Yale University

• 1. Introduction

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  Yale University was founded in 1701, making it the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States. It began not as a grand campus but as a single act of colonial law: "An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School", passed by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on the 9th of October, 1701. The school's first library came from ten Congregational ministers who gathered in the study of Reverend Samuel Russell in Branford and donated their own books. Its first home was the private residence of its rector, Abraham Pierson, in Killingworth.

  Three centuries later, Yale counts 72 Nobel laureates, 5 Fields medalists, and 5 U.S. presidents among its affiliates. Over 200 of its alumni have competed at the Olympic Games, winning more than 110 medals. How did a school born in a minister's study, in a colony still decades from independence, become one of the most powerful educational institutions on earth? What did it fight over, who did it exclude, and what controversies trail it still? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Birth of a Colonial College

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  Abraham Pierson, the school's first rector and first president, opened the Collegiate School in his own home. The group of ten ministers who founded it, later called the "Founders" and led by James Pierpont, were all Harvard alumni. They were not simply building a new school out of civic pride. There was a rift forming at Harvard, where its sixth president, Increase Mather, viewed his colleagues as increasingly liberal and ecclesiastically lax. The Mathers backed the new Collegiate School in hopes it would preserve Puritan orthodoxy in a way Harvard had ceased to do.

  The school moved to Saybrook in 1703, when the first treasurer, Nathaniel Lynde, donated land and a building. In 1716 it relocated again, settling in New Haven. Two years later, in 1718, Cotton Mather contacted the Boston-born businessman Elihu Yale at the behest of Rector Samuel Andrew or the colony's Governor Gurdon Saltonstall. Yale had made his fortune in Madras while working for the East India Company as the first president of Fort St. George. Through the persuasion of Jeremiah Dummer, he donated nine bales of goods that sold for more than £560. Cotton Mather then suggested the school take Yale's name.

  Almost simultaneously, a Harvard graduate working in England convinced 180 prominent intellectuals to donate books to the fledgling college. The 1714 shipment of 500 volumes represented the best of modern English literature, science, philosophy, and theology. Among the students who encountered those books was Jonathan Edwards, who discovered John Locke's works there and developed what he called his "new divinity". By 1722, the rector and six colleagues announced they had abandoned Calvinism entirely, become Arminians, and joined the Church of England. They were ordained in England and returned to the colonies as Anglican missionaries.

• 3. Curriculum Wars

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  Reverend Ezra Stiles, who served as president from 1778 to 1795, brought with him a deep interest in Hebrew as a vehicle for studying ancient Biblical texts in their original language. He required all freshmen to study Hebrew, in contrast to Harvard where only upperclassmen had that obligation. Stiles is also responsible for the Hebrew phrase Urim and Thummim appearing on the Yale seal. His greatest challenge came in 1779, when British forces occupied New Haven and threatened to raze the college. Yale graduate Edmund Fanning, who served as secretary to the British general in command, intervened and the college survived. In 1803, Fanning received an honorary degree in recognition.

  The Yale Report of 1828 drew a sharp line in the culture wars of American higher education. It was a dogmatic defense of the Latin and Greek curriculum against critics who wanted more modern languages, math, and science. The report insisted the classics would not be abandoned. At the same time, a group of professors and New Haven Congregationalist ministers concentrated on developing students with religious values strong enough to resist what they called the "isms" of the era: professionalism, materialism, individualism, and consumerism.

  William Graham Sumner, who taught at Yale from 1872 to 1909, pushed in the opposite direction. He filled classrooms teaching economics and sociology, and clashed directly with President Noah Porter, who disliked the social sciences and wanted Yale to hold to its classical traditions. Porter objected specifically to Sumner's use of a Herbert Spencer textbook that espoused agnostic materialism. That contest between tradition and modernity played out not just in classrooms but in how Yale defined itself for the next century. Sumner's disciplines prevailed.

• 4. Women, Law, and the Campus They Built

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  In 1793, Lucinda Foote passed the entrance examinations for Yale College. The president rejected her on the basis of her gender. It would be nearly a century before women studied at Yale, beginning in 1892 in graduate-level programs. The first seven women to earn PhDs received their degrees in 1894: Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Cornelia H. B. Rogers, Sara Bulkley Rogers, Margaretta Palmer, Mary Augusta Scott, Laura Johnson Wylie, and Charlotte Fitch Roberts. Their portrait hangs in Sterling Memorial Library, painted by Brenda Zlamany.

  Yale began discussions with Vassar College in 1966 about merging to foster coeducation at the undergraduate level. Vassar tentatively accepted, then declined. Both schools introduced coeducation independently in 1969. Amy Solomon was the first woman to register as a Yale undergraduate and the first woman at Yale to join an undergraduate society, St. Anthony Hall. The undergraduate class of 1973 was the first to have women from freshman year onward; all undergraduate women were housed in Vanderbilt Hall.

  A decade into coeducation, student assault and faculty harassment became the impetus for the lawsuit Alexander v. Yale. A group of students and a faculty member sued Yale for its failure to curtail sexual harassment by male faculty. The case was built partly on a 1977 report by plaintiff Ann Olivarius titled "A report to the Yale Corporation from the Yale Undergraduate Women's Caucus". The lawsuit was brought partly by Catharine MacKinnon and named specific faculty members including Keith Brion, Raymond Duvall, Michael Cooke, and Richard Kentwell. While the plaintiffs did not prevail in court, the case established for the first time that sexual harassment of female students could constitute illegal sex discrimination under Title IX. It resulted directly in the creation of Yale's Grievance Board and Women's Center.

