Talk:Yale University

• /Archive 1: to April 2005
• /Archive 2: April 2005–January 2006
• /Archive 3: February 2006

Dummy

Is it true, that the University should have be named after Mr Dummy but because of his name it was named after Mr Yale? Stern 00:50, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

• A-lie;who said so? But it doesn't Mather. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:32, 13 February 2006 (UTC)
  • It was actually Nehemiah Poopypants. Is Stern thinking perhaps of Harvard not having a Hoar House? - Nunh-huh 05:12, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

• • • Oxford does, however, have a Pusey House.

According to our Elihu Yale article

In 1999, American Heritage magazine rated Elihu Yale the "most overrated philanthropist" in American history, arguing that the college that would later bear his name (Yale University) was successful largely because of the generosity of a man named Jeremiah Dummer, but that the trustees of the school did not want it known by the name "Dummer College".

However, the Jeremiah Dummer article says this: "The most significant contribution of Jeremiah Dummer to the school was his work on persuading Elihu Yale to donate a large sum of money." btm _talk 07:16, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

American Heritage was being a little silly, and we're being a little silly quoting it, as "overrated" implies that most people think Elihu Yale was a great philanthropist rather than someone who gave some books and a little money to Yale and got a great bargain when it named after him. I'd submit that most people don't think about it that hard. In any case, the present article enumerates his contributions and doesn't overrate them<g>. Jeremiah Dummer gave £60 and over 600 books he collected from "sundry gentlemen" to Yale in 1714. Yale certainly gave more money than Dummer. - Nunh-huh 17:16, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Payne Whitney: world's largest gym?

Is Payne Whitney Gymnasium the largest in the world or the second-largest? PRRfan 04:41, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

I believe that Soviet Russia built a facility that was slightly larger for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, leading to Payne-Whitney's revised status during the 1980s as being "largest in the free world." Not sure whether the Russian facility still exists, and if it still exists whether it is classified as a gymnasium. Status of the Russian facility would help clarify the answer to this question.Mahnmut 03:48, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

"Consistently ranked"

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, a reference to a single year of U. S. News and World Reports rankings cannot serve to support the statement that certain Yale graduate programs are "consistently" ranked top in the nation. The referenced page is a popup menu, incidentally, and I haven't actually checked to make sure all the programs mentioned really were ranked #1 in 2007. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:05, 1 August 2006 (UTC)

Safety at Yale

I wanted to drop a note to explain my recent deletion of certain arguments being made in the Safety at Yale section. Some useful articles are being unearthed by some of the recent contributors, but we should be careful about drawing sweeping conclusions without proper support. In the most recent example, contributor 205.234.156.33 found some interesting information that a security watchdog group called Security on Campus was accusing Yale of under-reporting sexual assaults on campus, which could be affecting the DOE statistics under the Clery act. However, the same contributor later jumps to the conclusion that there has been a resurgence of violent crime on campus in the mid-2000s and cites several articles (I have since removed this text, so please refer to earlier saves). The first article only compares three years of data - 2001 to 2003 - and seems to largely be based on data on non-violent crime such as drug and alcohol violations. And I'm not sure what "trend" emerges from the three years of data - 2003 seems similar to 2001. The subsequent four citations deal with individual (and of course unfortunate) incidents, but do not place them in context. I suspect that most campuses, especially urban campuses, experience some muggings and assaults each year. A quick Google search on Yale's peer Harvard shows many newspaper articles about violent crimes on campus, and even murders of Harvard students over the past two decades. Are Yale's specific incidents unusual relative to Yale's peer schools, unusual relative to earlier periods in Yale's history, or even unusual relative to any community of Yale's size? The citations don't answer these questions, and therefore it seems unsupported to conclude that there has been some sudden surge in violent crime. I am not trying to suppress legitimate information, but if this section is going to paint the picture that Yale is unusually unsafe for a university, or that the Yale administration routinely engages in cover-ups of violent crime, then the burden is on the contributors to create a bullet-proof case backed up by lots of cited evidence.Mahnmut 01:51, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

The edits were probably a canard by someone from Harvard, looking to do something about the fact that Yale now has a lower acceptance rate than Harvard. Yale is one of the safest campuses in America and according to Harvard's own police department, at stalcommpol.org, Harvard is significantly more dangerous.

