YALE UNIVERSITY

Yale University is a private Ivy League research

university located in New Haven, Connecticut. It is
widely considered to be one of the most prestigious
and selective universities in the world.
Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the
university is the third-oldest institution of higher
education in the United States. Originally chartered
as the "Collegiate School", the institution traces its
roots to 17th-century clergymen who sought to
establish a college to train clergy and political
leaders for the colony. In 1718, the College was
renamed "Yale College" to honor a gift from Elihu
Yale, a governor of the British East India Company.
In 1861, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
became the first U.S. institution to award the
Ph.D.Yale became a founding member of the
Association of American Universities in 1900. Yale
College was transformed, beginning in the 1930s,
through the establishment of residential colleges: 12
now exist and two more are planned.
Yale employs over 1,100 faculty to teach and advise about 5,300
undergraduate and 6,100 graduate and professional students. Almost all
tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which
are offered annually. The University's assets include an endowment valued at
$20.80 billion as of 2013, the second-largest of any academic institution in the
world. Yale's system of more than two dozen libraries holds 12.5 million
volumes. 49 Nobel Laureates have been affiliated with the University as
students, faculty, and staff. Yale has nurtured many notable alumni, including
five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, and several foreign
heads of state. Yale Law School is the most selective law school in the
country.
Yale students compete intercollegiately as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA
Division I Ivy League. The oldest intercollegiate athletic event in the United
States is the Yale-Harvard regatta.
ADMINISTRATION AND ORGANIZATION
LEADERSHIP
The President and Fellows of Yale College, also known as the Yale Corporation, is the
governing board of the University.
Yale's president Richard C. Levin is one of the highest paid university presidents in the
United States with a 2008 salary of $1.5 million.
The Yale Provost's Office has launched several women into prominent university
presidencies. In 1977 Hanna Holborn Gray was appointed acting President of Yale from this
position, and went on to become President of the University of Chicago, the first woman to be
full president of a major university. In 1994 Yale Provost Judith Rodin became the first female
president of an Ivy League institution at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2002 Provost
Alison Richard became the Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. In 2004, Provost
Susan Hockfield became the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2007
Deputy Provost Kim Bottomly was named President of Wellesley College. In 2003, the Dean
of the Divinity School, Rebecca Chopp, was appointed president of Colgate University and
now heads Swarthmore College.
In 2008 Provost Andrew Hamilton was confirmed to be the Vice Chancellor of the University
of Oxford.Former Dean of Yale College Richard H. Brodhead serves as the President of Duke
University.
STAFF AND LABOR UNIONS
Much of Yale University's staff, including most maintenance staff, dining hall employees,
and administrative staff, are unionized. Clerical and technical employees are represented
by Local 34 of Unite Here and service and maintenance workers by Local 35 of the same
international. Together with the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO),
an unrecognized union of graduate employees, Locals 34 and 35 make up the Federation of
Hospital and University Employees. Also included in FHUE are the dietary workers at Yale-
New Haven Hospital, who are members of 1199 SEIU. In addition to these unions, officers
of the Yale University Police Department are members of the Yale Police Benevolent
Association, which affiliated in 2005 with the Connecticut Organization for Public Safety
Employees.]Finally, Yale security officers voted to join the International Union of Security,
Police and Fire Professionals of America in fall 2010 after the National Labor Relations
Board ruled they could not join AFSCME; the Yale administration contested the election.
Yale has a history of difficult and prolonged labor negotiations, often culminating in
strikes.There have been at least eight strikes since 1968, and The New York Times wrote
that Yale has a reputation as having the worst record of labor tension of any university in
the U.S. Yale's unusually large endowment exacerbates the tension over wages. Moreover,
Yale has been accused of failing to treat workers with respect . In a 2003 strike, however,
the university claimed that more union employees were working than striking. Professor
David Graeber was 'retired' after he came to the defense of a student who was involved in
campus labor issues.
CAMPUS
Yale's central campus in downtown New Haven covers 260 acres (1.1 km2). An
additional 500 acres (2.0 km2) includes the Yale golf course and nature
preserves in rural Connecticut and Horse Island.
Yale is noted for its largely Collegiate Gothic campus as well as for several iconic
modern buildings commonly discussed in architectural history survey courses:
Louis Kahn's Yale Art Gallery and Center for British Art, Eero Saarinen's Ingalls
Rink and Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, and Paul Rudolph's Art & Architecture
Building. Yale also owns and has restored many noteworthy 19th-century
mansions along Hillhouse Avenue, which was considered the most beautiful
street in America by Charles Dickens when he visited the United States in the
1840s.
Many of Yale's buildings were constructed in the Collegiate Gothic architecture
style from 1917 to 1931, financed largely by Edward S. Harkness.

