Yale University

Yale University

Motto	Urim and Thummim אורים ותמים (Hebrew) Lux et veritas (Latin) (Light and truth)
Established	1701
Type	Private
Location	New Haven, Connecticut USA
Website	www.yale.edu

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League. Particularly well-known are its undergraduate school, Yale College, and the Yale Law School, each of which has produced a number of U.S. presidents and foreign heads of state. In 1861, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences became the first U.S. school to award the Ph.D. degree. Also notable is the Yale School of Drama which has produced many prominent Hollywood and Broadway actors, as well as the art, music, medical and architecture schools, each of which is often cited as among the finest in its field.

The university's assets include a $20 billion endowment (the second-largest of any U.S. academic institution) and more than a dozen libraries that hold a total of 12.1 million volumes (the second-largest university library system). Yale has 3,300 faculty members, who teach 5,300 undergraduate students and 6,000 graduate students.

Yale's 70 undergraduate majors are primarily focused on a liberal curriculum, and few of the undergraduate departments are pre-professional in nature. About 20% of Yale undergraduates major in the sciences, 35% in the social sciences, and 45% in the arts and humanities. All tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.

Yale uses a residential college housing system modeled after those at Oxford and Cambridge. Each of 12 residential colleges houses a representative cross-section of the undergraduate student body, and features facilities, seminars, resident faculty, and support personnel.

Yale's graduate programs include those in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — covering 53 disciplines in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences and Engineering — and those in the Professional Schools of Architecture, Art, Divinity, Drama, Forestry & Environmental Sciences, Law, Management, Medicine, Music, Nursing, and Public Health.

Yale and Harvard have been rivals in almost everything for most of their history, notably academics, rowing and American football.

Yale president Richard C. Levin summarized the university's institutional priorities for its fourth century: "First, among the nation's finest research universities, Yale is distinctively committed to excellence in undergraduate education. Second, in our graduate and professional schools, as well as in Yale College, we are committed to the education of leaders."

The nicknames "Elis" (after Elihu Yale) and "Yalies" are often used, both within and outside Yale, to refer to Yale students.

History

Original building, 1718–1782

Yale traces its beginnings to "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School" passed by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut and dated October 9 1701. Soon thereafter, a group of ten Congregationalist ministers led by James Pierpont, all of whom were Harvard alumni (Harvard having been the only college in North America when they were school-aged), met in Branford, Connecticut, to pool their books to form the school's first library. The group is now known as "The Founders." Yale was founded to train ministers.

Originally called the Collegiate School, the institution opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson, in Killingworth (now Clinton). It later moved to Saybrook, and then Wethersfield. In 1718, the college moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where it remains to this day.

In the meanwhile, a rift was forming at Harvard between its sixth president Increase Mather (Harvard A.B., 1656) and the rest of the Harvard clergy, which Mather viewed as increasingly liberal, ecclesiastically lax, and overly broad in Church polity. The relationship worsened after Mather resigned, and the administration repeatedly rejected his son and ideological colleague, Cotton Mather (Harvard A.B., 1678), for the position of the Harvard presidency. The feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hopes that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not.

Old Brick Row in 1807

In 1718, at the behest of either Rector Andrew or Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, Cotton Mather contacted a successful businessman in Wales named Elihu Yale to ask him for financial help in constructing a new building for the college. Yale, who had made a fortune through trade while living in India as a representative of the East India Company, donated nine bales of goods, which were sold for more than £560, a substantial sum at the time. Yale also donated 417 books and a portrait of King George I. Cotton Mather suggested that the school change its name to Yale College in gratitude to its benefactor, and to increase the chances that he would give the college another large donation or bequest. Elihu Yale was away in India when the news of the school's name change reached his home in Wrexham, North Wales, a trip from which he never returned. And while he did ultimately leave his fortunes to the "Collegiate School within His Majesties Colony of Connecticot," the institution was never able to successfully lay claim to it.

Serious American students of theology and divinity, particularly in New England, regarded Hebrew as a classical language, along with Greek and Latin, and essential for study of the Old Testament in the original words. The Reverend Ezra Stiles, president of the College from 1778 to 1795, brought with him his interest in the Hebrew language as a vehicle for studying ancient Biblical texts in their original language (as was common in other schools), requiring all freshmen to study Hebrew (in contrast to Harvard, where only upperclassmen were required to study the language) and is responsible for the Hebrew words "Urim" and "Thummim" on the Yale seal. Stiles' greatest challenge occurred in July, 1779 when hostile British forces occupied New Haven and threatened to raze the College. Fortunately, Yale graduate Edmund Fanning, Secretary to the British General in command of the occupation, interceded and the College was saved. Fanning later was granted an honorary degree for his efforts.

