I stand corrected. Calhoun owned a slave plantation in Fort Hill, SC.
I believe Yale will change its name based on underlying social justice tends and institutional name changes that are occurring now and will occur in the future.
The Woodrow Wilson name change was hotly debated at Princeton. However, the school was able to mollify the students…for now
My hat is off to any college or university that has occupied the same downtown location for over 200 years.
Things change over time, folks.
Yale was in fact noted for Engineering through the first half of the 20th Century. Like Penn or Columbia, it had a separate engineering school within the university. The engineering school got folded into the main college/graduate school in the early 1950s, I believe, and promptly got starved for funding and attention.
That wasn’t a good move, obviously. Yale, like Harvard, which ceded engineering to MIT in the late 19th century, has been spending money like mad trying to catch back up. Maybe it will eventually.
But engineering never went away at Yale. I had friends in engineering there in the mid-70s. They have been perfectly happy with their careers. One got a PhD in operations research at Berkeley and worked for the CIA and Bolt Beranek Newman for a long time, so his education couldn’t have been that terrible. I also have a Yale classmate who was an English major at Yale who has a full professor at MIT ever since MIT lured him away from his tenured position at Stanford.
Yale continues to attract great students, and largely to excite them and to educate them while keeping them pretty darn happy for four years. Then they go out and do what great students do. Nothing is terribly wrong with that. Its position relative to other universities may have eroded somewhat, but that’s mainly because other universities have come up in the world (and some, like Stanford, made more providential bets), rather than Yale declining in any meaningful way. (Except, maybe, by not admitting my kids.) That said, Harvard and Yale themselves were not so dominant 50 years ago as people seem to imagine. Urban settings were less attractive then, and it was considered perfectly legitimate for top students to turn up their noses at Harvard or Yale, and go to Dartmouth or Williams, or maybe a safe suburban college like Stanford.
For a basis of comparison across time, this mid-20th century Life article recorded a snapshot of Yale’s statistical relationship to other colleges circa 1960:
Love that in 1960 Stanford was described as “the Yale of the West Coast, except with the good fortune to be coeducational.”
Hopefully it fading a bit so less people apply and I can get in lmaoo