Yale supports 35 varsity athletic teams that compete in the Ivy League Conference, the Eastern College Athletic Conference, the New England Intercollegiate Sailing Associaton, and Yale is an NCAA Division I member.
The school mascot is "Handsome Dan," the famous Yale bulldog, and the Yale fight song (written by alumnus Cole Porter) contains the refrain, "Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow."
Amy Solomon was the first woman to register as a Yale undergraduate; she was also the first woman at Yale to join an undergraduate society, St. Anthony Hall.
Many of the Alaska natives continue to live in remote villages scattered throughout the state, generally along rivers or the coasts.
Fortunately, Yale graduate Edmund Fanning, Secretary to the British General in command of the occupation, interceded and the College was saved.
Elihu Yale was away in India when the news of the school's name change reached his home in Wrexham, North Wales, a trip from which he never returned.
In 1726, Handel's opera Scipio (Scipione) was performed for the first time; it included the march that remains in use today as the regimental slow march of the British Grenadier Guards.
Many of Yale's buildings were constructed in the neo-Gothic architecture style from 1917 to 1931.
Yale uses a residential college housing system modeled after those at Oxford and Cambridge.
The Yale University Art Gallery is the country's first university-affiliated art museum.
Particularly well-known are its undergraduate school, Yale College, and the Yale Law School, each of which has produced a number of U.S. presidents and foreign heads of state.
Like other members of the Ivy League, Yale does not offer athletic scholarships and is no longer competitive with the top echelon of American college teams in the big-money sports of basketball and football.
October 21st, 2000 marked the dedication of Yale's fourth new boathouse in 157 years of collegiate rowing.
Yale alumnus William F. Buckley's 1951 book, God and Man at Yale, criticized Yale for indoctrinating liberalism, undermining Christianity, and failing to dismiss radical professors.
Yale University Library is the second-largest university collection in the world with a total of almost 11 million volumes.
The Yale Political Union, the oldest student political organization in the United States, is often the largest organization on campus, and is advised by alumni political leaders such as John Kerry and George Pataki.
In 1990, Yale launched a series of massive renovations to the older residential buildings, whose decades of existence had seen only routine maintenance and incremental improvements to plumbing, heating, and electrical and network wiring.
Yale claims to be less reliant on teaching assistants in undergraduate education than many of its peer institutions.
The President and Fellows of Yale College, also known as the Yale Corporation, is the governing board of the University.
Yale crew is the oldest collegiate athletic team in America, and today Yale Rowing boasts lightweight men, heavyweight men, and a women's team.
Yale, like the other Ivy League schools, remains highly selective in admissions and is rated among the nation's top schools in terms of academic and social prestige.
The Yale College Council runs several agencies that oversee campus wide activities and student services.
Yale also maintains the Gales Ferry site where the heavyweight men's team trains for the prestigious Yale-Harvard Boat Race.
Yale's English and Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement.
The Yale Dramatic Association and Bulldog Productions cater to the theater and film communities, respectively.
Dwight Hall, an independent, non-profit community service organization, oversees more than 2,000 Yale undergraduates working on more than 60 community service initiatives in New Haven.
Beyond these, Yale has graduated many Pulitzer Prize winners, actors, politicians, businessmen, activists, and scholars.
In 1966, Yale initiated discussions with its sister school Vassar College concerning the possibility of a merger as an effective means to achieve coeducation.
Yale also owns many noteworthy nineteenth-century mansions along Hillhouse Avenue.
Nevertheless, American football was largely created at Yale by player and coach Walter Camp, who evolved the rules of the game away from rugby and soccer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Yale's history department has also originated important intellectual trends.
About 20 percent of Yale undergraduates major in the sciences, 35 percent in the social sciences, and 45 percent in the arts and humanities.
The Yale University Collection of Musical Instruments, affiliated with the Yale School of Music, is perhaps the least well-known of Yale's collections, because its hours of opening are restricted.
In 2001, three Yale graduate students published a report detailing Yale's historical connections with slavery.
Yale and Harvard have been rivals in almost everything for most of their history, notably academics, rowing and American football.
Yale College students come from a variety of ethnic, national, and socio-economic backgrounds.
Yale was originally founded to continue the European tradition of liberal education in America.
Yale's 70 undergraduate majors are primarily focused on a liberal curriculum, and few of the undergraduate departments are pre-professional in nature.
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.
The Yale Center for British Art is the largest collection of British art outside of the UK, originally the gift of Paul Mellon and also housed in a building designed by Louis Kahn.
Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is a member of the Ivy League.
In 2006, the Yale administration began evaluating the feasibility of building two new residential colleges.
The yacht club, located in nearby Branford, Connecticut, is the home of the Yale Sailing Team, which has produced several Olympic sailors.
The Yale Corinthian Yacht Club, founded in 1881, is the oldest collegiate sailing club in the world.
Second, in our graduate and professional schools, as well as in Yale College, we are committed to the education of leaders.
A number of prominent senior societies, including Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head, are composed of Yale College seniors.
First, among the nation's finest research universities, Yale is distinctively committed to excellence in undergraduate education.