Yale University Trivia
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43 free Yale University trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Yale University trivia for alumni, applicants, Ivy League rivals and anyone who has walked past Harkness Tower and wondered why the stone looks so old. The quiz starts in 1701 with the Collegiate School, the ten ministers who donated books, the moves from Killingworth to Saybrook to New Haven, and the East India Company man whose nine bales of goods bought the naming rights. From there it covers the firsts and the oddities: the first PhD in America, the freshman Hebrew requirement behind the seal, the year women finally arrived as undergraduates, and the acid-splashed Collegiate Gothic buildings designed to look centuries older than they are. Then the campus icons: the marble-walled Beinecke and its Gutenberg Bible, the Peabody's Brontosaurus, the Yale Bowl, Cole Porter's fight song, Handsome Dan the bulldog, the Whiffenpoofs, Skull and Bones and the other tombs. Later rounds turn to Yale Law School, the presidents and justices it produced, the Harvard game that ended 29-29, and the college renamed for Grace Hopper. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Harvard, Ivy League and college trivia quizzes.
30 of 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Yale University is located in which city?
New Haven
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.
Q 02Besides Harvard, which is the only US college older than Yale?
William & Mary
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.
Q 03Elihu Yale made the fortune behind his 1718 gift working for which trading company?
the East India 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.
Q 04Which Boston clergyman suggested the school rename itself 'Yale College' after Elihu Yale's gift?
Cotton Mather
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.
Q 05Yale awarded the first of what degree in the United States, in 1861?
the PhD
The PhD came to America when Yale conferred it in 1861, copying German universities, where ambitious American scholars had gone to earn doctorates.
Q 06Which Yale graduate, secretary to the British commander, helped spare Yale when British troops raided its city in 1779?
Edmund Fanning
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.
Q 07Which 1773 Yale graduate and Revolutionary War spy is said to have regretted having 'but one life to lose'?
Nathan Hale
Nathan Hale volunteered to spy behind British lines, and his famous last words survive only secondhand, through a British officer who watched him hang.
Q 08The Yale Report of 1828 was a dogmatic defence of teaching what?
Latin and Greek
Latin and Greek stayed required under the 1828 Yale Report, and its prestige helped slow elective reforms at American colleges for decades.
Q 09Which Yale school admitted women from its 1869 opening?
Fine Arts
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.
Q 10Yale discussed merging in 1966 with which women's college to bring in coeducation?
Vassar
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.
Q 11The Alexander lawsuit against Yale was the first to use which law to argue sexual harassment of students is sex discrimination?
Title IX
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.
Q 12In 2017 Yale renamed Calhoun College after which computing pioneer?
Grace Hopper
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.
Q 13David Swensen grew Yale's endowment by shifting money heavily into which kind of investment?
private equity
Q 21Which architect designed Yale's Ingalls Rink and its Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges?
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen modelled the two colleges on the Tuscan hill town of San Gimignano, and described their walls as 'masonry walls made without masons'.
Q 22Yale's bulldog Handsome Dan, established in 1889, is believed to have been the first what in America?
college mascot
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.
Q 23Which future Broadway composer wrote Yale's official fight song, 'Bulldog', as a student?
Cole Porter
Private equity and other illiquid assets anchored Swensen's 'Yale Model', and many endowments later copied it, though few matched his results.
Q 14Which president met his wife while both studied law at Yale?
Clinton
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.
Q 15Which street of mansions did Dickens reportedly call the most beautiful in America?
Hillhouse Avenue
Hillhouse Avenue honors James Hillhouse, whose elm planting gave the city its nickname, the Elm City.
Q 16James Gamble Rogers gave Yale's Davenport College a Gothic street front, but what style is the rest?
Georgian
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.
Q 17Yale's 216-foot Gothic tower of 1921 was later reinforced with steel to hold what?
a carillon
The tower was reinforced to carry a 54-bell carillon, which students in the Yale Guild of Carillonneurs still play every day during term.
Q 18Which famous book does Yale's Beinecke Library keep on permanent display?
the Gutenberg Bible
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.
Q 19Which Gothic building with a cathedral-like entrance hall is Yale's main library?
Sterling Memorial 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.
Q 20The Peabody Museum of Natural History was founded in 1866 at the urging of which palaeontologist, Peabody's nephew?
Othniel Charles Marsh
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.
Cole Porter wrote about 300 songs at Yale, then enrolled at Harvard Law School before switching to music studies at Harvard.
Q 24Yale's sunken 1914 football stadium was the prototype for which later stadium?
the Rose Bowl
The Rose Bowl's design was influenced by the Yale Bowl, whose designer left out restrooms.
Q 25Which Yale alumnus is known as 'the Father of American Football'?
Walter Camp
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'.
Q 26Which future film star played in Harvard's 29-29 tie with Yale in 1968?
Tommy Lee Jones
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'.
Q 27Yale students claim to have invented which pastime by tossing empty pie tins from a local bakery?
Frisbee
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.
Q 28Yale's most famous a cappella group, founded in 1909, is called what?
the Whiffenpoofs
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.
Q 29Which strip began as 'Bull Tales' in the Yale Daily News?
Doonesbury
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.
Q 30Which Yale senior society was founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft?
Skull and Bones
Skull and Bones puts the number 322 on its badge, a figure widely linked to 322 BC, the year the Athenian orator Demosthenes died.