Talk:Yale University/Archive 5

Reverting Edits on the Prestige Statement
Greetings,

I noticed that there is an ongoing discussion (see above) about statements of so-called "prestige" in higher education. Meanwhile, until the discussion reaches a consensus, I have reverted some edits that were made on the statement in question. The fact that a school like Yale (and Harvard, which has a nearly identical statement) is one of the most prestigious universities is a pretty neutral and encyclopedic statement that has been documented in numerous sources. Also, it is common practice to place multiple sources on possibly controversial statements (while keeping in mind that Wikipedia is not a mere collection of links), and the sources presented are high quality sources that includes reputable and notable rankings, news sources, encyclopedias, etc. Most importantly, I notice that statements like this have not been changed on articles on Harvard and Stanford. (I'm not trying to bring up school rivalries here; I'm just pointing out the problem of consistency.)

The most important job of a lede is to provide an efficient summary of the article. This article indeed shows the rich history, academic achievements, wealth, and selectivity of this institution. To avoid edit wars, I propose that from now we should discuss any related edits here before making them.

Thank you everyone for your contributions. William2001(talk) 05:16, 13 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Schools like Yale, Dartmouth, other Ivy League schools arguably don't carry the same international recognition as schools like Harvard, Cambridge or Stanford. I think this is pretty clearly demonstrated by the fact that Yale doesn't rank Top 10 in most international university rankings. None of the sources provided support the "prestige" statement. XXeducationexpertXX (talk) 11:53, 20 April 2020 (UTC)


 * The issue is that right now there are no standards to debate against; as there is a patchwork of consensuses across the project. Until there is a consensus at WP:HED (see talk), it's not going to be helpful to edit war over this: this statement has been here for a month before this editing, and before the relevant discussion got under way, so it might as well be left until consensus is reached there. Continuously trying to force an article change whilst a discussion is taking place could be seen as disruptive editing, and might incur sanctions. As it's not clear that it's promotional given the current discussion, and it doesn't involve WP:BLP, it's really not necessary to remove it. The same would go for any currently being added to schools whilst the discussion is taking place. Shadowssettle(talk) 19:15, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * The edit warring clearly began in response to the statement. The page existed with out such a statement for years without edit warring. No, we are not going to use a highly dubious statement as a placeholder until discussion can be had. The status quo is what the page was prior to addition of the disputed text and this statement is clearly disputed. XXeducationexpertXX (talk) 01:07, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * This discussion was started as a consequence of your repeated effort to remove the statement, so the status quo ante is the version prior to your attempts at removing it. I have reverted as such. Please stop edit warring and discuss the matter here. -- Kinu t/c 01:15, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * This discussion was started as a consequence of a highly dubious and unsupported statement being added to the page and it going unnoticed for a short period of time. A similar statement has been repeatedly been removed in the past by previous editors. The "status quo" does not include the highly disputed statement. XXeducationexpertXX (talk) 01:40, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * The assertion that such a statement has been removed before was not mentioned until now. Can you please provide diffs so others can investigate this further? -- Kinu t/c 01:42, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

It appears that the disputed statement about the university's prestige only has one source that actually discusses "prestige:" a very poor CNBC blog post that mostly just quotes other materials. Setting aside the issue of whether this kind of information should be included in the lede of this or any other article, it must be supported by high quality sources - preferably in the body of the article because the lede should be a summary of what is in the body of the article - and accurately represent those sources.

So if we omit that one shitty source - and we definitely should - then it appears that it might be accurate to say that the university is highly ranked by a few specific rankings. And several of those rankings are not reputable, either. Further, there is a serious concern about synthesis if Wikipedia editors combine several sources to draw a novel conclusion.