Woolsey Hall in c. 1905

Yale College expanded gradually, establishing the Yale School of Medicine (1810), Yale Divinity School (1822), Yale Law School (1843), Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1847), the Sheffield Scientific School (1861), and the Yale School of Fine Arts (1869). (The divinity school was founded by Congregationalists who felt that the Harvard Divinity School had become too liberal. This is similar to the Oxbridge rivalry in which dissident scholars left University of Oxford to form the University of Cambridge) In 1887, as the college continued to grow under the presidency of Timothy Dwight V, Yale College was renamed to Yale University. The university would later add the Yale School of Music (1894), Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (1901), Yale School of Public Health (1915), Yale School of Nursing (1923), Yale Physician Associate Program (1973), and Yale School of Management (1976). It would also reorganize its relationship with the Sheffield Scientific School.

In 1966, Yale initiated discussions with its sister school Vassar College concerning the possibility of a merger as an effective means to achieve coeducation. However, Vassar declined Yale's invitation and, ultimately, both Yale and Vassar decided to remain separate and introduce coeducation independently in 1969. Amy Solomon was the first woman to register as a Yale undergraduate; she was also the first woman at Yale to join an undergraduate society, St. Anthony Hall. (Women studied at Yale University as early as 1876, but in graduate-level programs at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.)

Yale, like other Ivy League schools, instituted policies in the early twentieth century designed artificially to increase the proportion of upper-class white Christians of notable families in the student body (see numerus clausus), and was one of the last of the Ivies to eliminate such preferences, beginning with the class of 1970.

The President and Fellows of Yale College, also known as the Yale Corporation, is the governing board of the University.

Yale and politics in the modern era

The Boston Globe wrote that "if there's one school that can lay claim to educating the nation's top national leaders over the past three decades, it's Yale." Yale alumni have been represented on the Democratic or Republican ticket in every U.S. Presidential election since 1972. Yale-educated Presidents since the end of the Vietnam War include Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and major-party nominees during this period include John Kerry (2004), Joseph Lieberman (Vice President, 2000), and Sargent Shriver (Vice President, 1972). Other Yale alumni who made serious bids for the Presidency during this period include Howard Dean (2004), Gary Hart (1984 and 1988), Paul Tsongas (1992) and Jerry Brown (1976, 1980, 1992). Yale Law alumna Hillary Rodham Clinton is considered a front runner for the 2008 Democratic Presidential nomination.

Several potential explanations have been offered for Yale’s representation in national elections since the end of the Vietnam War. Various sources note the spirit of campus activism that has existed at Yale since the 1960s, and the intellectual influence of Reverend William Sloane Coffin on many of the future candidates. Yale President Richard Levin attributes the run to Yale’s focus on creating "a laboratory for future leaders," an institutional priority that began during the tenure of Yale Presidents Alfred Whitney Griswold and Kingman Brewster. Richard H. Brodhead, former dean of Yale College and now president of Duke University, stated: "We do give very significant attention to orientation to the community in our admissions, and there is a very strong tradition of volunteerism at Yale." Yale historian Gaddis Smith notes "an ethos of organized activity" at Yale during the 20th century that led John Kerry to lead the Yale Political Union's Liberal Party, George Pataki the Conservative Party, and Joseph Lieberman to manage the Yale Daily News. Camille Paglia points to a history of networking and elitism: "It has to do with a web of friendships and affiliations built up in school." CNN suggests that George W. Bush benefited from preferential admissions policies for the "son and grandson of alumni," and for a "member of a politically influential family." New York Times correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller and The Atlantic Monthly correspondent James Fallows credit the culture of community and cooperation that exists between students, faculty and administration, which downplays self-interest and reinforces commitment to others.

During the 1988 presidential election, George H. W. Bush (Yale '48) derided Michael Dukakis for having "foreign-policy views born in Harvard Yard's boutique;" when challenged on the distinction between Dukakis' Harvard connection and his own Yale background, he said that, unlike Harvard, Yale's reputation was "so diffuse, there isn't a symbol, I don't think, in the Yale situation, any symbolism in it" and said Yale did not share Harvard's reputation for "liberalism and elitism" In 2004, Howard Dean stated, "In some ways, I consider myself separate from the other three (Yale) candidates of 2004. Yale changed so much between the class of '68 and the class of '71. My class was the first class to have women in it; it was the first class to have a significant effort to recruit African Americans. It was an extraordinary time, and in that span of time is the change of an entire generation."