• 5. Stone, Steel, and Faux Gothic

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  Yale's central campus in downtown New Haven covers 260 acres, with an additional 500 acres of athletic facilities in western New Haven. Many of the university's most recognizable buildings were constructed between 1917 and 1931, financed largely by Edward S. Harkness and designed by architect James Gamble Rogers. Rogers built these Gothic structures with deliberate deception: he splashed the walls with acid to faux-age them, deliberately broke the leaded glass windows and repaired them in the style of the Middle Ages, and left niches empty to simulate centuries of loss or theft. Most of the buildings appear to be solid stone but actually have steel framing. The exception is Harkness Tower, a 216-foot structure that was originally a free-standing stone structure, later reinforced in 1964 to install the Yale Memorial Carillon.

  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. Its above-ground tower holds 180,000 volumes surrounded by large translucent Vermont marble panels that subdue direct sunlight and diffuse it in warm hues. Near the library, a sunken courtyard contains sculptures by Isamu Noguchi said to represent time, the sun, and chance.

  Alumnus Eero Saarinen, who also designed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and Dulles International Airport, designed Ingalls Rink, dedicated in 1959, as well as the residential colleges Ezra Stiles and Morse. Those latter two were modeled after the medieval Italian hill town of San Gimignano, chosen for its pedestrian-friendly layout and fortress-like stone towers. Charles Dickens, visiting the United States in the 1840s, called Hillhouse Avenue the most beautiful street in America. Yale owns and has restored many of the 19th-century mansions that line it.

• 6. Politics and the Presidential Pipeline

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  The Boston Globe wrote in 2002 that if any school could claim to have educated the nation's top national leaders over the prior three decades, it was Yale. Yale alumni appeared on the Democratic or Republican presidential ticket in every election between 1972 and 2004. Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush all attended Yale, as did Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, and Sargent Shriver.

  During the 1988 campaign, George H. W. Bush derided Michael Dukakis's Harvard connection by saying Harvard's views were "born in Harvard Yard's boutique". When pressed on the difference between that and his own Yale background, Bush said Yale's reputation was "so diffuse, there isn't a symbol" and that Yale did not share Harvard's reputation for "liberalism and elitism". In 2004, Howard Dean, himself a Yale alumnus, said his graduating class was the first to include women and to mount a significant effort to recruit African Americans, describing that period as "the change of an entire generation".

  Several explanations have been offered for Yale's dominance in national politics. Yale President Levin attributed it to the university's focus on creating what he called "a laboratory for future leaders", a priority that began under Presidents Alfred Whitney Griswold and Kingman Brewster. Yale historian Gaddis Smith pointed to an "ethos of organized activity" that led John Kerry to lead the Yale Political Union's Liberal Party and George Pataki its Conservative Party. Camille Paglia pointed simply to networking and elitism: "It has to do with a web of friendships and affiliations built up in school."

• 7. Calhoun, Hopper, and the Name on the Wall

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  Since the 1960s, calls had mounted to rename Calhoun College, one of Yale's residential colleges, which honored John C. Calhoun, a vice president, senator, and one of the most vocal defenders of slavery in American history. A racially motivated church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 2015 renewed those demands. Students signed a petition that year calling Calhoun "one of the most prolific defenders of slavery and white supremacy" in United States history, while acknowledging he had been regarded in the 19th century as an "extraordinary American statesman".

  Yale President Peter Salovey addressed the Class of 2019 in August 2015, acknowledging that Calhoun believed the highest forms of civilization depended on involuntary servitude and that he believed the races he considered inferior "ought to be subjected to it for the sake of their own best interests". Despite this, Salovey announced in April 2016 that Calhoun's name would remain, arguing students would be "better prepared to rise to the challenges of the present and the future" by living in his shadow. He said removing the name would "obscure" Calhoun's legacy rather than address it.

  Ten months later, in February 2017, Salovey reversed course and announced the college would be renamed for Grace Hopper, the groundbreaking computer scientist. The reversal prompted a range of reactions from students and alumni. In his 2019 book Assault on American Excellence, former Dean of Yale Law School Anthony T. Kronman criticized both the name change and what he saw as a lack of support from Salovey for faculty members targeted by student activists during the same period. The renamed college stands today as Hopper College.

• 8. Labor, Sport, and the Living Institution

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  The New York Times has written that Yale has a reputation as having the worst record of labor tension of any university in the United States. There have been at least eight strikes since 1968. Clerical and technical workers are represented by Local 34 and service and maintenance workers by Local 35, both affiliated with UNITE HERE. Yale has consistently refused to recognize its graduate student union, Local 33, citing claims that the union's elections were undemocratic and that graduate students are not employees. That position has been criticized by the American Federation of Teachers.

  On the athletic side, Yale Bowl was the nation's first natural bowl stadium and served as the prototype for venues including the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Bowl. Yale crew is the oldest collegiate athletic team in America, winning Olympic gold medals for men's eights in 1924 and 1956. The Yale Corinthian Yacht Club, founded in 1881, is the oldest collegiate sailing club in the world. The official fight song, "Bulldog", was written by Cole Porter during his undergraduate years and is sung after touchdowns.

  In 1970, the NCAA banned Yale from participating in all NCAA sports for two years after Yale played its Jewish center Jack Langer in college games following Langer's participation in the 1969 Maccabiah Games in Israel, with the approval of Yale President Kingman Brewster. The ban affected 300 Yale students. In 2016, the men's basketball team won its first Ivy League Championship in 54 years and then beat the Baylor Bears 79-75 in the school's first-ever NCAA tournament win. In July 2025, Russian authorities declared Yale University an "undesirable" organization, banning its activities in the country.