Yale University Celebrates
Rosalind D’Eugenio reviews 300 years of academic history.
The history of Yale University holds that, in 1701, a handful of Congregational ministers from Connecticut brought together forty books from their own libraries, placed them on a table, and pronounced, ‘I give these books for the founding of a College in this Colony’. While that tale has been alternately accepted and disputed, it is certain that in October 1701, the Connecticut Colony General Assembly met in New Haven and granted a charter for The Collegiate School, which was housed in the shoreline town of Old Saybrook before finding permanent residence in New Haven.
It was in 1718, with the donations of Elihu Yale, a British East India merchant of Wrexham, Wales, that the college completed its first building. Honouring Yale’s generous gift of nine bales of goods (worth 562 pounds and 12 shillings), 417 books, and a portrait and arms of George I, the school was renamed Yale College.
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