Administration

Rectors of the Collegiate School

1. The Rev. Abraham Pierson (1701–1707)
2. The Rev. Samuel Andrew (1707–1719) (pro tempore)

Rectors of Yale College

1. The Rev. Timothy Cutler (1719–1726)
2. The Rev. Elisha William(s) (1726–1739)
3. The Rev. Thomas Clap (1740–1745)

Presidents of Yale College

1. The Rev. Thomas Clap (1745–1766)
2. The Rev. Naphtali Daggett (1766–1777) (pro tempore)
3. The Rev. Ezra Stiles (1778–1795)
4. Timothy Dwight IV (1795–1817)
5. Jeremiah Day (1817–1846)
6. Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1846–1871)
7. Noah Porter III (1871–1886)
8. Timothy Dwight V (1886–1887)

Presidents of Yale University

1. Timothy Dwight V (1887–1899)
2. Arthur Twining Hadley (1899–1921)
3. James Rowland Angell (1921–1937)
4. Charles Seymour (1937–1951)
5. Alfred Whitney Griswold (1951–1963)
6. Kingman Brewster, Jr. (1963–1977)
7. Hanna Holborn Gray (1977–1978) (acting)
8. A. Bartlett Giamatti (1978–1986)
9. Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. (1986–1992)
10. Howard R. Lamar (1992–1993) (acting)
11. Richard C. Levin (1993–)

The Yale Provost's Office has helped launch several women into prominent university presidencies. In 1977, Hanna Holborn Gray was appointed acting President of Yale from that position, and went on to become president of the University of Chicago, the first woman to be full president of a major university. In 1994, Yale Provost Judith Rodin became the first female president of an Ivy League institution at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2002, Provost Alison Richard became the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. In 2004, Provost Susan Hockfield became the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2007, Deputy Provost Kim Bottomly was named President of Wellesley College. [2]

Admissions

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Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library.

The acceptance rate for Yale College for the Class of 2011 was 9.6%. For the Class of 2010, the acceptance rate was 8.9% with a 71.1% yield; 728 were waitlisted, of which 56 were admitted.

Yale College offers need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid to all applicants, including international applicants. Yale commits to meet the full demonstrated financial need of all applicants, and more than 40% of Yale students receive financial assistance. Most financial aid is in the form of grants and scholarships that do not need to be paid back to the University, and the average scholarship for the 2006–2007 school year will be $26,900.

Half of all Yale undergraduates are women, more than 30% are minorities, and 8% are international students. Furthermore, 55% attended public schools and 45% attended independent, religious, or international schools.

Intellectual "schools"

Yale's English and Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, after the passing of the New Critical fad, the Yale literature department became a center of American deconstruction, with French and Comparative Literature departments centered around Paul de Man and supported by the English department. This has become known as the "Yale School." Yale's history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historian C. Vann Woodward is credited for beginning in the 1960s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Most noticeably, a tremendous number of currently active Latin American historians were trained at Yale in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s by Emìlia Viotta da Costa; younger Latin Americanists tend to be "intellectual cousins" in that their advisors were advised by the same people at Yale.

Collections

The Night Café, Vincent van Gogh, 1888, Yale Art Gallery.

Yale University Library is the second-largest university collection in the world with a total of almost 11 million volumes. The main library, Sterling Memorial Library, contains about four million volumes, and other holdings are dispersed at a variety of subject libraries.

Rare books are found in a number of Yale collections. The Beinecke Rare Book Library has a large collection of rare books and manuscripts. The Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library includes important historical medical texts, including an impressive collection of rare books, as well as historical medical instruments. The Lewis Walpole Library contains the largest collection of 18th Century British literary works. And the Elizabethan Club, while technically a private organization, makes its Elizabethan folios and first editions available to qualified researchers through Yale.

Yale's museum collections are also of international stature. The Yale University Art Gallery is the country's first university-affiliated art museum. It contains important collections of modern art as well as old masters, with over 180,000 total works. The works are housed in the Swartout and Kahn buildings. The latter, Louis Kahn's first large-scale American work (1953), was recently renovated and reopened in December 2006. The Yale Center for British Art is the largest collection of British art outside of the UK, originally the gift of Paul Mellon and also housed in a building [[3]] designed by Louis Kahn.

The Peabody Museum of Natural History is New Haven's most popular museum, well-used by school children as well as containing research collections in anthropology, archaeology, and the natural environment. The Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments, affiliated with the Yale School of Music, is perhaps the least well-known of Yale's collections, because its hours of opening are restricted.

Yale architecture

Harkness Tower

Yale is noted for its harmonious yet fanciful largely Collegiate Gothic campus as well as for several iconic modern buildings commonly discussed in architectural history survey courses: Louis Kahn's Yale Art Gallery and Center for British Art, Eero Saarinen's Ingalls Rink and Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, and Paul Rudolph's Art & Architecture Building. Yale also owns many noteworthy 19th-century mansions along Hillhouse Avenue.

