50 Fun Facts About Yale University

Yale University is located in which city?

The town outbid several rivals in 1716 for the right to host the young college, which had started in Killingworth and moved to Saybrook.

In what year was Yale founded, making it the third-oldest US institution of higher education?

Only Harvard (1636) and William & Mary (1693) are older; it is one of nine colonial colleges chartered before the Revolution.

Under what name was Yale established in 1701?

It was founded by Congregationalist clergy to train ministers and lay leaders, and only became Yale College in 1718.

Elihu Yale, whose donation earned him naming rights, made his fortune in Madras working for which trading concern?

He was the first president of Fort St George in Madras; his gift of nine bales of goods sold for more than £560.

Which Boston clergyman suggested the school rename itself 'Yale College' after Elihu Yale's gift?

The Mathers had championed the Collegiate School in the hope it would stay more Puritan than Harvard.

Yale awarded the first of what academic degree in the United States, in 1861?

The college organised itself as a university in 1887 and was a founding member of the Association of American Universities.

Which Yale president, who made all freshmen study Hebrew, put Urim and Thummim on the seal?

Stiles, president from 1778 to 1795, had also helped found Brown University.

Which Yale graduate serving the British general saved the college when British forces occupied New Haven in 1779?

Yale thanked him with an honorary doctorate of laws in 1803.

Which 1773 Yale graduate and Revolutionary War spy 'regretted that he had but one life to lose'?

He was the archetype of the manly, aristocratic Yale ideal in the early 19th century.

The Yale Report of 1828 was a dogmatic defence of teaching what?

Critics wanted more maths, science and modern languages; the report ensured the classics were not abandoned.

In what year did Yale first admit women as undergraduates?

A proposed merger with Vassar had fallen through; women had studied in graduate programmes since 1892 and Lucinda Foote passed the entrance exam in 1793 but was rejected.

Yale discussed merging in 1966 with which women's college to bring in coeducation?

The Seven Sisters school tentatively accepted, then declined; both went coed on their own three years later.

Alexander v. Yale was the first lawsuit to use which law to argue sexual harassment of students is sex discrimination?

The plaintiffs lost in court, but the reasoning reshaped discrimination law and led Yale to set up a Grievance Board and Women's Center.

In 2017 Yale renamed Calhoun College after which computing pioneer?

John C. Calhoun, the slave-owning vice president, had been on the building since the 1930s.

Roughly how large was Yale's endowment in fiscal year 2025?

That made it the second-largest of any educational institution, behind Harvard.

How many Nobel laureates had been affiliated with Yale by October 2025?

The tally also includes 5 Fields medallists, 4 Abel laureates and 3 Turing Award winners.

How many US presidents count as Yale alumni?

Taft, Ford, George H. W. Bush, Clinton and George W. Bush; a Yalie was on a major-party ticket in every election from 1972 to 2004.

Which street of mansions did Dickens reportedly call the most beautiful in America?

He visited during his 1840s American tour; the university now owns many of the houses.

Architect James Gamble Rogers made Yale's 1917-31 Collegiate Gothic buildings look old by doing what?

He also left empty niches to suggest statues stolen over the centuries; underneath, most buildings have 1930s steel frames.

Yale's 216-foot Harkness Tower was reinforced in 1964 to hold what?

The tower was originally a free-standing stone structure, unusual among the steel-framed Gothic buildings around it.

The Beinecke Library's walls glow when lit from outside. What are they made of?

The Vermont marble was milled thin enough to let light through; Gordon Bunshaft designed the building.

The Beinecke displays one of the 48 surviving copies of which book?

The library's collections also include the mysterious Voynich manuscript.

The Yale University Library, with more than 15 million volumes, ranks where among US academic libraries?

Its centrepiece is Sterling Memorial Library, which hangs a portrait of the first seven women to earn Yale PhDs in 1894.

The Peabody Museum of Natural History was founded in 1866 at the urging of which palaeontologist, Peabody's nephew?

Its Great Hall of Dinosaurs holds a mounted Brontosaurus and the 110-foot mural The Age of Reptiles.

