46 Fun Facts About Yale University

Yale University is located in which city?

Yale sits in New Haven, Connecticut, where the Collegiate School settled in 1716 after early years in Killingworth and Saybrook.

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

Yale was chartered in 1701; only Harvard (1636) and William & Mary (1693) are older among the nine colonial colleges founded before the Revolution.

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

Elihu Yale grew rich with the East India Company, serving as governor of Fort St George at Madras from 1687 to 1692; his gift of nine bales of goods sold for about £560.

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 academic degree in the United States, in 1861?

Yale conferred the first three PhDs in the United States in 1861, to Eugene Schuyler, Arthur Williams Wright and James Morris Whiton.

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

Edmund Fanning, secretary to the British commander, interceded to spare the college during the July 1779 raid on New Haven; Yale thanked him with an honorary LL.D. in 1803.

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

Nathan Hale, Yale class of 1773, was hanged by the British as a spy in New York on 22 September 1776, aged 21.

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

The 1828 Yale Report defended the required study of Latin and Greek against critics who wanted more mathematics, science and modern languages; it shaped US college curricula for decades.

In what year did Yale first admit women as undergraduates?

Yale College admitted its first women undergraduates in September 1969, after the Yale Corporation voted for coeducation in November 1968; women had entered the graduate school in 1892.

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.

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?

Grace Hopper, who earned her Yale mathematics PhD in 1934 and became a US Navy rear admiral, replaced John C. Calhoun, the slavery-defending vice president, as the college's namesake in 2017.

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

Yale's endowment was valued at roughly $44 billion at the close of fiscal 2025, the second-largest of any private university after Harvard's.

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

72 Nobel laureates had been affiliated with Yale as students, faculty or staff by October 2025, alongside five Fields medallists, four Abel laureates and three 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?

Dickens is said to have praised Hillhouse Avenue during his 1842 American tour; Yale now owns many of the avenue's 19th-century mansions and uses them as offices.

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

Rogers aged his Gothic buildings by splashing acid on the walls, breaking and re-leading windows, and leaving niches empty as if statues had been stolen; most hide 1930s steel frames.

Yale's 216-foot Gothic tower of 1921 was reinforced in 1964 to hold what?

The free-standing stone tower, completed in 1921, was given internal steel reinforcement in 1964 to carry the 54-bell Yale Memorial Carillon, expanded from the original ten-bell chime.

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

The Beinecke holds one of the roughly 48 surviving Gutenberg Bibles, printed at Mainz about 1455; it also owns the undeciphered Voynich manuscript.

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

Sterling Memorial Library, designed by James Gamble Rogers in Collegiate Gothic style, is Yale's main library; its entrance hall is laid out like a cathedral nave, with the circulation desk where an altar would stand.

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 designed the whale-shaped Ingalls Rink (1958) and Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges (1962); Louis Kahn did the Art Gallery and Center for British Art, Paul Rudolph the Art & Architecture Building.

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, class of 1913, wrote 'Bulldog' in 1911 while an undergraduate; it is Yale's official fight song, though the older 'Boola Boola' (1900) is better known.

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

The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, opened in 1922, was modelled on the Yale Bowl, the sunken elliptical stadium of 1914 built into the earth rather than raised on a frame.

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'.

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

In the 1968 Game, Harvard scored 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie 29-29, prompting the Crimson's headline; the rivals marked the 50th anniversary at Fenway Park in 2018.

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

Yale students say they tossed empty tins from Bridgeport's Frisbie Pie Company across campus, giving the Frisbee its name; the bakery operated from 1871 to 1958.

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

The Whiffenpoofs, founded in 1909 and drawn from Yale seniors, are the oldest collegiate a cappella group in the US; they admitted their first woman in 2018.

In which year was the Yale Daily News first published?

The Yale Daily News first appeared on 28 January 1878, making it the oldest college daily in the US; Garry Trudeau's 'Bull Tales', the precursor of Doonesbury, ran in it from 1968.

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

Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft after a dispute over Phi Beta Kappa honours; Scroll and Key, Wolf's Head and Book and Snake are rival societies.

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

Yale's oldest society is also called the Order 322, the number on its emblem; it meets in a windowless High Street hall 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, class of 1881, set his words to 'Die Wacht am Rhein', the 1854 German patriotic anthem; the song ends with the tradition of waving white handkerchiefs.

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

Sonia Sotomayor earned her JD at Yale Law School in 1979; Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh are also Yale Law graduates, while Scalia and Roberts went to Harvard and Ginsburg finished at Columbia.

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

Yale Law School marks first-semester courses Credit/No Credit and later ones Honors, Pass, Low Pass or Fail; Connecticut court rules also let first-year students represent 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.

Whose bronze statue on Yale's Old Campus has a toe rubbed shiny for luck?

Theodore Dwight Woolsey, Yale's president from 1846 to 1871, sits in bronze on Old Campus; generations of students have rubbed the toe of his shoe for luck, polishing it bright.

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

Russia's Prosecutor General's Office declared Yale 'undesirable' in July 2025, accusing its World Fellows programme of training opposition activists and of seeking to undermine Russian territorial integrity.

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

The Yale-Myers Forest covers 7,840 acres in northeastern Connecticut's 'Quiet Corner', the largest forest run by Yale's environment school; Yale also owns Horse Island in the Thimble Islands.

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

Edward S. Harkness, who admired the Oxbridge college model, gave Yale the money in 1930 for colleges that opened in 1933; he had already funded Harvard's house system.

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

New Haven outbid other communities, including Hartford and Saybrook, with a larger pledge of money and land; the school had sat in Saybrook since 1707 under a deed meant to keep it there.

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

Yale College became Yale University in 1887 under Timothy Dwight V, the old name surviving 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?

Connecticut Hall, built 1750-52 in Georgian brick, is Yale's only surviving colonial building; it stands on the Old Campus, where most freshmen live.

Which French philosopher taught in Yale's comparative literature department in the late 1970s and 1980s?

Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, held a visiting post at Yale from the mid-1970s to 1986, alongside Paul de Man and the 'Yale School' of critics, before moving to UC Irvine.

How many residential colleges did Yale have after two new ones opened in 2017?

Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges opened in August 2017, raising Yale's residential colleges from 12 to 14; every undergraduate is assigned to one before freshman year.

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

Yale was Connecticut's only college until Washington College, now Trinity College, was chartered in Hartford in 1823; in that stretch it educated the sons of the state's elite.