Many of Yale's buildings were constructed in the neo-Gothic architecture style from 1917 to 1931. Stone sculpture built into the walls of the buildings portray contemporary college personalities such as a writer, an athlete, a tea-drinking socialite, and a student who has fallen asleep while reading. Similarly, the decorative friezes on the buildings depict contemporary scenes such as policemen chasing a robber and arresting a prostitute (on the wall of the Law School), or a student relaxing with a mug of beer and a cigarette. The architect, James Gamble Rogers, faux-aged these buildings by splashing the walls with acid, deliberately breaking their leaded glass windows and repairing them in the style of the Middle Ages, and creating niches for decorative statuary but leaving them empty to simulate loss or theft over the ages. In fact, the buildings merely simulate Middle Ages architecture, for though they appear to be constructed of solid stone blocks in the authentic manner, most actually have steel framing as was commonly used in 1930. One exception is Harkness Tower, 216 feet tall, which was originally a free-standing stone structure. It was reinforced in 1964 to allow the installation of the Yale Memorial Carillon.

Other examples of the Gothic (also called neo-Gothic and collegiate Gothic) style are on Old Campus by such architects as Henry Austin, Charles C. Haight and Russell Sturgis. Several are associated with members of the Vanderbilt family, including Vanderbilt Hall, Phelps Hall, St. Anthony Hall (a commission for member Frederick William Vanderbilt), the Mason, Sloane and Osborn laboratories, dormitories for the Sheffield Scientific School (the engineering and sciences school at Yale until 1956) and elements of Silliman College, the largest residential college.

Connecticut Hall

Ironically, the oldest building on campus, Connecticut Hall (built in 1750), is in the Georgian style and appears much more modern. Georgian-style buildings erected from 1929 to 1933 include Timothy Dwight College, Pierson College, and Davenport College, except the latter's east, York Street façade, which was constructed in the Gothic style.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, is one of the largest buildings in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books and manuscripts. It is located near the center of the University in Hewitt Quadrangle, which is now more commonly referred to as "Beinecke Plaza." The library's six-story above-ground tower of book stacks is surrounded by a windowless rectangular building with walls made of translucent Vermont marble, which transmit subdued lighting to the interior and provide protection from direct light, while glowing from within after dark.

A photo of the library by Paul Szynol is here.

The sculptures in the sunken courtyard by Isamu Noguchi are said to represent time (the pyramid), the sun (the circle), and chance (the cube).

Alumnus Eero Saarinen, Finnish-American architect of such notable structures as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Washington Dulles International Airport main terminal, and the CBS Building in Manhattan, designed Ingalls Rink at Yale and the newest residential colleges of Ezra Stiles and Morse. These latter were modelled after the medieval Italian hilltown of San Gimignano — a prototype chosen for the town's pedestrian-friendly milieu and fortress-like stone towers. These tower forms at Yale act in counterpoint to the college's many Gothic spires and Georgian cupolas.

Notable nonresidential campus buildings

Notable nonresidential campus buildings and landmarks include:

• Sterling Memorial Library
• Harkness Tower
• Woolsey Hall
• Beinecke Rare Book Library
• Yale University Art Gallery
• Yale Center for British Art
• Payne Whitney Gymnasium
• Ingalls Rink
• Battell Chapel
• Yale Art & Architecture Building
• Osborne Memorial Laboratories
• Sterling Hall of Medicine
• Sterling Law Buildings
• Kline Biology Tower
• Peabody Museum of Natural History

Yale's secret societies, whose buildings (some of which are called "tombs") were built both to be intensely private yet ostentatiously theatrical, display diversity and fancifulness of architectural expression, include:

• Berzelius, Don Barber in an austere cube with classical detailing (erected in 1908 or 1910).
• Book and Snake, Louis R. Metcalfe in a Greek Ionic style (erected in 1901).
• Elihu, architect unknown but built in a Colonial style (constructed with an early 17th century foundation and while the building is from 18th century).
• Manuscript Society, King Lui-Wu with Dan Kniley responsible for landscaping and Joseph Albers for the brickwork intaglio mural. Building constructed in a mid-century modern style.
• Scroll and Key, Richard Morris Hunt in a Moorish- or Islamic-inspired Beaux-Arts style (erected 1869–70).
• Skull and Bones, possibly Alexander Jackson Davis or Henry Austin in an Egypto-Doric style utilizing Brownstone (in 1856 the first wing was completed, in 1903 the second wing, 1911 the Neo-Gothic towers in rear garden were completed).
• St. Anthony Hall, (Charles C. Haight in a neo-Gothic style (erected circa 1913 to match the flanking donated dormitories {dated 1903–1906} now part of Silliman College).
• Wolf's Head, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (erected in the 1920s).

Campus life

Residential colleges

Yale has a system of 12 residential colleges, instituted in 1933 through a grant by Yale graduate Edward S. Harkness, who admired the college systems at Oxford and Cambridge. Each college has a carefully constructed support structure for students, including a Dean, Master, affiliated faculty, and resident Fellows. Each college also features distinctive architecture, secluded courtyards, and facilities ranging from libraries to squash courts to darkrooms. While each college at Yale offers its own seminars, social events, and Master's Teas with guests from the world, Yale students also take part in academic and social programs across the university, and all of Yale's 2,000 courses are open to undergraduates from any college.

Residential colleges are named for important figures or places in university history or notable alumni; they are deliberately not named for benefactors.

Residential Colleges of Yale University:

1. Berkeley College, named for the Rt. Rev. George Berkeley (1685–1753), early benefactor of Yale.
2. Branford College, named for Branford, Connecticut, where Yale was briefly located.
3. Calhoun College, named for John C. Calhoun, vice-president of the United States.
4. Davenport College, named for Rev. John Davenport, the founder of New Haven. Often called "D'port".
5. Ezra Stiles College, named for the Rev. Ezra Stiles, a president of Yale. Generally called "Stiles," despite an early-1990s crusade by then-master Traugott Lawler to preserve the use of the full name in everyday speech. Its buildings were designed by Eero Saarinen.
6. Jonathan Edwards College, named for theologian, Yale alumnus, and Princeton co-founder Jonathan Edwards. Generally called "J.E." The oldest of the residential colleges, J.E. is the only college with an independent endowment, the Jonathan Edwards Trust.
7. Morse College, named for Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of Morse code. Also designed by Eero Saarinen.
8. Pierson College, named for Yale's first rector, Abraham Pierson.
9. Saybrook College, named for Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the town in which Yale was founded.
10. Silliman College, named for noted scientist and Yale professor Benjamin Silliman. About half of its structures were originally part of the Sheffield Scientific School.
11. Timothy Dwight College, named for the two Yale presidents of that name, Timothy Dwight IV and Timothy Dwight V. Often abbreviated as "T.D."
12. Trumbull College, named for Jonathan Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut. The smallest college.

In 1990, Yale launched a series of massive renovations to the older residential buildings, whose decades of existence had seen only routine maintenance and incremental improvements to plumbing, heating, and electrical and network wiring. Renovations to many of the colleges are now complete, and among other improvements, renovated colleges feature newly built basement facilities including restaurants, game rooms, theaters, athletic facilities and music practice rooms.

The Yale administration is currently evaluating the feasibility of building two new residential colleges.

Sports

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The Walter Camp Gate at the Yale Athletic Complex.

Yale supports 35 varsity athletic teams that compete in the Ivy League Conference, the Eastern College Athletic Conference, the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Associaton, and Yale is an NCAA Division I member. Like other members of the Ivy League, Yale does not offer athletic scholarships and is no longer competitive with the top echelon of American college teams in the big-money sports of basketball and football. Nevertheless, American football was largely created at Yale by player and coach Walter Camp, who evolved the rules of the game away from rugby and soccer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yale has numerous athletic facilities, including the Yale Bowl (the nation's first natural "bowl" stadium, and prototype for such stadiums as the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Bowl), located at The Walter Camp Field athletic complex, and the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, the second-largest indoor athletic complex in the world.

October 21st, 2000 marked the dedication of Yale's fourth new boathouse in 157 years of collegiate rowing. The Gilder Boathouse is named to honor former Olympic rower Virginia Gilder '79 and her father Richard Gilder '54, who gave $4 million towards the $7.5 million project. Yale also maintains the Gales Ferry site where the heavyweight men's team trains for the prestigious Yale-Harvard Boat Race. Yale crew is the oldest collegiate athletic team in America, and today Yale Rowing boasts lightweight men, heavyweight men, and a women's team. All of an internationally competitive caliber.

The Yale Corinthian Yacht Club, founded in 1881, is the oldest collegiate sailing club in the world. The yacht club, located in nearby Branford, Connecticut, is the home of the Yale Sailing Team, which has produced several Olympic sailors.

Ingalls Rink by Eero Saarinen, thin-shell and tensile structure

Mascot

The school mascot is "Handsome Dan," the famous Yale bulldog, and the Yale fight song (written by alumnus Cole Porter) contains the refrain, "Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow." The school color is Yale Blue.

Yale athletics are supported by the Yale Precision Marching Band. The band attends every home football game and many away, as well as most hockey and basketball games throughout the winter.

Yale intramural sports are a vibrant aspect of student life. Students compete for their respective residential colleges, which fosters a friendly rivalry. The year is divided into fall, winter, and spring seasons, each of which includes about ten different sports. About half the sports are coed. At the end of the year, the residential college with the most points (not all sports count equally) wins the Tyng Cup.

