A School Rich in History, Tradition : Yale University System Modeled on Oxford, Cambridge

“Sometimes I am asked if I, as a woman, have a problem disciplining college students when it becomes necessary,” said Yale University’s Ann Ameling, master of Saybrook College.

“It strikes me as an odd question, for women as mothers are perhaps the best of disciplinarians. No, handling disciplinary matters does not bother me.”

Ameling, 44, a professor of nursing, is the only female master at Yale’s 12 residential colleges. Saybrugians, as residents of Saybrook are known, call the 5-foot-2-inch brunette “Master Ann” or “Master Ameling.”

“Somehow mistress doesn’t seem to fit,” she laughs.

Masters are faculty members chosen by the university’s president to supervise the daily life of the college. Each master lives in the college in the master’s quarters with his or her family and works closely with students to organize non-academic activities that enrich college life.

When Ameling was an undergraduate it was impossible for her to go to Yale. Women were not accepted at the undergraduate level until 1969. Today the student body of 10,000 is 43% women, 57% men.

Pastor and the Master

Ameling, who graduated from Smith College, shares her master’s quarters with her husband, Jim, and her 14-year-old son, Michael. Her husband is a Congregational minister. “They call us the pastor and the master,” said Ameling, who also teaches nursing.

Yale, the nation’s third oldest university, was founded in 1701, has been located on the same campus in New Haven since 1716 and is rich in history and tradition. The residential college system, modeled after Oxford and Cambridge universities, is one of those traditions.

“We are responsible for the well being of our students and the physical fabric of the place. Of course, that doesn’t mean I have to get up on the roof and repair the slates,” said Ramsay MacMullen, 57, professor of ancient Roman history and master of Calhoun College.

Hounies, as residents of Calhoun College are known, call silver-haired MacMullen “Master Mac.” He lives in master’s quarters with his wife, Edith, and their 110-pound Newfoundland dog, Pell Mell.

MacMullen’s college is named after John C. Calhoun, secretary of state and vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Calhoun received his BA from Yale in 1804 and a law degree here in 1822.

(Saybrook College is named after the Connecticut town where Yale was located before moving to New Haven.)

A residential college has nothing to do with a student’s major. Freshmen are selected at random to reside in one of the college complexes. Each is architecturally unique, designed to provide small social and residential communities of undergraduates numbering from 400 to 450.

“College life is a special experience here at Yale,” Ameling said. “Students get to know just about everyone in his or her college. It breaks the large university life into smaller experiences for students, providing a microcosm of everything available in the university with the intimacy of a small college environment.”

Within each college is a dining room resembling a centuries-old banquet hall with a huge stone fireplace and chandeliers. There are common rooms, libraries, study areas and various facilities for social, extracurricular and athletic activity in the residential colleges.

Each college has a weekly Master’s Tea where special guests, writers, artists, politicians, professors and others give lectures. Plays and musical programs by students residing in the college are presented from time to time.

“We try to upgrade the civilization here, encourage contacts between undergraduates and faculty outside the classroom and promote all kinds of useful and desirable things,” MacMullen said.

Yale traditions date back long before the birth of the nation. The school began as a church college with most of its early students studying for the ministry.

Oldest of the 225 buildings on the 170-acre campus is Connecticut Hall, completed in 1750, now a study hall for freshmen and a faculty meeting facility.

A statue of Nathan Hale stands in front of the ivy-covered, black-shuttered structure. Hale, who graduated from Yale in 1773, lived in Connecticut Hall during his years as a student. So did Noah Webster, who graduated in 1778, and Eli Whitney, class of 1792, and William Howard Taft, who graduated in 1878.

Hale’s name is inscribed in the domed rotunda of Memorial Hall on one of the tablets containing the names of all Yale men who died in the War of the Revolution, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, the World Wars, Korea and Vietnam.

Famous graduates, professors, presidents and Yale donors are remembered in many ways. Buildings, auditoriums and lecture rooms are named in their honor.

James Fenimore Cooper’s name is over a door entryway in one of the colleges. A freshman in the class of 1806, Cooper was expelled for exploding a firecracker in a professor’s office. The school reclaimed him years later after he made his mark as a novelist.

Yale athletes and students are called Elis (Yalies, too) in memory of Elihu Yale (1649-1721), a London merchant who donated proceeds from the sale of nine bales of goods, 417 books and a portrait of King George I to the fledgling Collegiate School. On receiving the gift, Collegiate School was renamed Yale.

Many of Yale’s gothic buildings resemble churches. The immense Payne Whitney Gymnasium is nicknamed the Cathedral of Sweat. Sterling Memorial Library is called the Cathedral of Learning.

8 Million Volumes

Inside Sterling are row after row of catalogue files for the more than 8 million volumes in Yale’s 40 libraries scattered throughout the campus, one of the largest libraries in America.

Where you would expect to see an altar in the Sterling Library is the circulation desk. And over it, what appears to be a giant religious mural is, in fact, a painting of “Mother Yale” stepping on a crimson carpet.

The first gallery of art in a U.S. college was at Yale in 1832. Today the school boasts one of the nation’s finest art museums.

Peabody Museum of Natural History houses one of the great scientific collections in America. People from throughout the U.S. and many parts of the world come here to see the Peabody’s Great Hall of Dinosaurs, which includes the largest intact brontosaurus on earth.

Yale also has an outstanding collection of 17th-, 18th- and 19th-Century musical instruments, which are studied and played by 150 graduate students working toward doctorates in the history and theory of music.

The spectacular translucent Vermont marble Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses 50,000 volumes of rare books including a premier collection of Western Americana.

Yale’s treasures of academia are in a class of their own. The first Ph.D. in the United States was awarded at Yale in 1861. The largest collection of British art outside Great Britain and German literature outside Germany are here.

Yale’s Daily News is the oldest college daily in America. The list of superlatives goes on and on.

When Yale is mentioned, Mory’s--the white frame house in the center of the campus at whose tables “sing the Whiffenpoofs assembled”--comes immediately to mind.

Mory’s was founded in 1849 by Frank and Jane Moriarity. The “Louis” in the Whiffenpoof song was Louis Linder, proprietor from 1890 to 1913.

Hanging from the walls at Mory’s are old Yale photographs dating back to the days of the first cameras. Names of Elis past and present are carved in the wooden tables. Welsh rarebit is still the house specialty and the tradition of passing the cup endures.

California has always been well represented at Yale. At present, among the undergraduates New York leads the list with 1,102, followed by Connecticut with 759, California with 451 and Pennsylvania with 273.

Competition to enter Yale is fierce. Of the 9,934 applications for the current freshman class, 1,281 were accepted.