Decision to bar donors’ names from colleges sets Yale apart
In 1718, Elihu Yale was approached with a request. The Collegiate School was to move into a grand new home in New Haven — one in need of a donor.
“If what is forming at New Haven might wear the name of Yale College,” a friend of the school wrote to the wealthy Welshman, “your munificence might easily obtain for you such a commemoration and perpetuation of your valuable name as would indeed be much better than an Egyptian pyramid.”
And with Yale’s donation of 562 pounds sterling, the University as we know it was born. But with the Yale Corporation’s decision not to offer...
Swensen College. He's done the most for Yale recently.