School Notes: Yale College
March/April 2012

A home for Native American students

Native American students at Yale are about to get a place they can call their own. This fall, Yale welcomed its largest-ever incoming class of Native American freshmen: 40 members of the class of 2015 identify themselves as primarily Native American, and another dozen identify themselves as Native Americans in conjunction with another group. To accommodate ever-increasing numbers of Native American students, Yale College is establishing a new site for the Native American Cultural Center (NACC), which was created in 1993 to promote Native American culture and issues on campus. The NACC currently shares space with the Asian American Cultural Center at 295 Crown Street, but will move during 2012 to its new location at 26 High Street.

Debating successes

The Yale Debate Association (YDA), the most successful collegiate debate team in the United States, has continued its winning ways this year. For the fourth year in a row, the YDA has been named the Club of the Year in the American circuit, which recognizes the consistency of each member on the team. In addition, YDA placed 1st, 2nd, and 3rd at last year’s North American championship, and 2nd and 3rd at this past year’s nationals. They have won four American tournaments this year and have competed overseas at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. The YDA was invited to this year’s world championships in Manila, where two Yale teams made it into the “octafinal” rounds. One of the oldest college debating teams in the country, the YDA celebrated its centennial in 2008.

A year as a Yale student

For the first time,Yale College has brought a small cohort of international students from partner institutions to spend a year as fully integrated members of the Yale community. Seventeen students from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Universidad Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico (the Tec) are enrolled in Yale College as part of the Yale Visiting International Student Program (Y-VISP). They take Yale undergraduate courses, live in the residential colleges, and enjoy the same extracurricular activities available to all Yale students. The “Y-VISPers” are actively taking advantage of all Yale’s resources and bringing the perspective of two very different cultural and educational systems into the classroom.