Which architect designed Yale's Ingalls Rink and its Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges?

Kahn did the Art Gallery and Center for British Art, and Rudolph the Art & Architecture Building; all feature in architecture survey courses.

Yale's teams are known as what?

They compete in NCAA Division I's Ivy League; the school colour has been Yale Blue since 1894.

Yale's bulldog Handsome Dan, established in 1889, is believed to have been the first what in America?

The original won first prize at Westminster and is preserved in a glass case in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

Which future Broadway composer wrote Yale's official fight song, 'Bulldog', as a student?

The far more famous 'Boola Boola' is not the official fight song, though it gave Yale its unofficial motto.

Yale's sunken 1914 football stadium was the prototype for which Pasadena venue?

The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum was modelled on it too; it sits in the Walter Camp Field complex.

Which Yale alumnus is known as 'the Father of American Football'?

The Harvard–Yale rivalry that he helped shape began in 1875 and is called simply 'The Game'.

The Harvard Crimson's headline 'Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29' followed The Game of which year?

Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds; the two met at Fenway Park in 2018 to mark the 50th anniversary.

Yale students claim to have invented which pastime by tossing empty pie tins from a local bakery?

The tins came from the Frisbie Pie Company.

Yale's most famous a cappella group, founded in 1909, is called what?

It was made up solely of senior men until 2018; the campus has at least 18 a cappella groups.

In which year was the Yale Daily News first published?

Garry Trudeau's 'Bull Tales', the precursor of Doonesbury, ran in it in the late 1960s.

Yale's oldest and most famous secret society, founded in 1832, is called what?

William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft founded it after a row over Phi Beta Kappa awards; the others are its rival 'tombs'.

Yale's oldest secret society is also known by which number?

The society's windowless meeting hall is known as the Tomb.

Yale's alma mater, 'Bright College Years', was written in 1881 to the tune of which German patriotic song?

Henry Durand of the Class of 1881 penned the words.

Yale Law School counts which of these Supreme Court justices among its alumni?

Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh also went there; the others are Harvard alumni.

Yale Law School grades first-semester students on what system?

Thanks to Connecticut court rules, its first-year students can also represent real clients in clinics.

In 2013 Yale opened a joint liberal arts college in which Asian country?

Yale-NUS College was a partnership with the National University of Singapore; the Peking University programme had ended in 2012 for lack of participants.

Yale has seen at least how many strikes since 1968?

It has also consistently refused to recognise its graduate student union, Local 33.

In July 2025, which country declared Yale an 'undesirable' organisation?

The prosecutor's office accused it of aiming to violate the country's territorial integrity.

The 7,840-acre Yale-Myers Forest lies in which state's rural 'Quiet Corner'?

It lies in the state's rural 'Quiet Corner'; the university also owns Horse Island nature preserve.

Which philanthropist, an admirer of Oxford and Cambridge, funded Yale's residential college system in 1933?

He donated to found similar colleges at Harvard too; the 216-foot Harkness Tower also bears the family name.

The Collegiate School moved in 1716 to New Haven, which had done what to win the right to host it?

The school had moved to Saybrook in 1707, and its deed technically required it to stay there.

In what year was Yale College renamed Yale University, under president Timothy Dwight V?

The old name was kept only for the undergraduate college; the School of Music followed in 1894 and Forestry in 1900.

What is the oldest building on Yale's campus, built in 1750 in the Georgian style?

It stands on the Old Campus, the university's oldest precinct, where most on-campus freshmen live.

Which French philosopher, the 'father of deconstruction', taught in Yale's comparative literature department?

He taught there from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, part of the so-called Yale School of literary criticism.

Roughly what share of Yale undergraduates live in their residential college or an affiliated dorm?

Every undergraduate is assigned to a college before freshman year; colleges host seminars and 'Master's teas' but no academic departments.

Yale was the only college in Connecticut from its founding until which year?

During that stretch it educated the sons of the elite, with presidents Thomas Clap and Ezra Stiles drawing it into the Great Awakening and Enlightenment.