Robert Blocker (born September 4, 1946) is an American classical pianist,[1][2][3] music educator, and university administrator,[4][5][6] who served as Dean of the Yale School of Music since July 1995 until 2023.
Blocker earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Furman University in 1968.
He earned graduate degrees — Master of Music in 1970 and Doctor of Musical Arts in 1972 — from the University of North Texas College of Music, where he studied with eminent American pianist Richard Brannan Cass (1931–2009), an alumnus of Furman and Juilliard and 1953 Fulbright Scholar to the National School of Music of Paris where he had studied with Nadia Boulanger.
[7] In 1986, while serving as dean at Baylor, Blocker was a fellow at the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard in 1986.
He was president of the Charleston County Student Council and is a member of the St. Andrews Parish High School Hall of Fame.