Yale in popular culture

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Yale University, one of the oldest universities in the United States, is a cultural referent as an institution that produces members of the elite in every generation.^[1]

Contents 1 Literature 2 Television 3 Cinema 4 Other 5 References

[edit] Literature

The narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Ishmael, explains his education thusly: "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard."^[2] Melville's famous invocation may have been autobiographical,^[3] and has been co-opted by other authors to describe unorthodox places of higher learning.^[4]

• Owen Johnson's novel, Stover at Yale, follows the college career of Dink Stover (whose prep-school life at the Lawrenceville School had been chronicled in earlier novels). A counterpart to Tom Brown at Oxford, it was once a byword. F. Scott Fitzgerald's fictional Amory accepted the novel as a "kind of textbook" for collegiate life.
• Frank Merriwell, the model for all later juvenile sports fiction, plays football, baseball, crew, and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs.^[5][6]
• In the popular Gossip Girl series for teenagers, one of the lead characters, Blair Waldorf, is waitlisted at and ultimately accepted to Yale. She attends Yale, while two friends who were also accepted opt out of attending college altogether.
• Diana Peterfreund's novel, Secret Society Girl, takes place in Eli University, a thinly veiled version of Yale. Additionally, the main character is initiated into the secret society Rose & Grave, an allusion to the common naming scheme for secret societies at Yale.
• Allusions to Yale occur frequently in the writings of Tom Wolfe, who earned a Ph.D at Yale. In his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, bond trader Sherman McCoy is described as having a "Yale chin." A character in A Man in Full carries the middle name "Ahlstrom," which he was said to have been given in honor of religious historian Sidney Ahlstrom; this is an allusion to Sydney E. Ahlstrom, who was an historian of religion on the Yale faculty from 1954 to 1984.
• Stephen Carter's novel, New England White, takes place at a university in "Elm Harbor," a city which bears a striking resemblance to Yale's home of New Haven. Carter is a law professor at Yale and a building from the university is featured prominently on the book's cover.
• Yale is strongly satirized in Thomas Pynchon's 2006 novel Against the Day. Among other elements, one of the major characters, Kit Traverse, is described as making a deal with the devil to get into Yale. Kit's Yale education was financed by arch-villain Scarsdale Vibe, after Kit's father was killed by henchmen of his.

[edit] Television

• On the CW show Gilmore Girls, Rory Gilmore (played by Alexis Bledel), attends Yale (after spending much of her educational career with her heart set on attending Harvard). She is admitted to Harvard, Princeton as well as Yale University and chooses the latter over the other two after much consideration. She dropped out at the end of season five, but returned mid-way through season six. Her friend and rival Paris Geller (Liza Weil) also attends the school after a rejection from Harvard, and both become editors for the Daily News during their time at the school.
• In Mission Hill, Kevin dreams about going to Yale and it briefly shows the school with a huge number of students who are stereotypical nerds like Kevin himself.
• Brad O'Keefe, from Grounded for Life, fictionally gets an interview with Yale, and is later granted admission. Lily Finnerty, also from Grounded for Life, gets an interview (by lying).
• In the show The L Word, the character Bette Porter (played by Jennifer Beals) is a Yale Graduate. Jennifer Beals is a Yale graduate in real life as well.
• Aaron Sorkin characters Josh Lyman (The West Wing) and Simon Stiles (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) attended Yale Law School and Yale Drama School respectively. An episode of The West Wing was framed around a Whiffenpoofs performance at the White House.
• In episode "4F16" of The Simpsons, Montgomery Burns is revealed to have been a member of Skull and Bones.^[7] In several episodes Burns is seen wearing a white sweater with a the Yale "Y" or waving a Yale pennant. In another episode it is revealed that Sideshow Bob attended Yale and appears to have been a member of the rowing team.
• The 2007 miniseries The Company follows the career of a young Yale graduate recruited into the CIA during the Cold War
• In the television series Gilligan's Island, Mr. Howell calls several different individuals "A Yale Man"; most notably in the episode "Don't Bug the Mosquitos" in which he proclaims "You sir look like Attila the Hun or a Yale man!" to a Mosquitos band member.

[edit] Cinema

• The 2000 film The Skulls concerns a secret society with resemblances to Skull and Bones. That society, as well as the a capella group the Whiffenpoofs, are elements of the 2006 film The Good Shepherd.
• Yale is prominently featured in the The Good Shepherd as the alma mater of the political figures instrumental in the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency.
• Indiana Jones 4 was filmed on the Yale campus in 2007. In the film, Yale will be fictionalized as "Marshall College". Some of the footage shows the building which houses the legendary Yale Secret Society, "Skull and Bones," the society to which both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were rumored to be members, as well as many other members of the power elite.

[edit] Other

• John O'Hara, according to The New Yorker contributor and Yale alum Brendan Gill, wanted desperately to have gone to Yale. "People used to make fun of [it], but it was never a joke to O'Hara. It seemed... that there wasn't anything he didn't know about in regard to college and prep-school matters." Hemingway once said, cruelly, "Someone should take up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale." George V. Higgins opined that the reason Yale University Library has the manuscript of BUtterfield 8 and the galley proofs of Appointment in Samarra is that O'Hara was "foraging for honors:"

Former Yale president Kingman Brewster was forthright — and supercilious — in his explanation of O'Hara's disappointments in New Haven: he said Yale didn't give him an LL. D. degree "because he asked for it."^{[citation needed]}

In a newspaper column, O'Hara attempted to make light of the matter, writing: "If Yale had given me a degree, I could have joined the Yale Club, where the food is pretty good, the library is ample and restful, the location convenient, and I could go there when I felt like it without sponging off friends. They also have a nice-looking necktie."

• The Doonesbury comic strip, by Garry Trudeau, originated in the Yale Daily News as "Bull Tales," a strip about local campus events and situations. Several characters in the Doonesbury strip were based on people associated with the university. The character B.D. was originally based on Yale football quarterback Brian Dowling; Dowling's teammate Calvin Hill was featured as "Calvin" in the early years of the strip.[1] President King of the fictional Walden College was based on Yale president Kingman Brewster, and longtime Yale chaplain Rev. William Sloane Coffin provided part of the basis for the Rev. Scott Sloan, the chaplain at Walden in the strip.

[edit] References