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Yale University

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Template:Infobox American Universities

This article is about a university. For other uses of "Yale", see Yale (disambiguation).

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third oldest American collegiate institution and one of the most prestigious and well-known in the world. The University has graduated numerous Nobel prize winners and U.S. Presidents. Its $11 billion academic endowment is the second largest of any university in the world, after Harvard University. Yale has the largest undergraduate endowment in the world.

Yale is one of the eight members of the Ivy League. The rivalry between Yale and fellow Ivy League school Harvard is long and storied; from academics to rowing to college football, their historic rivalry is similar to that of Oxford and Cambridge in the UK (see Oxbridge rivalry). Yale is the second most prolific university in terms of Rhodes Scholar graduates in the country (after Harvard).

Yale's emphasis on undergraduate teaching is unusual among its peer research universities, and its undergraduates live in a unique residential college system. Yale's graduate schools include strong drama and arts programs and the most selective law school in the United States.

History

File:Harkness.jpg
Harkness Tower

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, which was furthered by a meeting in Branford, Connecticut by a group of ten Congregationalist ministers who pooled their books to form the school's first library. The school first opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson in Killingworth, Connecticut. In 1716, the school moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where it remains to this day.

The college was originally known as the Collegiate School; it adopted the name Yale after an early benefactor, Elihu Yale bestowed a generous gift of nine bales of goods, 417 books, and a portrait of King George I. Yale expanded gradually, establishing the Yale Medical School (1810), Yale Divinity School (1822), Yale Law School (1843), Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1847), the Yale School of Fine Arts (1869), and Yale School of Music (1894). In the early 20th century, Yale merged with the Sheffield Scientific School.

Schools and libraries

Yale College, which accepts fewer than 10% of its applicants, is the most selective college in the United States, according to U.S. News and World Report. Yale is also noted for its law school, medical school, graduate school, and school of music. The Divinity School was founded in the early 19th century by Congregationalists who felt that the Harvard University divinity school had become too liberal. The Yale Law School is the most selective in the United States, and has graduated U.S. Presidents and Supreme Court Justices.

Yale's library system is the second largest in North America with a total of almost 11 million volumes. The main library, Sterling Memorial Library, contains about 4 million volumes. The Beinecke Rare Book Library is housed in a marble building designed by Gordon Bunshaft, of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. Its courtyard sculptures are by Isamu Noguchi. Other resources include the Peabody Museum of Natural History and the Yale Center for British Art.

Yale supports thirty-five varsity athletic teams that compete in the Ivy League Conference and the Eastern College Athletic Conference, and Yale is an NCAA Division I member. 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 Payne Whitney Gymnasium, which is one of the largest and most elaborate indoor athletic complexes in the world. The school mascot is "Handsome Dan", the famous Yale bulldog.

The Yale Daily News, the oldest daily college newspaper in the United States, has been an important forum for opinion and controversy since 1878, and counts among its former editors Joseph Lieberman, Bob Woodward, and Strobe Talbot. The Yale Political Union is the oldest student political organization in the United States, and is advised by alumni political leaders such as John Kerry, Gerald Ford, and George Pataki. Dwight Hall, an independent, non-profit community service organization, oversees more than 2,000 Yale undergraduates working on more than sixty community service initiatives in New Haven. The Whiffenpoofs began the tradition of college a capella singing groups in 1909, and often perform on television and at the White House.

Heads of Collegiate School, Yale College, and Yale University

Rectors of Yale College   (birth-death)  (years as rector)
1  Rev. Abraham Pierson    (1641-1707)   (1701-1707) Collegiate School
2  Rev. Samuel Andrew      (1656-1738)   (1707-1719) (pro tempore)
3  Rev. Timothy Cutler     (1684-1765)   (1719-1726) 1718/9: renamed Yale College
4  Rev. Elisha William     (1694-1755)   (1726-1739)
5  Rev. Thomas Clap        (1703-1767)   (1740-1745)

Presidents of Yale College (birth-death) (years as president)
1  Rev. Thomas Clap        (1703-1767)   (1745-1766)
2  Rev. Naphtali Daggett   (1727-1780)   (1766-1777) (pro tempore)
3  Rev. Ezra Stiles        (1727-1795)   (1778-1795)
4  Timothy Dwight IV       (1752-1817)   (1795-1817)
5  Jeremiah Day            (1773-1867)   (1817-1846)
6  Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-1899)   (1846-1871)
7  Noah Porter III         (1811-1892)   (1871-1886)
8  Timothy Dwight V        (1828-1916)   (1886-1899) 1887: renamed Yale University
9  Arthur Twining Hadley   (1856-1930)   (1899-1921)
10 James Rowland Angell    (1869-1949)   (1921-1937)
11 Charles Seymour         (1885-1963)   (1937-1951)
12 Alfred Whitney Griswold (1906-1963)   (1951-1963)
13 Kingman Brewster, Jr.   (1919-1988)   (1963-1977)
14 Hanna Holborn Gray      (1930-    )   (1977-1977) (acting)
15 A. Bartlett Giamatti    (1938-1989)   (1977-1986)
16 Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.   (1942-    )   (1986-1992)
17 Howard R. Lamar         (1923-    )   (1992-1993)
18 Richard C. Levin        (1947-    )   (1993-    )

Residential colleges

Yale has a system of twelve residential colleges, instituted in the early 1930s through a grant by Yale graduate Edward S. Harkness, who admired the college system at Oxford and Cambridge. Undergraduate students are accepted by the university as a whole, and assigned to residential colleges at random. (A special dispensation, though, is made for "legacy" students or students with siblings currently enrolled in Yale College; they may request to be placed in the same college or to be placed in a different college.) 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 rich facilities ranging from libraries to squash courts to dark rooms. While each college at Yale offers its own seminars, social events, and Master's Teas with luminaries from the outside 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 of Yale University (official list):

  1. Pierson College - named for Yale's first rector, Abraham Pierson
  2. Davenport College - named for Rev. John Davenport (usually called "D'port")
  3. Jonathan Edwards College - named for theologian Jonathan Edwards (usually called "J.E.")
  4. Branford College - named for Branford, Connecticut
  5. Saybrook College - named for Old Saybrook, Connecticut
  6. Trumbull College - named for Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut
  7. Berkeley College - named for the Rt. Rev. George Berkeley (though pronounced BERK-lee) (1685-1753)
  8. Calhoun College - named for John C. Calhoun
  9. Silliman College - named for Benjamin Silliman
  10. Timothy Dwight College - named for the two Yale presidents of that name, Timothy Dwight IV and Timothy Dwight V (usually called "T.D.")
  11. Ezra Stiles College - named for the Rev. Ezra Stiles and generally called simply "Stiles," despite an early-1990s crusade by then-master Traugott Lawler to preserve the use of the full name in everyday speech.
  12. Morse College - named for Samuel Morse

Other campus buildings

Cross Campus
Cross Campus

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:

Famous alumni

Yale alumni are well represented in the ranks of U.S. presidents, including four of the last six: Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, William Clinton, and George W. Bush. Beginning with Peace Corps founder and Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sargent Shriver in 1972, at least one Yale graduate has run on either the Democratic or Republican ticket in every presidential election for the past three decades, and both the Democratic and Republican candidates for the 2004 presidential election are Yale graduates: George W. Bush and John Kerry. In the 2004 Democratic primaries, Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean were also Yale graduates.

Nobel laureates

Technology & innovation

Founders, entrepreneurs, & CEO's

Academics

Presidents & Vice Presidents of the United States

Law & politics

History, literature, art & music

Film

Television

Fictional

(* attended, but did not graduate from Yale)

Famous Professors

Professors who are also alumni of Yale are listed in italics.

Famous on-campus tragedies

Yale's high public profile led to three on-campus bombings. On May 1, 1970, an explosive device was detonated in the Ingalls Rink during events related to the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale. On June 24, 1993, computer science professor David Gelernter was injured in his office on Hillhouse Avenue by a bomb sent by serial killer and Harvard graduate Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber. On May 21, 2003, an explosive device went off at the Yale Law School, damaging two classrooms.

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