Student life

Yale College students come from a variety of ethnic, national, and socio-economic backgrounds. Of the 2006-07 freshman class, 9% are international students, while 54% went to public high schools.[4] Minority students are visible and active in numerous cultural organizations, several cultural houses, and campus events.

Yale is also an open campus for the gay community. Its active LGBT community first received wide publicity in the late 1980s, when Yale obtained a reputation as the "gay Ivy," due largely to a 1987 Wall Street Journal article written by Julie V. Iovine, an alumna and the spouse of a Yale faculty member. During the same year, the University hosted a national conference on gay and lesbian studies and established the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center.[5] The slogan "One in Four, Maybe More; One in Two, Maybe You" was coined by the campus gay community. While the community in the 1980s and early 1990s was very activist, today most LGBT events have become part of the general campus social scene. For example, the annual LGBT Co-op Dance attracts queer as well as straight students. The strong programs at the School of Music, School of Drama, and School of Art also thrive.

Campus cultural life features many concerts, shows, recitals, and operas.

Student organizations

There are a large number of student organizations.

The Yale Political Union, the oldest student political organization in the United States, is often the largest organization on campus, and is advised by alumni political leaders such as John Kerry and George Pataki.

The university hosts a variety of student journals, magazines, and newspapers. The latter category includes the Yale Daily News, which was first published in 1878 and is the oldest daily college newspaper in the United States, as well as the weekly Yale Herald, first published in 1986. Dwight Hall, an independent, non-profit community service organization, oversees more than 2,000 Yale undergraduates working on more than 60 community service initiatives in New Haven. The Yale College Council runs several agencies that oversee campus wide activities and student services. The Yale Dramatic Association and Bulldog Productions cater to the theater and film communities, respectively.

The campus also includes several fraternities and sororities. The campus features at least 18 a capella groups, the most famous of which is The Whiffenpoofs, who are unusual among college singing groups in being made up solely of senior men. A number of prominent senior societies, including Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, are composed of Yale College seniors.

New Haven

New Haven has experienced major economic growth in the past couple of decades, turning it into a state cultural center and hub for travel. In the past decade, technology and biotech firms and investment by Yale have put a new face on this colonial city. In 2003, New Haven was selected as an All-America City, in recognition of its immigrant neighborhoods, city parks, and blocks of old mansions, quaint stores and big chains, and one of the world's pre-eminent universities.

Yale students run for alderman, work in City Hall, and launch non-profit organizations. Yalies go to Toad's Place to hear bands like Built to Spill and Rufus Wainwright, enjoy cheap martinis at Hot Tomatoes, or buy home-brewed beer and brick-oven pizza at BAR; and visitors check out exhibits at the Peabody Museum before taking in a show at the Shubert Theater.

The area's quality of life attracts businesses and residents who are unaffiliated with the university. For example, hedge funds are moving east from the world's hedge-fund capital of Greenwich. Downtown New Haven's luxury apartments draw thousands of young professionals who reverse-commute to high-paying corporate jobs in more suburban parts of Connecticut. The city has become a center for architecture firms, due in part to Eero Saarinen, whose firm moved to New Haven in the early 1960s, and younger colleagues including Cesar Pelli, whose "alumni" of his large New Haven firm have started firms of their own in the city.

Yale people of note

Nineteen Nobel laureates are affiliated with the university.

Benefactors

Yale has had many financial supporters, but some stand out by the magnitude of their contributions. Among those who have made large donations commemorated at the university are:

• Elihu Yale
• Edward S. Harkness
• Paul Mellon
• Joseph E. Sheffield
• John William Sterling
• Payne Whitney
• Edwin, Frederick, and Walter Beinecke
• William K. Lanman, who was also the main sponsor of the Tercentennial celebrations in 2001
• The Yale Class of 1954 donated $70 million in commemoration of their 50th reunion.

Notable alumni

All U.S. presidents since 1989 have been Yale graduates, namely George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton (who attended the University's Law School along with his wife, New York Senator Hillary Clinton), and George W. Bush, and Vice President Dick Cheney, (although he did not graduate). Many of the 2004 presidential candidates attended Yale: Bush, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and Joe Lieberman.

Other Yale-educated presidents were William Howard Taft (B.A.) and Gerald Ford (LL.B). Alumni also include several Supreme Court justices, including current Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Additional famous alumni are noted in the List of Yale University people, including Nobel Laureates, politicians, artists, athletes, activists, and numerous others who have led notable lives.

Staff and Labor Unions

Much of Yale University's staff, including most maintenance staff, dining hall employees, and administrative staff are unionized. Yale has a history of difficult and prolonged labor negotiations, often culminating in strikes. In a 2003 strike, however, more Union employees were working than striking. There are currently three unions of Yale employees.

