Yale, the Book Donation, and the Town-Gown Divide

Ten Congregational ministers met in seventeen hundred and one in the study of Reverend Samuel Russell in Branford, Connecticut. Each brought books. The idea was to pool their libraries and found a school to train ministers and civic leaders for the Connecticut colony. They called it the Collegiate School. Its first home was in the house of its rector in Killingworth, then it moved to Saybrook, then in seventeen sixteen it moved to New Haven, where it has stayed.

In seventeen eighteen, a Boston minister named Cotton Mather wrote a letter to a wealthy British merchant named Elihu Yale. Yale had made his fortune working for the East India Company and had retired to England. Mather's pitch was direct: donate to the struggling school in Connecticut, and it will carry your name forever. Yale sent goods worth more than five hundred sixty pounds sterling. The school was renamed Yale College.

The man who gave his name to one of the most powerful universities in the world was not an American. He had never visited Connecticut. He gave once and never again. His money built the college's first permanent building.

Yale has shaped New Haven for three centuries, and the relationship has never been entirely comfortable. The university does not pay property taxes on its academic buildings, holding them as tax-exempt educational property. It is simultaneously the city's largest employer and its largest source of untaxed land. New Haven has one of the highest poverty rates of any city in New England, sitting at the edges of one of the wealthiest universities in the world.

The arrangement is old enough to have its own name. People here have called it the town-gown problem since before the Civil War.