Birthplace of New Criticism?

I'd personally contest the statement that "Yale's English and literature departments were the birthplace of New Criticism." Obviously, it is valid that Robert Penn Warren was a major influence in this movement and he was indeed a professor at Yale. But many credit the birthplace of "New Criticism" to the time Robert Penn Warren was at Vanderbilt in literary groups such as "The Fugitives". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitives

Yearly expenses

A more interesting figure than Endownment (money which you doesn't spend on research) is the actual figure what the university does spend on research and teaching. Please add it to the page.

Conciseness and relevance

I have spent some time reading this article with a fresh eye, and I want to compliment the community on creating what is arguably one of the better university articles in the Wikipedia. Some of the best attributes of the article in my opinion are that it is broadly informative without being drowned in unnecessary information, that it maintains a consistently professional tone, and that some of the unnecessary POV (both positive and negative) that plagued earlier versions has now been removed.

The article has been fairly stable for some time, and I wanted to challenge the community to try to take the article to the next level. We should look at each part of the article, and ask ourselves whether it is meeting the standard of being informative without providing unnecessary, inappropriate or superfluous information. Conciseness and relevance should be our guiding principles.

For example, the Safety at Yale section (many parts of which I personally authored) feels like it has become an uneasy and over-long compromise between those who want to list all of the crimes that have happened at Yale and those who want to put out statistics showing how safe Yale is. In my opinion, it doesn't rise to the standards of the rest of the article because it reads like two different POVs going head to head, rather than a relevant and concise view of the topic.

In fact, I would suggest that we need to examine why this section even exists in the Yale article. If there was a crime that meaningfully changed the course of history at the University, it should go in the history section with a clear explanation of its historic relevance (rather than a laundry list of every major crime at Yale, some without any context of why they are historically relevant). On the other side, if Yale's safety statistics are not worse than its peer schools, then why do we need an entire section defending how safe Yale really is?

Similarly, Yale in Fiction and Popular Culture is starting to feel like a laundry list of every last pop culture reference that anyone can find. Some of the more literate references may be interesting, but does mentioning "Grounded for Life" or "The Skulls" really add anything to the reader's understanding of Yale? This section is starting to feel like the famous alumni section did when we listed every last Edward Norton or Ron Livingston.

I'm not trying to single out anyone's specific contribution as not being worthy of inclusion (many of my own contributions may not warrant inclusion), but rather I'm challenging the community to look at the article with a fresh and neutral eye, and start making tougher decisions about what should stay in and what should either be moved to separate articles or removed altogether. Mahnmut 19:12, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Opening

I think the Atlantic Monthly citation is in poor taste; it's conspicuous references to the "two universities" and its failure to actually name Harvard shows an attempt to establish prestige while not wanting to bring in its competitor. It's some quote from the 1800s, too, which doesn't say much about Yale's standing in the world today. I don't think an article about Yale should say explicitly that it and Harvard are popularly considered the two best schools in the country. Leave that for the article on the "Big Three," or create a page on the Harvard-Yale rivalry. Yale's page should be about Yale. It doesn't need to establish its prestige or be a battleground for the Yale-Harvard rivalry. I'm taking the sentence out.

Grade Inflation and Teaching Assistants

Given that none of the articles referenced suggests that there is any grade inflation at Yale or an over-reliance on teaching assistants at Yale, and given that it is generally believed that Yale suffers far less from these afflictions than many of her competitors, I am modifying the relevant sections. If anyone has Yale-specific references that can support either of these notions, please feel free to contribute them. Rschon 14:16, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

I should have added that the NY Times article that is referenced, which I am about to remove, is completely non-germane, leading me to wonder about the motivations of why it would have been added. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9803E5D71130F933A1575AC0A9649C8B63 Rschon 14:18, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Finally, on further close examination, I have discovered that the article from the YAM supposedly claiming that there is an over reliance on TAs was from an infamous, tendentious, and statistically flawed GESO study. I have left in the reference but attempted to put it into NPOV context. Rschon 14:32, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