Miscellany and traditions

• Yale students claim to have invented Frisbee, by tossing around empty pie tins from the Frisbie Pie Company. Another traditional Yale game was bladderball, played between 1954 and 1982.

• Yale's central campus in downtown New Haven covers 260 acres. An additional 500 acres (2 km²) includes the Yale golf course and nature preserves in rural Connecticut and Horse Island.

• Yale's Handsome Dan is believed to be the first live college mascot in America, having been established in 1889.

• Yale's student tour guides tell visitors that students consider it good luck to rub the toe of the statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey on Old Campus. Actual students rarely do so.

• Yale seniors at graduation smash clay pipes underfoot to symbolize passage from their "bright college years."

• The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.

Criticisms of Yale

Yale alumnus William F. Buckley's 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, criticized Yale for indoctrinating liberalism, undermining Christianity, and failing to dismiss radical professors.

Yale claims to be less reliant on teaching assistants in undergraduate education than many of its peer institutions. Teaching assistants generally lead discussion sections and some introductory language classes; they also sometimes teach undergraduate seminars in which they have unique expertise. Some graduate students have criticized Yale for an over-reliance on teaching assistants, claiming that when measured on a time per student basis, graduate teaching assistants do a majority of teaching at Yale. In comparison with its peer institutions, Yale senior faculty perform an unusually high amount of undergraduate teaching and are generally praised for being extremely accessible and interested in undergraduates. All tenured professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teach undergraduate courses, and courses taught primarily by graduate students account for only 7% of total enrollments.

In 2001, three Yale graduate students published a report detailing Yale's historical connections with slavery. The report noted that nine of Yale's residential colleges are named for slave owners or proponents of slavery such as John C. Calhoun; it also noted prominent abolitionists such as James Hillhouse associated with the university.

Admissions policies

Yale, like nearly all of its peer institutions, has been criticized for its supposed preferential admissions policies toward certain groups. These groups include African-Americans and Hispanics (affirmative action), children of alumni (legacy preferences), and athletes (athletic recruitment). However, Yale offers need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid to all applicants, including applicants from lower income groups and international applicants.

In the 2005 book The Chosen, Jerome Karabel unfavorably chronicles the use of non-academic criteria at Yale and its peer institutions throughout their histories. In the 2006 book The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden makes similar points regarding preferences given to wealthy and famous applicants.

In 2006, Yale came under public pressure for its admission of Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, as a non-degree student. Critics on both the right and left questioned the University's decision, both in light of Yale's refusal to allow ROTC on campus and the University's lack of support for programs offering educational opportunities for victims of the Taliban regime. In the summer of 2006, Yale denied Hashemi's application to its degree program.

Campus safety

In the 1970s and 1980s, poverty and violent crime rose in New Haven, dampening Yale's student and faculty recruiting efforts.^{[citation needed]} In 1991, junior Christian Prince was slain on Hillhouse Avenue, resulted in a brief decline in applications and leading Yale to boost the size of its police force, transfer secondary police responsibilities to an expanded security force, and install emergency blue phones around campus. Yale also began to make payments-in-lieu-of-taxes to the city ($2.3 million in 2005; $4.18 million in 2006).

Between 1990 and 2006, New Haven's crime rate fell by half, helped by a community policing strategy by the New Haven police and Yale's campus became one of the safest among the Ivy League and other peer schools. In 2002–04, Yale reported 14 violent crimes (homicide, aggravated assault, or sex offenses), when Harvard reported 83 such incidents, Princeton 24, and Stanford 54. The incidence of nonviolent crime (burglary, arson, and motor vehicle theft) was also lower than most of its peer schools.

In 2004, a national non-profit watchdog group called Security on Campus filed a complaint with the Department of Education, accusing Yale of under-reporting rape and sexual assaults.

Murders or attempted murders involving Yale students or faculty include:

• In 1974, Yale junior Gary Stein was killed in a robbery. Melvin Jones was convicted in the case and spent fifteen years in prison.
• In 1977, Yale student Bonnie Garland was killed by her former boyfriend, Yale graduate student Richard Herrin, while she was sleeping in her parents' house in Scarsdale, New York, where he was visiting. The support of the Yale Catholic community for the perpetrator resulted caused great controversy.
• On June 24, 1993, computer science professor David Gelernter was seriously injured in his office in Arthur K. Watson Hall by a bomb sent by serial killer Ted Kaczynski ("The Unabomber").
• In 1998, student Suzanne Jovin was stabbed to death in a wealthy neighborhood two miles from the central campus. Allegations that her thesis advisor was a suspect led to the end of his career at Yale, but the crime remains unsolved.

