NEW HAVEN, Conn. - It turns out that Richard Brodhead, the soon-to-be president of Duke, is not just a Yalie or a son of Eli. He's a Branfordian.
Even though "Branfordian" sounds like a foreign nationality, calling Brodhead a "Brandfordian" is merely a means of identifying him with the residential college at Yale he has been affiliated with since his undergraduate days.
The newly-developed quadrangle system at Duke bears a faint resemblance to the college system at Yale University, and as administrators nurture residential life at Duke over the next few years, Brodhead's long experience with Yale's colleges will undoubtedly influence his contributions to Duke's quads.
Ask any Yalie the first question any fellow Eli asks when they initially meet and the answer is the same: What college are you in? The identity is so strong that at football games, students spend more time cheering for their college than for the Bulldogs.
"At the Yale-Harvard game, someone will yell out, `Shoes!'" said freshman Zoe Durner-Feiler about the traditional cheer in her college, Saybrook. At the call, the Saybrookians slowly strip, one article of clothing at a time. "Eventually people will go down to whatever you want to go to-including their birthday suits." They then run around mostly nude until someone decides to get dressed again.
Bizarre cheers like the Saybrook Strip notwithstanding, colleges seem at first like dorms with perks. Primarily comprised of residential housing space, the basics of dorm life are duplicated in each college. Each boosts laundry rooms, computer clusters and student lounges-just like most quads at Duke. But there are some differences from life in quads and life colleges, most notably that each college provides a four-year "home" for students-physically, academically and socially.
To support this environment, each of the 12 colleges feature a dining hall, a library, a master who oversees college life and an academic dean. The colleges vary in size by about 25 students per class, but most have about 100 students per class year.
Although most freshmen live together on Old Campus, students are attached to their colleges before they arrive on campus and advisors for freshmen are assigned by college. Upperclassmen live in their colleges the rest of their Yale careers.
All housing is suite-style with students in single or double rooms sharing a commons room and bathroom. Unlike at Duke, which offers a variety of options, anyone looking for apartment housing is forced off campus.
Occasionally, students can feel stuck in their affiliations if most of their friends are from other colleges. Some students do switch college affiliations, but such changes are rare and require an application.
What really morphs colleges from souped-up dorms to microcosms of Yale are the two administrators who live in the colleges: the master and the dean.
The two administrators live in full fledged houses located among student dorm rooms. Although they are usually accomplished professors, they serve no policing function. Fundamentally, they are scholars who care about student community and intellectual life; they are not seasoned administrators.
"This is a community, not a dorm," said Steven Smith, master of Branford College. He noted that college identity does not just extend to students. Each of Yale's faculty members is also affiliated with a college.
However, college association is stronger than quad or dorm affiliation. "It's definitely a defining factor of Yale," said freshman Megan Toal, as she returned from Sunday brunch in her college's dining hall with fellow residents. Her friends said their college affiliations are particularly strong because their college is so close to Old Campus, where most freshmen live together in dorms affiliated with their colleges.
"We're small and we have a bad dining hall so that brings us closer together," freshman Janey Symington said.
With the mandatory student meal plan, students can eat in any college's dining hall, but most gravitate to the eateries in their own colleges. Students say eating regularly with a smaller group of people is one of the major items that facilitates community.
"I met a lot of upperclassmen in my college because I eat in the dining hall," Symington said.
Some students complain about the quality of the food and the lack of selection. However, the ARAMARK Corp.-operated dining halls are consistently well-rated nationally. Since every student is required to purchase a substantial board plan, they take the dining hall food, which is only offered until 7 p.m. Sundays and 9 p.m. every other day, as a given.
Each college also has its own intramural sports teams and student government. Many of them publish weekly newsletters full of inside jokes, updates and programming announcements for the college.
College councils also serve as programming bodies. With college funds, individual students can get reimbursed for throwing parties open to the whole community. The councils also host several smaller activities throughout the year.
"The study breaks are really good," freshman Oliver Davies said. "They give us a lot of food. Like last night we had Chinese."
College activities are funded from two sources-the Parents' Fund, distributed evenly among colleges by the University's development office, and a second fund filled by each college's alumni.
The master, the head of each college, coordinates most college activities. There are no resident assistants, residence coordinators or graduate assistants at Yale and on the weekends, thumping music overflows from crowded student suites into the central green areas outside.
Smith, like many masters, knows most students' names and hometowns and named all the students hailing from Mississippi in his college with little effort.
He frequently eats with students in the dining hall, and the courtyard where students play ultimate Frisbee and sun themselves doubles as Smith's backyard. "In these informal ways, I get to talk with students and get to know them," he said.
Masters also put on informal programming in their homes, regularly bringing in celebrities and other less famous figures to talk at "Master's Teas," which draw anywhere from 5 to 50 people. Everyone from members of the band Phish to the Swiss ambassador to the United Nations has spoken at these small gatherings. At these informal gatherings, students and faculty chat with featured guests and each other while munching finger food and sipping tea or wine.
In addition to student life, academics are also based out of the colleges. Each college sponsors several full credit seminar classes a semester, in which college residents receive priority registration. The dean of each college also serves as the senior academic advisor for residents.
Students said the dean's offices are always a flurry of activity. In the course of 10 minutes last Friday afternoon, six students dropped by the office at Branford. As the go-to person for all things academic in Branford College, Dean Thomas McDow is responsible for signing schedules and authorizing excuses for late homework and missed tests for all 460 students of his college.
In theory, the rules for such excuses are all standardized, but the interpretation of the rules varies by college, McDow said. It creates a "culture of local options."
Students rave about lax deans who will occasionally extend deadlines on papers for sleep-deprived campus leaders-and they complain about some who look skeptically at undergraduates who come in requesting make-up exams due to illness.
But regardless of how difficult it is to get a dean's excuse, students thrive on their college affiliations.
All the colleges have unique features architecturally and characteristically. Students playfully argue that their assigned college is the best, but no University-wide winner or loser exists-except in intramural sports.
And unlike at Duke when students exiled to Edens complain about the quad, even students in the most distant college can be heard screaming their cheers with college pride at campus-wide events.
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