User:Rschon's edits about the GESO study (which can hardly be described as "infamous, tendentious, and statistically flawed") were hardly, in my view, NPOV. I hope that the wording I've crafted is better. 71.77.12.236 23:57, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, thanks. 129.2.175.110 06:32, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

3 Forms of Urim & Thummim

Previously the hebrew on the logo was hotlinked to the article entitled "Urim & Thummim" as such is the standard translation/transliteration of the hebrew on the logo. But the "Lux et Veritas" on the logo is a translation of the same thing. Nowadays we generally translate Urim & Thummim as "Lights and Perfections," but in various Latin Bibles it is translated as Lux et Veritas, and thus the reference. Anyway, I moved the hotlink from the hebrew to the English for that reason. Any disputations? --Mrcolj 23:35, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Founding location

Old Saybrook, Connecticut and Saybrook College say the institution was once located in Old Saybrook, but this article says it was originally located in Killingworth, and moved from there to New Haven. -- Beland 04:41, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

Resolved, but references are still needed. -- Beland 06:35, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[1] Killingworth: Kelly, pp. 13-15. Yale's first student, Jacob Heminway, arrives at Rector Pierson's house in Killingworth in March 1702. The first commencemen (of Nathaniel Chauncey and Stephen Buckingham), however, occurs in Saybrook 16 September 1702. Also Pierson, Founding of Yale, p. 18-19

[2] Old Saybrook: Kelly, p. 16-19. Last commencement in Saybrook was 12 September 1716.

[3] New Haven: Kelly, pp. 20. First commencement in New Haven was 11 September 1717.

Classes were also held in other towns besides Killingworth and Old Saybrook, such as Milford. - Nunh-huh 02:51, 28 November 2006 (UTC)

Graduate teachers, contingent teachers, and the new AAUP report

This morning I placed the following sentence at the end of the paragraph about the prevelance of graduate teachers' teaching their own classes: "A 2006 study by the AAUP found that 33.5% of full-time faculty (24.4% of full-time, instructional faculty) were not on tenure-track, and that graduate employees and contingent (adjunct) teachers made up 72.0% of all Yale instructors. To make just one comparison, 45.4% of Harvard's full-time faculty are non-tenure-track, and graduate and contingent instructors make up 76.0% of its total.[1]." User:Mahnmut removed the sentence with the justification "AAUP data, which indirectly touches upon numbers of TAs, doesn't seem very relevant to how much undergraduate teaching TAs are actually doing". I dispute that the data only "indirectly touches" on the question--indeed, the prevelance of contingent and graduate instructors cuts directly to the heart of the matter. I am happy to make this a separate paragraph or change the wording, but I think it is a key piece of data in the question addressed in the paragraph, and simply replacing it with the administration's spin doesn't do the same thing. I'm open to ideas about where to place the AAUP data. 71.77.12.236 03:47, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for bringing this onto the Talk Page - it is an important issue to discuss. I think that one of the reasons this is such a contentious issue for many of us is that many undergraduates and alumni intuitively find the GESO claims that TAs do a majority of the teaching at Yale to be completely inconsistent with our own learning experiences at Yale. There has always been a major disconnect between how the "customer base" (i.e., the undergraduates) view this issue, and how GESO (which has a clear economic interest in its point of view) sees it. To my knowledge, GESO has never cited a credible survey or study establishing student dissatisfaction with the use of TAs and professor accessibility. Quite the opposite, searches of the Yale Daily News and Yale Herald show that accessibility of even Yale's most famous professors is frequently cited by undergraduates as one of Yale's core strengths.

