Yale University
Yale Institution is a private Ivy League research university founded in 1701 as Collegiate School located in New Haven, Connecticut. In the United States it is the third-oldest and among the most distinguished institution of higher education of the country.
This Collegiate School was founded by clergy to educate Congregational preachers before migrating to New Haven in 1716. By the time of the American Revolution, the curriculum had expanded to include sciences and humanities in addition to theology and other sacred languages. In the 19th century the college moved into graduate and professional education, offering the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and it was established as a university in 1887.
The Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (the original graduate college), and twelve professional schools make up fourteen constituent institutions of Yale. Though the Yale Corporation governs the institution, the faculty of each school is in charge of its curriculum and degree programmes. The institution’s western New Haven campus possesses athletic facilities, forests, wildlife preserves around New England and central campus in downtown New Haven. In 2021 the endowment of the university was worth $42.3 billion, that makes it the second-largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, with over 15 million volumes, is the third-largest academic library in the United States, which serves all the constituent institutions.
Expansions
The Yale School of Medicine was added in 1810. The college gradually grew with the addition of the Yale Divinity School in 1822, Yale Law School in 1822, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1847, and the now-defunct Sheffield Scientific School in 1847, and the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1869. In 1887 Yale Institution was renamed Yale University, under the presidency of Timothy Dwight V, and the former name was solely applied to the undergraduate college after that. In addition, the Sheffield Scientific School would restructure its affiliation with the university to provide solely undergraduate courses.
Medicine
From 1920 through 1935, Milton Winternitz served as dean of Yale School of Medicine. He was equally devoted to “social medicine” and the study of persons in their culture and surroundings as he was to the new scientific medicine founded in Germany. He is credited for establishing the “Yale System” of teaching, with fewer lectures and tests, and strengthened the full-time faculty system; the Yale School of Nursing and the psychiatric department was founded by him and he also constructed several new facilities. Unfortunately, progress toward his plans for an Institute of Human Relations, which he envisioned as a haven where social scientists and biological scientists could collaborate in a holistic study of humanity, lasted only a few years before resentful anti-Semitic colleagues forced him to resign.
Faculty
Before WWII, most prestigious university faculties had few Jews, blacks, women, or other minorities among their ranks; Yale was no exception. By 1980, the situation had drastically changed, with many members of those organizations holding professor jobs. Almost all the member of the Faculty of Sciences and Arts and certain members of other faculties teaches undergraduate courses, with over 2,000 offered each year.
Administration and organization
Leadership
The President and Fellows of Yale College, often known as the Yale Corporation or Board of Trustees, is the governing body of the university. It comprises thirteen standing committees, each with its own set of tasks stated in the university’s by-laws. Three ex officio members, six chosen alumni fellows, and ten successor trustees comprise the 19 members of the corporation. Yale College (undergraduate programme), the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the twelve professional schools are the three major academic components of the university.
Staff and Labour Unions
Several separate unions represent Yale University employees. Local 34 represents clerical and technical workers, while Local 35 represents service and maintenance workers. Both are affiliated with UNITE HERE. Unlike other universities of the country, Yale has consistently refused to recognize its graduate student union, Local 33 (another UNITE HERE affiliate), citing claims that the elections of the unions were undemocratic and that graduate students are not employees; the American Federation of Teachers has criticized Yale’s decision not to recognize the union. In 2005 Yale Police Benevolent Association, which joined the Connecticut Organization for Public Safety Employees, represents Yale University Police Department, officers.
Campus
The 260-acre central campus of Yale in downtown New Haven includes the main, historic campus and a medical campus close to Yale-New Haven Hospital. The institution has 500 acres of athletic facilities in western New Haven, including the Yale Golf Course. The 17-building, 136-acre former Bayer HealthCare complex in West Haven, Connecticut, was purchased by Yale in 2008, and the facilities are now used as laboratory and research space. In Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire, it owns seven forests and wildlife preserves and the largest among them is the 7,840-acre Yale-Myers Forest in Connecticut’s Quiet Corner.
The 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 are prominent contemporary buildings mentioned in architectural history survey courses. Yale also owns and has renovated several notable 19th-century mansions on Hillhouse Avenue, which Charles Dickens deemed the most beautiful street in America when he visited in the 1840s. In 2011 Travel+Leisure named the Yale campus as one of the most beautiful campus in the United States.
Many of university’s buildings, including the Yale Drama School, were built in the Collegiate Gothic architectural style between 1917 and 1931, partly because of Edward S. Harkness. Contemporary college personas, such as a writer, an athlete, a tea-drinking socialite, and a student who has fallen asleep while reading, are depicted in stone sculptures placed on the walls of the buildings. Similarly, the ornate friezes on the buildings represent modern scenarios, such as a police officer pursuing down a robber and catching a prostitute (on the Law School’s wall) or a student relaxing with a mug of beer and a cigarette.
The oldest structure on campus, the Connecticut Hall was completed in 1750 in the Georgian style. Timothy Dwight College, Pierson College, and Davenport College were all built in the Georgian style between 1929 and 1933, except the latter’s east York Street façade, built in the Gothic style to match the nearby structures.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, built by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Gordon Bunshaft, is one of the world’s largest structures dedicated only to preserving rare books and manuscripts. A six-story above-ground tower of book stacks containing 180,000 volumes is encased by enormous translucent Vermont marble panels and a steel and granite truss.
Sustainability
The Office of Sustainable of the Yale University is responsible for developing and implementing sustainability initiatives. The university grants renewable energy credits to offset some of the energy used by residential colleges as part of this commitment. Eleven campus buildings are being considered for LEED certification. Due to the Yale Sustainable Food Project, all residential college dining halls now provide local, organic vegetables, fruits, and meat. On the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s College Sustainability Report Card 2008, achieved an overall grade of “B+” and named as Campus Sustainability Leader.
Campus Safety
Yale has pioneered several campus safety initiatives. In 1894 Yale University established its first campus police force when the university hired municipal police officers to patrol the campus exclusively. The university originally engaged the officers to settle the conflict between students and residents of the city and prevent harmful student activity. A range of safety services is offered, including blue phones, a safety escort, a 24-hour shuttle service, and the Yale Police Department.
Admissions
US News ranks Yale College’s undergraduate entrance as “most selective.” Yale admitted 2,234 candidates into the Class of 2026 in 2022, out of 50,015 applicants, for a 4.46 per cent acceptance rate. 98 per cent of students graduate within six years. About half of Yale College students get some financial help, and 15% are expected to have no family contribution. Moreover, 39% of Yale undergraduates are from ethnic minorities in the United States, and 10.5 per cent are international students. Ninety-seven per cent of students were in the top 10% of their high school class, with 55 per cent attending public schools and 45 per cent attending private, religious, or international institutions.
Ranking
The New England Commission of Higher Education has granted Yale University accreditation. Yale was ranked third among national universities in the United States by US News & World Report in 2016, as it has been for the previous sixteen years. Yale was placed 11th in the 2016 Academic Ranking of World Universities, 10th in the 2016-17 Nature Index for scientific research output quality, and 10th in the 2016 CWUR World University Rankings globally. In addition, the university was ranked sixth in the 2016 Times Higher Education (THE) Global University Employability Rankings and eighth in the Academic World Reputation Rankings.
Research
The Association of American Universities (AAU) classifies Yale as “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity.” According to the National Science Foundation, Yale spent $990 million on research and development in 2018, placing it 15th in the U.SU.S.
Sixty-seven members of the National Academy of Sciences, 55 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 8 members of the National Academy of Engineering, and 187 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences are among Yale’s current staff. After normalizing for institution size, the college is the tenth-biggest baccalaureate source of PhD degree recipients in the United States and the largest within the Ivy League.
Campus life
Yale is a research university with many graduate and professional school students. Yale College students, or undergraduates, come from a wide range of ethnic, national, financial, and personal backgrounds. Ten per cent of the first-year class of 2010-2011 are non-citizens, while 54 per cent attended public high schools. Yale students had a median family income of $192,600, with 57 per cent of students coming from the top ten per cent of earners and 16 per cent from the poorest 60 per cent.
Residential colleges
Edward S. Harkness, who liked the social intimacy of Oxford and Cambridge and provided large monies to construct equivalent colleges at Yale and Harvard, established Yale’s residential college system in 1933. Though Yale’s colleges are organized and structurally similar to their English counterparts, they are dependent on Yale College and have little autonomy. The colleges are overseen by a president and an academic dean who live on campus, and each college’s fellowship is made up of university professors and affiliates.
