With Presidents’ Day wrapping up yesterday, it’s as good a time as any to stop for a minute and honor the legacy of George “ The American Fabius ” Washington and the presidents that followed him. (Sidenote: the Wikipedia page titled “List of nicknames of United States Presidents” is a gem. I mean, who knew that Franklin Pierce’s nickname was “Young Hickory of the Granite Hills”?)
That being said, Yale is particularly well represented in the list of US Presidents (or underrepresented, if you only compare us with Harvard). We have five: William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. If you were running for president in the 1980s or 1990s as a Yale alumnus, your odds were pretty good. Other things that probably would have improved your odds: Skull and Bones membership (Taft, Bush and Bush), being a Caucasian male (everyone!), and having a family that could be described as powerful (Taft, Bush, Bush).
Some things you didn’t know about our Eli presidents:
Of course, the main question is why Yale has been such a presidential magnet. While it isn’t shy about wanting to educate future leaders, I think we have a tradition of entering government en masse that stands out from the other Ivies — check out the numbers here .
Indeed, as Yale Law Dean Anthony Kronman said in an interview with the YDN , “Yale’s commitment to public service is old and deep… [and] stands for two things: a kind and degree of intellectual adventurousness and a commitment to public service that views the law as an instrument of social improvement.”