The UNH English/Yale Connection

UNH English Faculty with degrees from Yale

• Alfred Richards (1912): A.B., Yale University, (1898) 
• Claude T. Lloyd (1925): Arrives in 1925 (he is an asst. prof w/Ph.D., Yale grad) 
• Paul S. Schoedinger (1926): A.B. Princeton, 1920; M.A. Ohio State University, 1921; Ph.D. Yale University, 1940. Instructor in English, Ohio State University, 1921-22. Instructor in English, 1926-29; present position, 1929—Assistant Professor (gone by 1946)
• Carroll Towle (1931): A.B., Bowdoin College, 1922; Ph.D., Yale university, 1933. Instructor, University of Texas, 1923-26. Teaching assistant, Yale university, 1926-29; instructor, Yale university, 1929-31. 
• Sylvester Bingham (1937): A.B., Dartmouth College, 1922; A.M., Harvard University, 1929; Ph.D., Yale university, 1937. 

What do we know about Yale English?

A Very Brief History of the Yale English Department, Excluding the Present

... the classics-dominated Yale college. Hoping "to win adherents to the teaching science" against Yale's classicists, who "fought hard to maintain their monopoly," (56).

Having begun from scratch, John's Hopkins had had no tradition of generalist culture like that at Harvard and Yale. (65)

In 1870 Noah Porter of Yale conceded that "mere grammatical analysis has ... Been pushed to a one sided extreme so as to be over refined, unnecessarily complicated, and unreasonably prolonged." Porter suggested that "the drill work of classical study might be exchanged by degrees for those higher enjoyments to which the ancient writers invite whenever works are read as literature, or are studied with logical or a aesthetic analysis, or are recited with a distinct regard to rhetorical praxis and improvement." (73)

The campaign for criticism in the university frequently went along with efforts to legitimate modern literature as an object of study... [passage continues to talk about Phelps' "Modern Novels" course at Yale, initiated in 1895 and concludes with:] Still, the hostile reaction to Phelp's course at Yale was characteristic, and academic interest in the literature of the present or recent past was at best hesitant and sporadic. (124)

More on Yale/UNH connection: see Crowley p. 101, where she discusses surveys of Freshman English circa 1929. “He found that over half of the schools included in his survey (55 percent) required ‘a considerable amount—1000 pages or more a semester—of reading in pure literature’ (20). He continued: “considerably less than that is required by 25%; and 11% admit not requiring any” literature in the required freshman course. Another 13 percent put “special stress on literature, such as to turn the course rather from writing toward reading.’ This group included ‘of course, both Yale and Princeton’ I presume that in schools where students were reading over a thousand pages of literature they were not using these texts as models, as they would in the classical approach. Interpreted in this way, Shipherd’s data suggests that composition courses were still widely used as introductions to literary study” (101).

Berlin and Hobbs also discuss Yale and liberal culture, see blog post, here

From Maureen Daly Goggin: "The next two reports from the Pedagogical Section focused on the teaching of undergraduate composition as distinct from rhetoric, and they revealed a strong lack of agreement among the respondents over whether composition should be taught directly as it was at Harvard, or indirectly through reading great literature as it was at Yale. (25)