Editors who really want to include this kind of information should focus their energy on finding high quality sources that explicitly support the statement. If it's true and something that is noteworthy enough to include in the lede of the article, it should be easy to find in multiple high quality sources given the amount of scholarly writing that focuses on US higher education. ElKevbo (talk) 01:24, 26 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Agreed with . There are certain universities that have sources, which state explicitly support the "prestige" statement. Yale is not one of the those universities. We shouldn't be synthesizing secondary sources to draw novel conclusions. Let's please remove this statement or risk having every Ivy League school feature this un-encyclopedic information. There have been similar debates on the MIT, Columbia and Princeton University pages. All of these universities have been called "prestigious", "elite" and are ranking Top 10 nationally and internationally, but the justification for including the statement is usually a derivative and subjective conclusion of several sources, which neither directly or consistently make such a claim. XXeducationexpertXX (talk) 01:45, 26 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Although I'm not going to spend any time looking for this information I would be surprised if editors can't find high quality sources to support this kind of statement; there's a reason why there's a long-standing joke that USN&WR has a die with "H," "Y", and "P" on the sides and they just roll it each year to determine which university will be ranked number one. ElKevbo (talk) 02:08, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * That's not a long-standing joke, at least outside of your own circle. However, it does give some good insight into what your agenda is with these prestige statements. According to USNWR, ARWU, CWUR, and QS, Yale is not a Top 10 university globally - that's really significant. The schools that are: Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, Princeton, UChicago. Very clearly, if you believe rankings, Yale is simply not considered "one of the most prestigious universities in the world" if it can't even crack the top 10. Further, the Top universities in the United States according to USNWR are Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Yale and recently UChicago. Stanford hasn't made the top 3 in over 15 years. The first university rankings ever published in the 1900s had Harvard, Columbia, UChicago and Berkeley ranked as the top universities in the world and the 2nd oldest rankings in 1906 had Harvard, UChicago, Columbia as the Top 3. Princeton didn't make the top 10. The schools with the lowest acceptance rates in order: Stanford (~4%), Harvard (4.5%), Columbia (5%), Princeton (5.8%), UChicago (5.8%), Yale (5.9%), MIT (6.2%). There goes use of the "selectivity" specifically for Yale. Don't even get me started on Nobel Prizes where Harvard, UChicago, Columbia and Berkeley individually have more Nobel Prizes than Yale and Princeton combined. If you really would like to go down the path of citing rankings and "selectivity" measures, I assure you it will be a zero sum game.XXeducationexpertXX (talk) 04:25, 30 April 2020 (UTC)


 * I would follow whatever consensus the project reaches but I think that Yale is one of the very few schools that can be consistent with the prestige statement in the Harvard article. There is the Harvard-Yale rivalry that is acknowledged by Harvard, second biggest endowment, Yale Law School that is ranked number 1, Yale graduates in politics (Bushs, Clintons and SCOTUS justices). How do we measure recognition anyway? My opinion is to just lay out the facts and let the readers decide without saying anything about prestige but a school's prestige is not just the rankings and I believe that Yale is the only school that can be treated as a rival of Harvard (in the United States). So if we are going to write it for Harvard, I see no problem in writing it for Yale also. But as I have said, my preferred approach is to just lay out the facts for every school. --HamiltonProject (talk) 16:18, 3 July 2020 (UTC)

Endowment
It's now $31.2 billion. https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2020/09/25/not-business-as-usual-yale-releases-update-on-the-universitys-financial-situation/ Make correction please. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 32.215.223.224 (talk) 22:41, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Notable alumni and faculty
I've been going through the section and adding sources for each person, as the maintenance message requests, and some of the listed people didn't graduate. Claire Danes, Paul Newman, Oliver Stone, William E. Boeing, George Weiss, and Ron Darling all attended the University; however, none of them graduated. Considering an alumni is someone who graduates from the school, shouldn't they be removed? I'll leave them for now, considering they were students, but it is still questionable. Additionally, I'm going to WP:Bold and remove Brian Dennehy as any claims to him attending Yale is unreliable and disputed by both his NYT Obituary and his own interviews, where he never mentions the school. Lastly, I think listing this section as both "Notable alumni and faculty" is odd, considering it only lists two faculty members who weren't Yale alumni (John E. Hare and Benoit Mandlebrot). I'd suggest removing them and just keeping it to "Notable alumni"; at that point, there could either be a separate section for faculty or just leave it for another wiki page. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 21:48, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * "Alumni" does not mean "graduate." ElKevbo (talk) 22:12, 17 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Fair enough, didn't realize that non-graduates could be included as alumni. Will keep them then and keep adding citations. Thanks for the help. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 01:35, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

