Ronald W. Betts, Senior Fellow of the Yale Corporation and ice hockey alumnus, has had several successful careers. After graduating from Yale, he taught school, trained teachers, and served as an assistant principal in Harlem. His experiences led him to write Acting Out: Coping with Big City Schools, published in 1978. In that same year, he graduated from Columbia Law School and began to practice entertainment law.
Betts founded and chaired Chelsea Piers, LP, which operates Chelsea Piers Sports and Entertainment in New York City. He also founded and presided over Silver Screen Management, Inc., which has financed and produced over 75 movies with Walt Disney Company. Also president of International Film Investors, Inc., Betts has been responsible for the financing of some one hundred featured films.
For nine years, Betts was the principal cover of the Texas Rangers Baseball Club, purchased in 1989 by a group of investors he assembled with classmate and President George W. Bush, ’68. He is a director of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, where he chairs the site committee charged with rebuilding the World Trade Center tract. A trustee of numerous charitable, academic, and public-spirited organizations, he has been appointed trustee and treasurer of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
