Henry, and Brooks. So far, between Jennifer and her partner and Connie and her husband, Catherine and I have five grandchildren, all of whom we love enormously.

Currently, Catherine—whose family gave Vanderbilt Hall to Yale in 1894—and I live with our two dogs—Buster and Sam—in Alexandria, Virginia, and Catherine works part time as a nurse. Lately, we have been traveling more, most recently to Europe to pursue my rekindled interest in automobile endurance racing, and thinking about what our next step in life will be and where. What I feel most now is gratitude for a very diverse—all unplanned—set of life experiences made much richer by the curiosity to explore them to the fullest that I learned at Yale.