Trivial Information Throughout Article
Currently trying to bring this article to a higher quality, and I can't help but notice that this article simply contains poor structure and lots of trivial information. The History section is a complete mess; the first subsection "Early history of Yale College" is mostly fine, besides the odd sentence or two that can be moved to somewhere later and more citations and expansion. After that though, the "19th century" subsection has an odd paragraph about the "ideal prototype of the Yale ideal" (all cited by a single source), which has no place being in the article. The "20th century" is filled with numerous trivial paragraphs (Behavioral Sciences, Biology, Medicine, History and American studies, for instance) that could all easily be removed and nothing of serious substance would be lost. They aren't a broader scope, note-worthy milestones, etc. rather odd anecdotes cited by singular journal or books that are difficult to find. And, all could easily be simplified to just one to two sentences is a larger section, if that The more important sections (Class, Women, Faculty, etc.) are disorganized as well. The section "Town-gown relations" can be moved to the section later down "Relationship with New Haven." Further, the 21st century needs additional work to make it flow, and not just being singular sentences detailing small events. While I've only pointed out issues with the history section, this extends to the rest of the article. Unless anyone objects or suggests a different approach/view, I'll work to reformat the article to resolve this pertinent issue. In the meantime though, to give anyone time to respond, I'll work on fixing citations on this page, as there are many dead links and non-filled fields, as well as fixing grammar issues. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 23:45, 22 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Since no one objected, I will WP:BOLD and have removed some of the mention information above, as it was purely small historical accounts, typically with only one source, that do not need such weight in this article. This page is long as is; it needs trimming and a more general approach. PoliticsIsExciting (talk) 15:15, 4 March 2021 (UTC)

Proposed merge of CancelYale into Yale University
Likely doesn't have its' own notability, but there's enough information to have CancelYale merged into this article. I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 00:03, 4 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Support merging some of the content into this article (if it's not already here) but I'm skeptical that the hashtag is itself notable enough to warrant more than a passing mention if that. ElKevbo (talk) 00:21, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose I support two distinct articles Germartin1 (talk) 18:29, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. It's obviously gained traction but not enough to merit a separate article. The information would be better served in the main Yale page. Etzedek24 (I'll talk at ya) (Check my track record) 01:39, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support The articles should be merged. nrunje 18:29, 01 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose Cancel Yale is just trolling and doesn't deserve a wikipedia page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 32.215.223.224 (talk) 22:43, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Support I'm not seeing a duration of coverage of this movement - it was nationally covered only around June and July, and the most recent news coverage I see is an August article from a Yale magazine. Also, much of the relevant content already seems to be mentioned at Yale University and Elihu Yale, so a merge and redirect seems appropriate. - Whisperjanes (talk) 14:57, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Not sure if CancelYale even deserves a mention in the main article. Pennsylvania2 (talk) 21:58, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Support A hashtag trending and discussed for a few weeks in June/July is hardly a movement. Most information in CancelYale appears to predate the hashtag, and would be better served merged into the main article. Bxec (talk) 21:23, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose The idea that every related topic should be collapsed into a larger article hurts Wikipedia. I've seen this over and over again. I've seen an entire, well-written, well-sourced article vanish because somebody claimed that X was usually (but not always) Y so therefore should just be merged into Y. Dumb! Here, CancelYale isn't merely a hashtag. The hashtag is indicative of the movement. Right or wrong, whether you agree or disagree, a significant movement like this, with national news coverage, deserves its own article. Maybe 10 or 20 years from now, we can look back and say this was insignificant, but that isn't the case today. If this should be merged anywhere, perhaps there is article about similar movements, but I would probably still Oppose. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:600:877F:AE1F:FD46:A82A:24B6:2375 (talk) 03:54, 22 February 2021 (UTC)

Apparent vandalism on 216.15.62.121 on 13 January 2014
I'm challenging this edit. The correct idiom in American English is "graduated from" (with persons as the subject and the university as the object), not "has graduated" (with the university as the subject and persons as the object). Most of the results on Google Books for "has graduated" are coming back from the 1910s and 1920s. Any objections before I fix this? --Coolcaesar (talk) 15:27, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

"CancelYale" subsection
Yesterday, I removed the "CancelYale" subsection label and integrated the material in the subsection into the larger section of the history section in which it was already placed. This removed very little information from the article and placed this material into a more readable, understandable context. A few hours later, Filetime reverted my edit with no discussion or an edit summary. He then added one new source documenting the existence and importance of this Twitter hashtag as well as cleaning up some other reference templates and text in the section.