The oldest building on campus, Connecticut Hall (built in 1750), is in the
Georgian style. Georgian-style buildings erected from 1929 to 1933 include
Timothy Dwight College, Pierson College, and Davenport College, except the
latter's east, York Street faade, which was constructed in the Gothic style.
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, designed by Gordon
Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, is one of the largest buildings in
the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books and
manuscripts. It is located near the center of the University in Hewitt
Quadrangle, which is now more commonly referred to as "Beinecke Plaza".
The library's six-story above-ground tower of book stacks is surrounded by a
windowless rectangular building with walls made of translucent Vermont
marble, which transmit subdued lighting to the interior and provide protection
from direct light, while glowing from within after dark.
Interior of Beinecke Library
The sculptures in the sunken courtyard by Isamu Noguchi are said to
represent time (the pyramid), the sun (the circle), and chance (the cube).

CAMPUS SAFETY
In addition to the Yale University Police Department, founded in 1894, a variety of safety
services are available including blue phones, a safety escort, and a shuttle service.[88]
In the 1970s and 1980s, poverty and violent crime rose in New Haven, dampening Yale's
student and faculty recruiting efforts.Between 1990 and 2006, New Haven's crime rate fell
by half, helped by a community policing strategy by the New Haven police and Yale's
campus became the safest among the Ivy League and other peer schools. Nonetheless,
across the board, the city of New Haven has retained the highest levels of crime of any Ivy
League city for more than a decade.
Between 2002 and 2004, Yale reported 14 violent crimes (homicide, aggravated assault, or
sex offenses); in comparison, Harvard reported 83 such incidents, Princeton 24, and
Stanford 54. The incidence of nonviolent crime (burglary, arson, and motor vehicle theft)
was also lower than most of its peer schools.
In 2004 a national non-profit watchdog group called Security on Campus filed a complaint
with the U.S. Department of Education, accusing Yale of under-reporting rape and sexual
assaults.

ACADEMICS

ACADEMIC ORGANIZATION
There are currently 15 academic schools which
provide a great variety of study programs. The
university comprises three major academic
components: Yale College (the undergraduate
program), the Graduate School of Arts and
Sciences, and the professional schools.
Yale College
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Professional Schools
School of Architecture
School of Art
Divinity School
School of Drama
School of Engineering & Applied Science
School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
Law School
School of Management
School of Medicine
School of Music
School of Nursing
School of Public Health
Institute of Sacred Music
ADMISSIONS
For the Class of 2017, Yale accepted 1,991 students out of a record 29,610 total
applications, hitting a record-low acceptance rate of 6.7%.
Through its program of need-based financial aid, Yale commits to meet the full
demonstrated financial need of all applicants. Most financial aid is in the form of
grants and scholarships that do not need to be paid back to the university, and
the average need-based aid grant for the Class of 2016 was $41,320. Over 10%
of students in Yale College are expected to have $0 parental contribution.
Half of all Yale undergraduates are women, more than 30% are minorities, and
8% are international students. Fifty-five percent attended public schools and
45% attended private, religious, or international schools.In addition, Yale College
admits a small group of non-traditional students each year, through the Eli
Whitney Students Program.

COLLECTIONS
Yale University Library, which holds over 12 million volumes, is the second-
largest university collection in the United States. The main library, Sterling
Memorial Library, contains about 4 million volumes, and other holdings are
dispersed at subject libraries.
Yale's museum collections are also of international stature. The Yale University
Art Gallery is the country's first university-affiliated art museum. It contains more
than 180,000 works, including old masters and important collections of modern
art, in the Swartout and Kahn buildings. The latter, Louis Kahn's first large-scale
American work (1953), was renovated and reopened in December 2006. The
Yale Center for British Art, the largest collection of British art outside of the UK,
grew from a gift of Paul Mellon and is housed in another Kahn-designed
building.