Let me also speak to why I specifically disagree with the AAUP numbers. First, it is misleading to lump graduate instructors and adjunct/contingent instructors together in the same statistic. Many of the adjunct/contingent instructors are some of Yale's most distinguished teachers with unique areas of expertise - like David Swensen, the Yale endowment manager who teaches a popular portfolio management course in the economics department, but who is not on tenure track. Second, it is misleading to lump "support" TAs - those who primarily grade exams, administrate course logistics and lead optional discussion sections for large lecture courses - with TAs who have primary responsibility for developing a curriculum and driving the teaching process forward. I know that support work is important and necessary work. However, let's say a professor spends 2 hours a week lecturing and teaching course material that she developed over several years, and TAs in aggregate spend 20 hours/week grading homework and exams behind the scenes under the professor's guidance. GESO would argue that TAs are doing 10 times as much teaching as the professor in this course, but most undergraduates in the course would be completely bewildered by that claim, especially given that many of them will have never met or interacted with the TAs in question.

The raw number of graduate student TAs floating around (as indirectly reflected in the AAUP data) does not shed light on this issue either. What matters is, how many of Yale's 2,000 undergraduate courses are primarily taught (i.e. curriculum developed by, lectured and taught) by graduate students? And what percentage of undergraduate enrollments are in courses that are primarily taught by graduate teaching assistants? And, do any studies or surveys exist that establish undergraduate student dissatisfaction with professor accessibility, or over-reliance on TAs? GESO argues (from its own financial interest) about how much teaching it is doing, but where are the undergraduates, the actual customers, who see the situation through the same lens? By the way, if you would like to keep this discussion going, it would be helpful if you adopted an identity rather than just signing an IP address. Mahnmut 23:49, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

(First, about the fact that I don't have a user name: It's intentional, it's thought-out, and it should have absolutely no baring on my opinion and my arguments. One of the key parts of Wikipedia is that it's the encyclopedia anyone can edit, so the fact that I do so without a user name is irrelevant. See my talk page if you'd like to see my reasoning, since this has come up before.) Now to the issue at hand. You instictively bring up GESO, which is entirely besides the point in this question. It happens that, yes, I support GESO (I did as an undergrad and I do as an alum). But we're not arguing about GESO here--we're talking about the way to describe the amount of teaching done by TAs and other contingent teachers. So let's dispense with that. Further, studies about undergrad disenchantment are not the issue, either. First, In the absence of any studies at all, you can't very well claim the hypothetical ones would go in your favor. Second, the question is not whether people are satisfied. The question is whether or not Yale is reliant on graduate and other non-faculty labor in teaching its classes.

Your substantive points, as I understand them, are (a) TAs don't do real instructional work, and (b) the AAUP data aren't relevant. Let's take them in order: To (a), I can only say, again, if you think grading, leading discussion, and the like is not real teaching, is not substantive, does not affect the quality of instruction, you must never have taught. Grading and leading discussions are fundamentally two of the most important parts of teaching. Grading essays, for instance, is how students learn to write. Discussion sections (and, let me tell you, when I was there--not too long ago--in every one of my classes with sections they were mandatory) are an integral part of courses, and the way they are led is deeply important. To dismiss this as merely "support work" is simply silly.

As for (b), I think you're wrong, as I've said. I don't have data, but you'd be surprised how few of the contingent faculty at Yale are of the sort you're describing. Many more of them are language teachers. Look at the Blue Book: anyone listed as a lecturer, at any rank, is contingent faculty. You'll see that they aren'd David Swenson. They're people without job security, with relatively low pay, without say in the way the department they work in operates. This cuts to the heart of GESO's (and others') criticism about casualization. If you're dissatisfied with the way I've presented the data, it's all right there in the AAUP report (the data of which comes from the U.S. Department of Education, by the way) and rephrase it. But it is absurd not to use this verifiable, independent data in discussing this criticism. 71.77.12.236 03:32, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Let me start by saying that I am fundamentally sympathetic to GESO's desire for fair living wages. Yale has plenty of money, and everyone associated with Yale should receive enough compensation to make a fair living. For me, this discussion has nothing to do with whether Yale is paying fair wages to its employees. Rather, this issue is fundamentally about GESO's claim (and your own claim) that the Yale undergraduate teaching process is somehow built around graduate students and TAs.

