Yale University

ale University is an American private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 in Saybrook Colony as the Collegiate School, the University is the third oldest institution of higher education in the United States.

 The school was renamed Yale College in 1718 in recognition of a gift from Elihu Yale, who was governor of the British East India Company. In 1731, received a further gift of land and slaves from Bishop Berkeley.

Established to train Congregationalist ministers in theology and sacred languages, by 1777 the school's curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences and in the 19th century gradually incorporated graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first Ph.D. in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school's faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. 

In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the University owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, including the Yale Bowl, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forest and nature preserves throughout New England. The university's assets include an endowment valued at $25.6 billion as of September 2015, the second largest of any educational institution in the world.

Yale College undergraduates follow a liberal arts curriculum with departmental majors and are organized into a system of residential colleges. Almost all faculty teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.

 The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States.Outside of academic studies, students compete intercollegiately as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I Ivy League.

Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 13 living billionaires,and many foreign heads of state. In addition, Yale has graduated hundreds of members of Congress and many high level U.S. diplomats, including former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and current Secretary of State John Kerry. 

52 Nobel laureates, 230 Rhodes Scholars, and 118 Marshall Scholars have been affiliated with the University


The Yale Report of 1828 was a dogmatic defense of the Latin and Greek curriculum against critics who wanted more courses in modern languages, mathematics, and science. Unlike higher education in Europe, there was no national curriculum for colleges and universities in the United States.

 In the competition for students and financial support, college leaders strove to keep current with demands for innovation. At the same time, they realized that a significant portion of their students and prospective students demanded a classical background. 

The Yale report meant the classics would not be abandoned. All institutions experimented with changes in the curriculum, often resulting in a dual track. In the decentralized environment of higher education in the United States, balancing change with tradition was a common challenge because no one could afford to be completely modern or completely classical.



 William Graham Sumner, professor from 1872 to 1909, taught in the emerging disciplines of economics and sociology to overflowing classrooms. He bested President Noah Porter, who disliked social science and wanted Yale to lock into its traditions of classical education.

 Porter objected to Sumner's use of a textbook by Herbert Spencer that espoused agnostic materialism because it might harm students.

Until 1887, the legal name of the university was The President and Fellows of Yale College, in New Haven. In 1887, under an act passed by the Connecticut General Assembly, Yale gained its current, and shorter, name of Yale University 


 Between 1925 and 1940, philanthropic foundations, especially ones connected with the Rockefellers, contributed about $7 million to support the Yale Institute of Human Relations and the affiliated Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology. The money went toward behavioral science research, which was supported by foundation officers who aimed to  improve mankind  under an informal, loosely defined human engineering effort.

 The behavioral scientists at Yale, led by President James R. Angell and psychobiologist Robert M. Yerkes, tapped into foundation largesse by crafting research programs aimed to investigate, then suggest, ways to control, sexual and social behavior. 


For example, Yerkes analyzed chimpanzee sexual behavior in hopes of illuminating the evolutionary underpinnings of human development and providing information that could ameliorate dysfunction. Ultimately, the behavioral-science results disappointed foundation officers, who shifted their human-engineering funds toward biological sciences


 A group of professors at Yale and New Haven Congregationalist ministers articulated a conservative response to the changes brought about by the Victorian culture. They concentrated on developing a whole man possessed of religious values sufficiently strong to resist temptations from within, yet flexible enough to adjust to the  isms professionalism, materialism, individualism, and consumerism tempting him from without.