Herbert M. Allison, Jr.
Chairman, President and CEO, Retired
TIAA-CREF
Herb Allison became chairman, president and CEO of TIAA-CREF in 2002. He joined TIAA-CREF after a 28-year career span at Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., where he last served as president and COO until 1999. In early 2008, Mr. Allison retired from TIAA-CREF.
Mr. Allison's professional career began with Merrill Lynch in 1971. He first served as an associate in investment banking in New York and also held posts in Paris, London, and Tehran. He became president and COO and a member of the board in 1997. During his tenure there, Mr. Allison ran both the investment banking and the corporate and institutional groups. He also served at various times as head of human resources and as CFO.
After leaving Merrill Lynch in mid-1999, he served as national finance chairman for U.S. Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.
In 2000, he accepted a leadership role in a start-up academic organization, the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, Inc., a joint venture of Oxford, Stanford, and Yale Universities. There, as president and CEO, he helped build an online learning organization for adults that provided the highest quality college-level courses.
Mr. Allison serves on the advisory board of the Yale School of Management, is the chair of the Business-Higher Education Forum, and is on the board of directors of The Conference Board. Governor Eliot Spitzer recently appointed Mr. Allison to the insurance working group of the New York State Commission to Modernize the Regulation of Financial Services.
He also is a member of the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, the Council of Graduate Schools Advisory Committee and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s International Advisory Committee. He previously served as Chair of the Vietnam Education Foundation, as well as on the Boards of the United Negro College Fund and the New York Stock Exchange. In addition, he served on Governor Pataki’s New York State Commission on Education Reform.
Mr. Allison earned a BA in philosophy from Yale University. Following a four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, including service in Vietnam, he earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
