Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yale University was founded in 1701 by ten Congregationalist ministers known as The Founders. The group included Samuel Andrew, Thomas Buckingham, Israel Chauncy, Samuel Mather, James Noyes II, James Pierpont, Abraham Pierson, Noadiah Russell, Joseph Webb, and Timothy Woodbridge. The institution opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson, before moving to Saybrook in 1703 and finally to New Haven in 1716.
The Collegiate School received its current name in 1718 after Cotton Mather contacted Elihu Yale, a Boston-born businessman who donated nine bales of goods worth more than £560. The name Yale is the Anglicized spelling of the Welsh name Iâl, which had been used for the family estate at Plas yn Iâl near Llandegla, Wales. The institution was officially renamed Yale University in 1887 under an act passed by the Connecticut General Assembly.
Women began studying at Yale from 1892 in graduate-level programs at the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The first seven women to earn PhDs received their degrees in 1894, including Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Cornelia H. B. Rogers, and Sara Bulkley Rogers. The undergraduate class of 1973 was the first to have women starting from freshman year, and all undergraduate women were housed in Vanderbilt Hall.
Yale's central campus in downtown New Haven covers approximately 300 acres and comprises its main historic campus and a medical campus adjacent to the Yale-New Haven Hospital. In western New Haven, the university holds 1,000 acres of athletic facilities including the Yale Golf Course. The university also owns seven forests in Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire, the largest of which is the Yale-Myers Forest in Connecticut's Quiet Corner.
Yale-educated presidents since the end of the Vietnam War include Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Major-party nominees from Yale include Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, and Sargent Shriver. Yale alumni were represented on the Democratic or Republican ticket in every U.S. presidential election between 1972 and 2004.
In 2017, Yale University renamed Calhoun College to Hopper College after Grace Hopper because the original name honored slave owner and white supremacist Vice President John C. Calhoun. In 2020, the U.S. Justice Department sued Yale for alleged discrimination against Asian and white candidates through affirmative action admission policies, and the Justice Department withdrew the lawsuit in 2021 under the new Biden administration. In July 2025, Russian authorities declared Yale University to be an undesirable organization, banning its activities in the country.