Calhoun college
Since the 1960s, calls to rename the college or remove honours to John C. Calhoun have been made because of his white supremacist ideals and pro-slavery leadership. Following the racially motivated church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, renewed calls for Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges, to be renamed in the summer of 2015. Students signed a petition seeking the name change in July 2015. They claimed in the petition that, while Calhoun was regarded as an “outstanding American statesman” in the nineteenth century, he was “one of the most prolific champions of slavery and racial supremacy” in American history.
Calhoun was “a prominent political theorist, a vice president to two separate USUS presidents, a secretary of war and state, and a congressman and senator from South Carolina,” according to him. Also, Calhoun acknowledged, “Involuntary servitude is thought to be necessary for the highest kinds of society. Not only that, but he also believed that races he considered to be inferior, particularly black people, should be subjected to it for their own good.” In 2015, student activism around this subject grew, with more protests triggered by a controversy over an administrator’s comments about the potential good and negative consequences of students wearing culturally sensitive Halloween costumes.
Student organization
In 2014, Yale had 385 recognized student organizations, with another 100 becoming registered.
Several student publications, magazines, and newspapers are published at the university. The Yale Record is the world’s oldest comedy magazine, founded in 1872. The Yale Daily News, which began publication in 1878, and the Yale Herald, which began publication in 1986, are two newspapers. The Yale Journal of Medicine & Law is a biannual publication that examines the relationship between law and medicine.
The Yale College Council oversees several organizations that supervise campus activities and student services. Dwight Hall, a non-profit community service organization, supervises approximately 2,000 Yale undergraduates who work on over 70 community service projects in New Haven. Bulldog Productions and the Yale Dramatic Association cater to the theatre and film communities. The Yale Drama Coalition also aims to manage and offer resources for the different Sudler Fund-sponsored theatre shows every weekend. WYBC Yale Radio is a student-owned and controlled radio station on campus. Students used to broadcast on AM and FMFM frequencies, but now they solely broadcast online.
The Yale College Council (YCC) is the undergraduate student government on campus. The Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee, a YCC subsidiary entity, regulates and funds all registered student organizations (UOFC). Yale’s graduate and professional student government is the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS).
Alumni politicians like John Kerry and George Pataki advise the Yale Political Union. The Yale International Relations Association (YIRA) is the umbrella organization for Yale’s top-ranked Model United Nations squad. Other Model UN conferences, such as YMUN Korea or YMUN Taiwan, and educational programmes, such as the Yale Review of International Relations (YRIS), YMUN Institute, or Hemispheres, are also affiliated with YIRA.
Traditions
Seniors at Yale crush clay pipes underfoot at graduation to represent a departure from their “bright college years,” albeit the pipes have recently been substituted with “bubble pipes.” Yale student tour guides tell visitors that rubbing the toe of Theodore Dwight Woolsey’s monument on Old Campus brings good luck; however, actual students rarely do so. Bladderball, a campus-wide game played with a big inflatable ball, became a popular tradition in the second half of the twentieth century but was banned by management due to safety concerns. Despite criticism from the administration, students brought the game back in 2009, 2011, and 2014.
In Fiction and Popular Culture
Yale University is a cultural reference point for producing some of society’s most elite individuals. Its grounds, alumni, and students have been extensively featured in fiction and popular culture in the United States. For example, Frank Merriwell, the model for all later juvenile sports fiction, plays football, baseball, crew, and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs in Owen Johnson’s novel Stover at Yale. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald also mentions Yale University. Nick Carraway, the narrator, published a series of Yale News editorials, while Tom Buchanan was “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football” for the university.
Alumni
Yale has produced many notable alumni in various professions, both public and private, throughout its history. According to figures from 2020, over 71 per cent of students enter employment, with 16.6 per cent going on to graduate or professional school. 252 Rhodes Scholarships, 123 Marshall Scholarships, 67 Truman Scholarships, 21 Churchill Scholarships, and 9 Mitchell Scholarships were awarded to Yale graduates. The university has also produced 89 MacArthur Fellows and is the second-highest generator of Fulbright Scholars, with 1,199 in its history. Yale was ranked fifth among research universities producing the most 2020-2021 Fulbright Scholars by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Yale has also produced 31 living billionaires.
Yale alumni have had a considerable presence in the US government in all three branches. 19 judges of the US Supreme Court, have been alumni of this university, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni that include current senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, and Chris Coons.
There are numerous award-winning authors and influential writers who have passed from this university, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough.
Baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow, baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss, and football players Calvin Hill and Gary Fenick, are also Yale alumni.