There are a lot of arguments I can make here, but I want to keep this simple, so let me make an intuitive argument. If Yale is truly over-reliant on graduate students for undergraduate teaching, then shouldn't this show up in some metric related to the customer base, the undergraduate student body? At Harvard, for example, there is a lot of documented evidence from multiple sources that students are dissatisfied with the quality of undergraduate teaching and with the availability of tenured professors. At Yale, most of the documented evidence (such as the many student surveys published in annual college guides, articles in the YDN and Herald, etc.) is at the other end of the spectrum. Undergraduate focus and faculty accessibility are universally cited as core strengths of the Yale undergraduate experience. Student satisfaction with the academic experience runs very high. And so, I pose the following question to you: if graduate students are really doing the majority of undergraduate teaching at Yale, why isn't anyone noticing it except GESO? Why are the students, the customers who are paying upwards of $100,000 for a Yale education, praising the academic experience and the accessibility of even the most famous professors? I would suggest that student satisfaction with undergraduate teaching stands in direct contradiction to the claim that graduate students do a majority of teaching at Yale, and student satisfaction with teaching is the very heart of the matter.

With respect to AAUP, my issue is not the credibility of the source, it is the relevance of the data. There are roughly 5,000 graduate students at Yale, and many of them are by definition going to be classified as TAs. The real question is how much teaching all of these TA/graduate students are actually doing, and the AAUP data sheds no light on this question whatsoever.

My other issue with the AAUP data continues to be that it lumps non-ladder faculty together with graduate students, and there does not seem to be any way to break the numbers out. I disagree with your assessment that the majority of non-ladder faculty fall in the same boat as graduate students, and if you are going to argue that point, you will need an independent source to back you up. Most of the non-ladder faculty that I knew at Yale were accomplished individuals (often alumni) with special areas of expertise that allowed them to teach unique courses. Many of them were recognized to be among Yale's most gifted and sought-after teachers, and their unique areas of expertise allowed Yale to offer a much broader range of courses in more diverse areas of interest (for example, the residential college seminars). In my experience, non-ladder faculty are an asset to Yale undergraduate teaching, not a problem in the same way that courses primarily taught by TAs would be. If you want to argue differently, you need to find independent sources.Mahnmut 17:49, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

Should the term "Elis" be included somewhere?

I've seen the term "Elis" used in place of Bulldogs for the sports teams of Yale. I understand the context (since the disambig for Eli also notes the usage as a nickname for Yale students, but it's surprising to not find it here in the main article (maybe near sports?). Someone with a better familiarity with the article might want to work it in. --Bobak 21:26, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

It definitely should be included and I'm surprised it isn't. For what it's worth, literally yesterday I was working a crossword puzzle with the clue "Tigers foe," for which the answer was "Elis." (The New York Times: Sunday in the Park Crosswords; ed. Will Shortz; #14, "Drop it!"; 58 down).

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, in Chapter 2, we find:

...at each performance of “Ha-Ha Hortense!” half-a-dozen seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets, further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in the show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black flag and said, “I am a Yale graduate—note my Skull and Bones!”—at this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise conspicuously and leave the theatre with looks of deep melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of the real thing.

Google Book searches on "elis yale" turn up numerous relevant hits, both in "full view books" (which are mostly prior to 1923), showing that the usage is old, and in all books, showing that the usage is still current.

A Google search on site:www.yale.edu elis turns up 153 hits, mostly relevant; one on site:www.yaledailynews.com elis yields seven thousand, mostly relevant, and show that "Elis" refers to Yale students in general, not just athletes: "Elis stress local HIV impact," "Five Elis win Rhodes," "Elis experience weightlessness in NASA research, "Elis open Coxe season," "More Elis go overseas," etc. etc.

Dpbsmith (talk) 03:28, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Yale opened in 1701, with one student and two teachers

I read on the first page of the 2002-2003 Information and Application brochure of Yale's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences that Yale opened with one student and two teachers. I find that so compelling in terms of the spirit of educational entreprise, that perhaps it should be added in the article. Anyone in support of this idea? (MidwestAl 11:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)).

While I appreciate the noble effort to personify Yale's first 3 monkeys, I think it's a highly suspect POV to suggest that they classified themselves as two students and a teacher. 129.2.175.110 06:38, 2 February 2007 (UTC)