43 Fun Facts About Yale University

Yale University is located in which city?

New Haven cannot collect property tax on Yale's academic buildings, so city officials have long pressed the university to do more for the city.

Besides Harvard, which is the only US college older than Yale?

William & Mary got its royal charter in 1693; Yale followed in 1701, founded by colonial ministers to prepare young men for service in church and civil state.

Elihu Yale made the fortune behind his 1718 gift working for which trading company?

Elihu Yale ran the East India Company's Madras post until it removed him for self-dealing and made him pay a penalty, yet he still sailed home with a large fortune.

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

Cotton Mather wrote to Elihu Yale in 1718 suggesting the Collegiate School take his name in return for a gift; the Mathers hoped it would stay more orthodox than Harvard.

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

The PhD came to America when Yale conferred it in 1861, copying German universities, where ambitious American scholars had gone to earn doctorates.

Which Yale graduate, secretary to the British commander, helped spare Yale when British troops raided its city in 1779?

Edmund Fanning had seen a North Carolina mob wreck his own house in 1770, and nine years later he is credited with talking British raiders out of razing Yale.

Which 1773 Yale graduate and Revolutionary War spy is said to have regretted having 'but one life to lose'?

Nathan Hale volunteered to spy behind British lines, and his famous last words survive only secondhand, through a British officer who watched him hang.

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

Latin and Greek stayed required under the 1828 Yale Report, and its prestige helped slow elective reforms at American colleges for decades.

Which Yale school admitted women from its 1869 opening?

Fine Arts took women because its donor, Augustus Street, specified in his will a school open to both sexes, and two of its first three students were women.

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

Vassar, a Seven Sisters college in Poughkeepsie, studied the merger in 1966-67 and then voted to stay independent; both schools went coeducational on their own three years later.

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

Title IX carried the students' claim, which the courts dismissed as moot or unproven, but Yale had already set up a way to hear sexual harassment complaints.

In 2017 Yale renamed Calhoun College after which computing pioneer?

Grace Hopper, a Navy rear admiral who earned two Yale graduate degrees, gave her name to the college after Yale reversed its 2016 decision to keep John C. Calhoun's name.

David Swensen grew Yale's endowment by shifting money heavily into which kind of investment?

Private equity and other illiquid assets anchored Swensen's 'Yale Model', and many endowments later copied it, though few matched his results.

Which president met his wife while both studied law at Yale?

Bill Clinton met Hillary Rodham at Yale Law School; both campaigned for George McGovern in 1972, and she later moved to Arkansas, where they married in 1975.

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

Hillhouse Avenue honors James Hillhouse, whose elm planting gave the city its nickname, the Elm City.

James Gamble Rogers gave Yale's Davenport College a Gothic street front, but what style is the rest?

Georgian red brick fills the rest of Davenport because Rogers matched the street front to his Gothic quadrangle opposite, while the inside recalled Yale's colonial past.

Yale's 216-foot Gothic tower of 1921 was later reinforced with steel to hold what?

The tower was reinforced to carry a 54-bell carillon, which students in the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs still play every day during term.

Which famous book does Yale's Beinecke Library keep on permanent display?

The Gutenberg Bible sits behind marble panels just 1.25 inches thick, which let soft light through while shielding the rare books from direct sunlight.

Which Gothic building with a cathedral-like entrance hall is Yale's main library?

Sterling Memorial Library dresses up like a cathedral, with a nave for an entrance hall and an altar for a desk, and student critics mocked the disguise when it opened.

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

Othniel Charles Marsh persuaded his uncle George Peabody to give $150,000 to found the museum in 1866; its Great Hall holds a mounted Brontosaurus beneath Zallinger's 110-foot mural The Age of Reptiles.

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

Eero Saarinen modelled the two colleges on the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano, and described their walls as 'masonry walls made without masons'.

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

Handsome Dan, bought by student Andrew Graves in 1889, is considered the first live college mascot in America; the original, stuffed, sits in a glass case at Payne Whitney Gymnasium.

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

Cole Porter wrote about 300 songs at Yale, then enrolled at Harvard Law School before switching to music studies at Harvard.

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

The Rose Bowl's design was influenced by the Yale Bowl, whose designer left out restrooms.

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

Walter Camp, Yale class of 1880, devised the line of scrimmage, the down system and the eleven-man side, earning the title 'Father of American Football'.

Which future film star played in Harvard's 29-29 tie with Yale in 1968?

Tommy Lee Jones was on the Harvard team that scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds, prompting the Crimson headline 'Harvard Beats Yale 29-29'.

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

Frisbee takes its name from the Frisbie Pie Company's tins, and Wham-O altered the spelling to avoid legal trouble; Middlebury students claim the craze too.

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

The Whiffenpoofs pick an entirely new group of Yale seniors every year, a tradition begun by a senior quartet that met weekly at Mory's.

Which strip began as 'Bull Tales' in the Yale Daily News?

Doonesbury got its name in 1970, when a new syndicate picked up Garry Trudeau's campus strip, renamed it and ran it in newspapers nationwide.

Which Yale senior society was founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft?

Skull and Bones puts the number 322 on its badge, a figure widely linked to 322 BC, the year the Athenian orator Demosthenes died.

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

Henry Durand set his words to 'Die Wacht am Rhein', and after World War I anti-German feeling nearly got the song banned from campus.

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

Sonia Sotomayor went straight from Yale Law School into prosecuting crimes as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

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

Credit/No Credit is a legacy of late-1960s student unrest, when Yale Law students attacked grading as a symbol of hierarchy and the school dropped traditional grades.

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

Yale's partner, the National University of Singapore, decided in 2021 to close Yale-NUS College, which shut after its final class graduated in 2025.

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

Russia's prosecutors claimed the university aimed at violating Russia's territorial integrity.

Which future first chief of the US Forest Service founded Yale's forestry school with his family?

Gifford Pinchot publicly attacked the interior secretary over Alaska coal claims until President Taft fired him as Forest Service chief in 1910.

Which philanthropist, an admirer of Oxford and Cambridge, funded Yale's residential colleges, which opened in 1933?

Edward S. Harkness offered Yale the plan first, but when it missed his 1928 deadline he funded Harvard's houses, returning to Yale in 1930.

Which former Yale president went on to become commissioner of Major League Baseball?

Bart Giamatti struck a deal that left baseball's all-time hits leader permanently ineligible over gambling, then died of a heart attack about a week later.

Which Yale freshman did John Hinckley hope to impress by shooting President Reagan?

Jodie Foster had been pestered by Hinckley's calls and love letters, and a second stalker later came to Yale meaning to kill her but changed his mind.

What is the oldest building on Yale's campus, begun in 1750?

Connecticut Hall is the only building left from Old Brick Row, the line of college buildings Yale tore down to make today's quadrangle.

Which French philosopher was a regular visiting professor at Yale from the 1970s until the mid-1980s?

Jacques Derrida worked with Paul de Man at Yale, and when a leading colleague from their deconstruction circle left for UC Irvine in 1986, Derrida followed him there.

Which Founding Father names a residential college Yale opened in 2017?

Benjamin Franklin was chosen to honor an alumnus donor who saw him as a role model and gave $250 million toward building the two colleges.

Which Hartford school, founded in 1823, ended Yale's in-state monopoly?

Trinity College, founded as Washington College, later sold its downtown campus to the city of Hartford, and the state Capitol was built on that land.