The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Yale’s newest digs
University’s two residential colleges unveiled
NEW HAVEN » About 350 Yale University undergraduates who move into the new Pauli Murray and Benjamin Franklin colleges starting Aug. 23 will begin forming a “critical portion of their Yale identity,” according to professor Tina Lu, the first head of Murray College.
“If you know Yale College, you know that the residential colleges are the beating heart of the institution,” said Lu during a media tour of Pauli Murray College on Tuesday. “They’re where the ideals of Yale College come to life, where intellectual disagreement is carried into friendly conversation, and that’s what I’d like to see here.”
Lu, professor of East Asian languages and literatures, will live at Pauli Murray College with her husband, Associate Head Stuart Semmel, a senior lecturer in history and in the humanities, and their five children, ages 6 to 15, who all attend New Haven public schools.
She said she wanted to be the first head of college at Murray because “I wanted to be part of the real life of Yale College beyond teaching my classes and interacting with students in a fairly narrow way. I wanted to be part of the community.”
For John Bollier, Yale’s associate vice president for facilities, the challenge was building two colleges to look like those downtown that were built in the 1930s while conforming to modern building codes and amenities.
It’s taken 33 months of work to erect the complexes on a 6½-acre triangular site on the north end of campus facing Prospect Street, wedged between Grove Street Cemetery, Ingalls Rink and the Farmington Canal Heritage Greenway.
Yale’s 13th and 14th residential colleges are named for the Founding Father and for Murray, whom Lu called “a very important civil rights activist, feminist, poet, writer, scholar and the first female African-American Episcopal priest in this country.”
Upper-class students who transferred to the new colleges were chosen by lottery, while freshmen (or first-years, which Lu said is now the preferred term), were randomly assigned. “I think wewere all very pleasantly surprised by the numbers and the level of enthusiasmby these upper-class students to be pioneers ... has really warmed my heart,” Lu said.
The new colleges will allow Yale to increase its undergraduate enrollment by 200 a year over the next four years, for a total of 6,200, according to spokesman Thomas Conroy.
Like all residential colleges, Murray and Franklin will have their own dining halls, common rooms and libraries. In Pauli Murray, the library overlooks the dining hall. “If you look down you can see whether your friends
are here right now and how long the line is,” Lu said.
The library features a table made from a tree that was felled on the site, created by City Bench of the Higganum section of Haddam. But there is as yet no budget for books, Lu said. “For now we’re probably going to rely on fellows for donations of old books” and for students to donate their used textbooks to fill the shelves, Lu said. “We’re hoping to find some funds for magazine subscriptions,” she said.
Each college has its unique amenities, too. Pauli Murray’s lower level includes a half-size basketball court, theater, digital art and media room and a bicycle repair shop, which is especially appropriate given it’s next to the Farmington Canal Greenway trail. “You can basically bike out to … Northampton [Massachusetts] if you’re really energetic,” Lu said.
While students fromother colleges can use the facilities, “The students in these two residential colleges get first dibs,” Lu said. “We have
probably the best dance rehearsal space on campus from what I’ve been told.”
Unlike older colleges, the two newresidences are compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, so disabled students will be given preference to live there.
The colleges, designed by Robert A.M. Stern, then dean of the Yale School of Architecture, may look similar to Trumbull or Berkeley downtown, but they are far different in many ways. Bollier pointed out that the first colleges were built before zoning and building codes, not to mention the ADA. “Challenges such as getting handicapped accessibility to all areas of the campus took 28 elevators, whereas some of our colleges have no elevators,” he said.
The colleges are rated LEEDGold, with 55 geothermal wells that take the place of forced-air heating and air conditioning.
“Replicating the stone carving was difficult. There are no stone-carving masons these days as there were in the 1930s,” Bollier said. In- stead, an automated process called computer numerical control was used to carve the decorative elements “and then hand-tooled afterwards,” he said.
Bollier said the location and layout of the colleges — the first new ones since Ezra Stiles and Morse opened in 1962 — help unify Yale’s 2-mile-long campus. By moving the geographic center farther north, Science Hill between Whitney Avenue and Prospect Street isn’t so isolated. The new colleges have the “secondary effect of making campus wrap around Grove Street Cemetery so that the commercial areas on Broadway were more accessible,” he said.
The triangular shape of the space allowed “idiosyncratic spaces to be created, which led to a feeling of individuality,” Bollier said. The tower is “prominent at all angles and it helps anchor the space,” he said.
There are details that evoke the older colleges, such as some panes among the 4,300 windows that look like they have cracked and been repaired, and others that have a rippled-glass look. “It’s trying to pattern itself after what 100 years ago would have been a more typical configuration,” Bollier said.
Planning for the colleges began in 2006, with talks between Yale and city officials, according to Bruce Alexander, Yale’s vice president for New Haven and state affairs and campus development. Yale had acquired the properties on the site but the university needed zoning approval and “we also needed to de-map some of the streets that went through the site,” such as part of Mansfield Street, he said.
“We put money into Scantlebury Park and sat down with the neighborhood ... and the Dixwell Management Team actually had a series of meetings in which the community itself, both adults and children, created that park,” Alexander said. Yale paid for the improvements to the park and to the adjoining Farmington Canal trail, he said.
Alexander, a Berkeley College resident when he attended Yale (class of 1965), said the residential college system serves an important purpose. “We hope that our students who benefit from these colleges will go out and serve the world in many important ways,” he said. “The whole notion of this is that students come together. ... It is a great place where diversity encourages interactions of various viewpoints.”
Yale President Peter Salovey had solicited suggestions for the names of the new colleges and naming one after Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray broke the tradition of Yale’s residential colleges being named for white men.
But the naming of Benjamin Franklin College was met with anger by many students when it was revealed that the namewas suggested by billionaire Charles Johnson, who donated $250 million toward the building of the colleges. Franklin, whose papers are kept at Yale and who is revered by Johnson, did not attend Yale but received an honorary degree in 1753.