Herbert M. Allison

Herbert Monroe Allison, Jr. (born August 24, 1943) was chairman, president and CEO of TIAA-CREF from November 2002 to 2008. After a short "retirement" period, he accepted the position of CEO of Fannie Mae in September 2008. Previously, he had been with Merrill Lynch from 1971 to 1999, where he was president and COO during the latter part of his tenure.

He served as national finance chairman for U.S. Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. He also served as president and CEO of the Alliance for Lifelong Learning, a joint venture of Oxford, Stanford, and Yale universities, from 2000 to 2002. Allison serves on the advisory boards of the Yale School of Management and the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is the chairman of the Business-Higher Education Forum, and is on the board of directors of The Conference Board. He is a member of both the Business Roundtable and the Financial Services Roundtable. Additionally, Allison served on Governor Pataki's New York State Commission on Education Reform and has been named to Governor Spitzer's New York State Commission to Modernize the Regulation of Financial Services.

Allison holds a B.A. (1965) from Yale University and an M.B.A. (1971) from Stanford University.

Mr. Allison joined TIAA-CREF in 2002 after a 28-year career at Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., where he last served as President and Chief Operating Officer until 1999.

His 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 Chief Operating Officer 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 Chief Financial Officer.

After leaving Merrill Lynch in mid-1999, he served as National Finance Chairman for U.S. Senator John McCain's Presidential Campaign.

In 2000, Mr. Allison 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 Chief Executive Officer, he ostensibly helped build an online learning forum for adults that provided the highest quality college-level courses. However, the Alliance for Lifelong Learning was dismantled in 2006 and its web site is now a misleading link farm. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/mar/20/elearning.highereducation]

Mr. Allison is chairman of the Business-Higher Education Forum and serves on the Advisory Board of the Yale School of Management as well as the Advisory Council of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is on the board of directors of The Conference Board and the board of trustees of The Economic Club of New York. Governor Spitzer recently appointed Mr. Allison to the insurance working group of the New York State Commission to Modernize the Regulation of Financial Services.

He is also a member of the Business Roundtable, the Financial Services Roundtable, the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, the Council of Graduate Schools Advisory Committee, the Harvard Graduate School of Education Visiting 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 B.A. in Philosophy from Yale University. Following a four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy, including service in Vietnam, he earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Currently, he is a director of Time Warner.

On September 7, 2008, Mr. Allison was chosen to head Fannie Mae, as part of an emergency federal conservatorship of the financial institution caused by the housing market crisis. Fannie Mae, is a large government sponsored financial institution that was created during the New Deal, but that was privatized in the 1960s, that provides liquidity in the secondary market for mortgages by guaranteeing consumer home mortgages, buying consumer mortgages for securitization in mortgage backed securities, and carrying out other large scale financial transactions.