Campus Clips

Yale college is increasing its enrollment again. The university announced in February that, beginning this fall with the Class of 2029, it will increase undergraduate class size by 100 students to a total of 1,650—a six-percent expansion. In 2017, the opening of two new residential colleges allowed an increase from about 1,350 students per class to 1,550. (Because of pandemic-related deferrals, the current enrollment in Yale College is about 6,800, an average of 1,700 per class.) “By making investments to welcome more of these talented students,” college dean Pericles Lewis and provost Scott Strobel wrote in announcing the expansion, “Yale College will advance its strategic plan, providing the benefits of a Yale education to additional future leaders with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives.” They also said that new faculty positions and other resources will be provided to support the larger enrollment.

A new poetry prize will be awarded by the Yale Library this year. The Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry has been established as a complement to the biennial Bollingen Prize, which has been awarded since 1948. The new $25,000 prize, named for the longtime Beinecke Library curator and Bollingen Prize director, will honor a book of poetry published in the previous two years. The Bollingen Prize, which up to now has recognized the lifetime achievement of a poet who had produced a work in the previous two years, will now be a more straightforward lifetime achievement award.

Rising juniors, rather than seniors, will have priority in room selection in the residential colleges beginning in the 2026–27 academic year. Next year, as an interim step, juniors and seniors will have equal priority. “Many students who move off campus in their junior year say they feel unprepared for this step, but they take it nevertheless because they are uneasy about their chances in the lottery,” wrote dean of students Melanie Boyd ’89 in a message to students about the change. Boyd assured seniors that there will still be housing available on campus for all who want it;  59 percent of seniors currently live off campus.

Sweetgreen, the fast casual restaurant chain that serves what it describes as “fresh, plant-forward, earth-friendly” bowls and salads, is coming to the corner of York and Broadway this year. The company has more than 200 locations across the country. Depending on their generation, alumni will remember that corner as Liggett’s drugstore, Demery’s, Au Bon Pain, or Patagonia, among others.