Yale MBAs On Their ‘Starship Enterprise’

When Yale’s School of Management moved into its brand new home in January, Poets&Quants wrote about the event under the headline “The Spaceship Enterprise Lands On Yale’s Campus.”

Now SOM students are producing a satirical video takeoff on the headline, the first video of which features Dean Ted Snyder in a starring role.

In the video, a couple of MBA students visit Snyder in his new office where pictures are yet to be hung on the walls. When they are ushered into his office, Snyder is sitting behind his desk.

“I’ve heard you make a couple of jokes about how the building is like the Starship Enterprise,” says one student. “That’s pretty funny, right.”

“You think this is funny?,” lectures Dean Ted Snyder. “I told you when you came here that this is a mission-driven enterprise. Other business schools are into satelite campuses. We have loftier ambitions,” he confides.

“Do you have any idea what’s underneath here (the building)?,” he asks his puzzled visitors.

“Parking,” responds one.

“That’s not a joke. It’s astronaut training,” quips Snyder.

“What about the state-of-the-art classrooms?,” asks the other student.

“Our classrooms are control centers!”

About the only thing real in the video is Snyder’s remark to the visiting MBA candidates,

“I didn’t come here to do a walk around the block.”

Dean Ted Snyder came to Yale SOM in mid-2011 after highly successful stints as dean at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and the University of Virginia’s Darden School with the goal of making SOM a bigger player in the business school market.

See the video featuring Dean Ted Snyder above

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