CAMPUS LIFE
Yale is a medium-sized research university, most of whose students are in the
graduate and professional schools. Undergraduates, or Yale College students,
come from a variety of ethnic, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Of the
20102011 freshman class, 10% are non-U.S. citizens, while 54% went to public
high schools.Yale is also an open campus for the gay community. Its active LGBT
community first received wide publicity in the late 1980s, when Yale obtained a
reputation as the "gay Ivy", due largely to a 1987 Wall Street Journal article written
by Julie V. Iovine, an alumna and the spouse of a Yale faculty member. During the
same year, the University hosted a national conference on gay and lesbian studies
and established the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center.The slogan "One in Four,
Maybe More" was coined by the campus gay community. While the community in
the 1980s and early 1990s was very activist, today most LGBT events have
become part of the general campus social scene.For example, the annual LGBT
Co-op Dance attracts straight as well as gay students.
RESIDENTIAL COLLEGES
Yale has a system of 12 residential colleges, instituted in 1933 through a grant by Yale graduate
Edward S. Harkness, who admired the college systems at Oxford and Cambridge. Each college
has a dean, master, affiliated faculty, and resident fellows. Each college also features distinctive
architecture, courtyards, a commons room, meeting rooms/classrooms, and a dining hall; in
addition, some have chapels, libraries, squash courts, pool tables, short order dining counters,
cafes, or darkrooms. Each college at Yale offers its own seminars, social events, and Master's
Teas, and most of them are open to students from other residential colleges. However, Yale
remains a unitary university, while Oxford and Cambridge colleges are self -governed charitable
institutions in their own right.
All of Yale's 2,000 undergraduate courses are open to members of any college.
The dominant architecture of the residential colleges is Neo-Gothic, in line with the characteristic
architecture of the university. Several colleges have other period architecture, such as Georgian
and Federal, and the two most recent, (Morse and Ezra Stiles), have modernist concrete exteriors.
Students are assigned to a residential college in their freshman year. Only two residential colleges
(Silliman and Timothy Dwight) house freshmen. The majority of on-campus freshmen live on the
"Old Campus", an extensive quadrangle formed by older buildings. Each residential college has its
own dining hall, but students are permitted to eat in any residential college dining hall or the large
dining facility called "Commons".
Residential colleges are named for important figures or places in university history or notable
alumni.
In 1998, Yale launched a series of extensive renovations to the older
residential buildings, which in many decades of existence had seen only
routine maintenance and incremental improvements to plumbing, heating, and
electrical and network wiring. Many of these renovations have now been
completed, and among other improvements, renovated colleges feature newly
built basement facilities including snack bars called "butteries," game rooms,
theaters, athletic facilities, fine arts studios, and music practice rooms.
In June 2008, President Levin announced that the Yale Corporation had
authorized the construction of two new residential colleges, scheduled to
open in 2013. The additional colleges, to be built in the northern part of the
campus, will allow for expanded admission and a reduction of crowding in the
existing residential colleges.[132] Designs have been released, and some
public controversy has surfaced over Yale's decision to demolish a number of
historic buildings on the site, including a recently constructed library, in order
to clear it for the $600 million new structures.
STUDENT ORGANIZATIONS
The university hosts a variety of student journals, magazines, and newspapers.
The latter categories include the Yale Daily News, which was first published in
1878, the weekly Yale Herald, published since 1986, and The Yale Record, which
was established in 1872 and is America's oldest college humor magazine. Dwight
Hall, an independent, non-profit community service organization, oversees more
than 2,000 Yale undergraduates working on more than 70 community service
initiatives in New Haven. The Yale College Council runs several agencies that
oversee campus wide activities and student services. The Yale Dramatic
Association and Bulldog Productions cater to the theater and film communities,
respectively. In addition, the Yale Drama Coalition serves to coordinate between
and provide resources for the various Sudler Fund sponsored theater productions
which run each weekend. WYBC Yale Radio is the campus's radio station, owned
and operated by students. While students used to broadcast on AM & FM
frequencies, they now have an Internet-only stream.
The Yale College Council (YCC) serves as the campus's undergraduate student
government. All registered student organizations are regulated and funded by a subsidiary
organization of the YCC, known as the Undergraduate Organizations Committee (UOC).
The Yale Political Union is advised by alumni political leaders such as John Kerry and
George Pataki. The Yale International Relations Association functions as the umbrella
organization for the top-ranked Model UN team.
The campus also includes several fraternities and sororities. The campus features at least
18 a cappella groups, the most famous of which is The Whiffenpoofs, who are unusual
among college singing groups in being made up solely of senior men.
Yale's secret societies include Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Wolf's Head, Book and
Snake, Elihu, Berzelius, St. Elmo, Manuscript, and Mace and Chain. The two oldest
existing honor societies are the Aurelian (1910) and the Torch Honor Society (1916).
The Elizabethan Club, a social club, has a membership of undergraduates, graduates,
faculty and staff with literary or artistic interests. Membership is by invitation. Members
and their guests may enter the "Lizzie's" premises for conversation and tea. The club
owns first editions of a Shakespeare Folio, several Shakespeare Quartos, a first edition of
Milton's Paradise Lost, among other important literary texts.
TRADITIONS
Yale seniors at graduation smash clay pipes underfoot to
symbolize passage from their "bright college years".("Bright
College Years," the University's alma mater, was penned in 1881
by Henry Durand, Class of 1881, to the tune of Die Wacht am
Rhein.) Yale's student tour guides tell visitors that students
consider it good luck to rub the toe of the statue of Theodore
Dwight Woolsey on Old Campus. Actual students rarely do so. In
the second half of the twentieth century Bladderball, a campus-
wide game played with a large inflatable ball, became a popular
tradition but was banned by administration due to safety concerns.
In spite of administration opposition, students revived the game in
2009 and 2011, but its future remains uncertain.