When I asked Filetime on their User talk page why they made this edit, they replied: "Removing an entire subsection of the page, particularly relating to a controversial subject, is a matter that should be discussed and agreed upon in the talk page, rather than unilaterally executed. If you feel this information is inappropriate for the article, please gain consensus in the talk page." The accusation that I "remov[ed] an entire subsection of the [article]" is clearly false and it makes me think that Filetime did not actually look at the edit that I made. The reversion of my edit now leaves us with:


 * A subsection of the "History" section labeled after a Twitter hashtag. We have no evidence that this is actually of historical importance. Moreover, the material in the subsection is very clear that the events it describes predate the invention of this hashtag by a few decades so it's just a bad label.
 * A subsection in the "History" section that discusses, with no preamble and little explanation, events that took place in the late 20th and early 21st century. The problem is that the sections that surround this material are all about the 18th century. So with little context readers are whipped from the middle of the 18th century to the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century only to be flung back into the 18th century in the next subsection. This material can be integrated into this part of the institution's history but it has to be done carefully and with intention; the material that Filetime is insisting remain in this article does not do that.

Filetime, I look forward to your participation in this discussion and your help in resolving these issues. ElKevbo (talk) 21:58, 14 April 2021 (UTC)


 * I agree that this #CancelYale hashtag section is a violation of WP:UNDUE. The university has a 320 year history.  This is WP:RECENTISM, and WP:CRYSTAL.  At most this phenomenon deserves a sentence or two.  Some day it might merit more or be worthy of a standalone article. Jehochman Talk 22:02, 14 April 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm late to this discussion, but just to solidify the consensus, I concur with ElKevbo and Jehochman. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 20:17, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

AfD for Whitney Humanities Center
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Whitney Humanities Center. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:03, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Women's Campaign School
I'm not sure where to fit in a section on the Women's Campaign School. But it would appear that mention would be in order. See, e.g.,. If anyone has thoughts as to where, appreciated, and if anyone want to take a crack at it, please do. --2603:7000:2143:8500:A8DD:1194:1F88:AF62 (talk) 20:23, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Few notable college alumni? Or just bad category diffusion?
Hi all! Here's a friendly prod: By my latest very rough calculation, Yale College currently has roughly 2.5 alumni with Wikipedia pages per thousand graduates. That's a rate below Harvard, yes, but it's also below quite a few liberal arts colleges that don't have to diffuse their alumni category, and it's barely a third of the top liberal arts colleges. Either Yale just isn't graduating that many notable alumni (a hypothesis I'm guessing you doubt :P), or there's quite a bit of work to do to make sure alumni of the college are categorized under Category:Yale College alumni rather than Category:Yale University alumni. Anyone want to take on fixing up the category to see if you can get the count higher than Harvard's? Cheers, &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:54, 4 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Related prior discussion at Talk:Harvard University/Archive 11. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 00:01, 5 July 2021 (UTC)


 * Sdkb I would be interested in helping to do this. I think that it would be necissary to do that by graduation year(1930s, 1940s, etc.). If it is still over 200 per decade, I would then recmomend doing it by year. MrMeAndMrMe   Contributions  23:49, 24 January 2022 (UTC)
 * @MrMeAndMrMe, fantastic to hear! Going through systematically like that sounds good. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 00:17, 25 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Please see prior consensus against such categories by date at Categories_for_discussion/Log/2017_February_24. – Fayenatic  L ondon 11:14, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

John M. Merriman
Professor John M. Merriman has died. Any help improving his article would be appreciated. Thank you, Thriley (talk) 19:18, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

For Humanity Campaign?
Should campaigns be talked about on Yale's page? According to this: https://news.yale.edu/2021/10/02/yale-launches-comprehensive-campaign-humanity, it seems like some changes can be transformative. Thoughts? Wozal (talk) 15:45, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
 * We really need independent sources, ideally multiple one, to establish due weight. ElKevbo (talk) 00:11, 5 July 2022 (UTC)