The Yale Campus has been the site of three bombing incidents. In addition to that carried out by the Unabomber, mentioned above, on May Day in 1970, during the New Haven Black Panther trials, two bombs were set off in the basement of Ingalls Rink. No injuries resulted, and the perpetrators were never identified. On May 21, 2003, an explosive device went off at the Yale Law School, damaging two classrooms. The latter crime has not been solved, and no motive has been discerned; the bombing occurred while the nation was under an elevated terror alert, and while the university was involved in difficult labor negotiations. The homes of at least two former employees were searched, but no arrests have been made in the case.

In 2004, Naomi Wolf wrote in an article in New York Magazine where she came forward with her own personal accusation against noted author and faculty member Harold Bloom, giving a detailed account of her efforts to verify the legitimacy of the procedures at Yale for handling instances of sexual harassment. She wrote in the story:

In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student’s inner thigh—a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. Here is why I am telling this story now: I began, nearly a year ago, to try—privately—to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren’t still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact—as secretive as a Masonic lodge. Full Story

Wolf's story testifies to a culture of secrecy and complicity in sexual harassment and assault when involving tenured and noted faculty.

Yale in fiction and popular culture

• Owen Johnson's novel, Stover at Yale, follows the college career of Dink Stover.
• Yale also appears in F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby and his short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
• Frank Merriwell, the model for all later juvenile sports fiction, plays football, baseball, crew, and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs.
• On Gilmore Girls, Rory Gilmore and Paris Geller attend Yale.
• Brad O'Keefe, on Grounded for Life is admitted to Yale.
• The 2000 film The Skulls concerns a secret society with resemblances to Skull and Bones. That society, as well as the a capella group the Whiffenpoofs, are elements of the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, about the Central Intelligence Agency.
• Sideshow Bob and Montgomery Burns, of The Simpsons, attended Yale; Burns was a member of Skull and Bones.
• John O'Hara, according to New Yorker contributor and Yale alum Brendan Gill, wanted desperately to have gone to Yale. George V. Higgins opined that the reason Yale University Library has the manuscript of BUtterfield 8 and the galley proofs of Appointment in Samarra is that O'Hara was "foraging for honors:"
• Blair Waldorf, Serena Van Der Woodsen, and Nate Archibald, of the Gossip Girl series, attend Yale.
• Bette Porter, of The L Word, is a Yale graduate.
• Aaron Sorkin characters Josh Lyman (The West Wing) and Simon Stiles (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) attended Yale Law School and Yale Drama School respectively. An episode of The West Wing was framed around a Whiffenpoofs performance at the White House.
• Mary Mazzio's 1999 documentary film, A Hero for Daisy, chronicles the 1976 demonstration at Yale in which the women's rowing team demanded equal athletic facilities.
• On Boy Meets World, Topanga Lawrence gets accepted into Yale after being put on the Wait List.

Books on Yale

• Lyman H. Bagg, Four Years at Yale, New Haven, 1891.
• Walter Camp and L. S. Welch, Yale: Her Campus, Classrooms and Athletics, Boston, 1899.
• Arnold G. Dana, Yale Old and New, 78 vols. personal scrapbook, 1942.
• Clarence Deming, Yale Yesterdays, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1915.
• Franklin B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Yale: Yale College with Annals of the College History, 6 vols. New York, 1885–1912.
• Robert Dudley French, The Memorial Quadrangle, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1929.
• Edgar S. Furniss, The Graduate School of Yale, New Haven, 1965.
• Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac, Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan, On Strike For Respect, (updated edition: University of Illinois Press, 1995,)
• Reuben A. Holden, Yale: A Pictorial History, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967.
• William L. Kingsley, Yale College. A Sketch of its History, 2 vols. New York, 1879.
• Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985.
• Cary Nelson, ed. Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Edwin Oviatt, The Beginnings of Yale (1701–1726), New Haven, Yale University Press, 1916.
• George Wilson Pierson, Yale College, An Educational History (1871–1921), New Haven, Yale University Press, 1952.
• George Wilson Pierson, The Founding of Yale: The Legend of the Forty Folios, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988.
• Patrick L. Pinnell, The Campus Guide: Yale University, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999.
• Yale, The University College (1921–1937), New Haven, Yale University Press, 1955.
• Anson Phelps Stokes, Memorials of Eminent Yale Men, 2 vols. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1914.

Secret Societies

• Robbins, Alexandra, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power, Little Brown & Co., 2002; ISBN 0-316-73561-2 (paper edition).
• Millegan, Kris (ed.), Fleshing Out Skull & Bones, TrineDay, 2003. ISBN 0-9752906-0-6 (paper edition).

External links

• Yale University official website
• Yale Daily News

• Central campus (winter) aerial photo from Google Maps
• Campus map from Yale University website
• Planned Giving at Yale University

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