Yale graduates have played influential roles in public life since the American Revolution. | REUTERS Yale University is founded, Oct. 9, 1701

This day in 1701 marks the founding of Yale University, when Connecticut’s colonial Legislature chartered the Collegiate School in Seabrook to educate students for “Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.” Originally based at the house of its first rector in Killingworth, the school moved to New Haven in 1716; in 1718, it was renamed Yale College to honor an early benefactor, Elihu Yale, a wealthy merchant.

Three out of four of the nation’s most recent presidents — George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — graduated from either Yale College or its law school. Another Yale Law School graduate, Hillary Clinton, is a potential 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.


Yale graduates have played influential roles in public life since the American Revolution. Lyman Hall, Philip Livingston, Lewis Morris and Oliver Wolcott signed the Declaration of Independence. In all, 25 Yale men served in the Continental Congress. Patriots Nathan Hale and Noah Webster were graduates. In 1781, Yale conferred the honorary degree of doctorate in laws on George Washington.

Rather than take up a professional football career, which had been offered to him by both the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers after his graduation from the University of Michigan, Gerald R. Ford, another future president, opted to attend Yale Law School while he worked as a football and boxing coach at the university.

William Howard Taft, the nation’s 27th president, graduated from Yale. Upon leaving the White House in 1913, he was named Chancellor Kent professor of law and legal history at Yale Law School. In 1921, President Warren Harding nominated him to become the 10th chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

One of Taft’s sons, Robert A. Taft, who also went to Yale, served as a Republican senator from Ohio from 1939 until his death in 1953.

SOURCE: U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS