The Residential Colleges
The most conspicuous advantage of a university is that it presents students with a great breadth of learning and gives them access to scholars who are engaged not only in communicating knowledge but also in discovering it. But the potential disadvantages of a large university are that its size and complexity may discourage communication, and that teachers and students may become less of a challenge to each other. In such an event, the discovery of new knowledge suffers as much as do teaching and learning.
In order to avoid such disadvantages, Yale established residential colleges. Initially made possible through gifts from Edward Stephen Harkness, B.A. 1897, the colleges are more than living quarters; they are small communities of men and women, whose members know one another well and learn from one another. Each college has its own dining hall, where the students eat together, as well as its own library, common rooms, and athletic teams; each college offers courses for which academic credit is given; and each college celebrates the progress of the academic year with various festivities, concerts, and dramatic presentations.
There are twelve colleges: Berkeley, Branford, Calhoun, Davenport, Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards, Morse, Pierson, Saybrook, Silliman, Ezra Stiles, and Trumbull. At the head of each college is a resident master; and in each college a dean advises students on both academic and nonacademic matters. Associated with the master and the dean as fellows are about fifty members of the faculty drawn from different departments and schools of the University. A few fellows reside in the college; others have offices there.
Upon entrance, each freshman is assigned to one of the twelve residential colleges. Most freshmen reside in a quadrangle known as the Old Campus. Whether freshmen live there or elsewhere on campus, they participate fully in the life of their residential college and may take a certain number of meals in their college. All freshmen and sophomores are required to live on campus. After freshman year most students live in their colleges, with about ten to fifteen percent of juniors and seniors choosing to live off campus. Whether they live on campus or off, undergraduates normally continue as members of the same college throughout their undergraduate careers.
