YaleCoursesYale and the American Revolution - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 6
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Today's Themes: Revolution and Community 0:01
The lecture opens by announcing a shift toward community as the day's main theme, building on the earlier discussions of character. It promises to move from Yale's role in the American Revolution into the idea of imagined communities, meaning what makes someone a member of a group and what duties come with that membership, and it closes with a nod to a Michael Sandel op-ed criticizing modern meritocracy.
Trumbull's Painting and Yale's Founders 1:18
The famous painting of the Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, son of Governor Trumbull, is used to introduce the signers with Yale ties, including John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Jefferson. Trumbull painted it decades after 1776, meeting and sketching many founders from life between 1786 and 1820, and the smaller version hangs in Yale's art gallery while the larger one sits in the U.S. Capitol.
18th Century Yale Before the War 4:00
Yale at the time was quasi-independent of church and state, run by ministers but funded partly by Connecticut, training students for church and secular careers in roughly equal measure. Students were often only sixteen, living under an in loco parentis system, studying a classical curriculum that was slowly absorbing Locke, Newton, and calculus. In 1769 students wore homespun cloth to commencement to protest British taxation, a gesture later echoed by Gandhi's homespun campaign in India.
Dwight's Address to the Class of 1776 7:04
Three weeks after independence was declared, tutor Timothy Dwight told Yale's graduating class not to think of themselves as members of a small town but as founders of American greatness destined for immortality and citizenship of the world. The speech blurred religious and secular meaning, and Dwight later became Yale's president after serving as a Revolutionary Army chaplain.
Yale Figures in the War 11:07
David Bushnell, class of 1775, built the first submarine, the Turtle, though it failed to sink any British ships and was later lost when its transport ship sank. Nathan Hale spied in British-held Manhattan, was captured and hanged, and is remembered with a 1914 statue outside Connecticut Hall, a figure later claimed as a forerunner of the CIA, with reproductions reportedly kept at CIA headquarters and even exchanged, in miniature, during the founding of Yale-NUS in Singapore.
A College Record of Wartime Hardship 16:01
The speaker reads from an April 1, 1777 Yale Corporation record describing why students had to be scattered to other towns under their tutors: food was scarce, prices were high, illness and smallpox were spreading, and public affairs pulled students away from study. The record closes by hoping God's providence would open a door for the students' return to their fixed and ancient seat of learning, a phrase that strikes the speaker as funny since Yale had only been in New Haven sixty years. He draws a direct parallel to sending students home during COVID in March 2020, noting that in both cases students eventually returned to finish their work.
The Battle of New Haven 18:30
In July 1779, British ships controlling New York sailed up Long Island Sound and landed troops near East Haven and West Haven with orders to burn Yale's college building, which stood deserted at the time. One British officer later claimed he stopped the burning, though this is unconfirmed. Townspeople fought off the invasion, and twenty-seven people died, including Naphtali Daggett, a 51-year-old Yale figure who rode out to fight, was beaten, and died about a year later from his wounds. A team member named Abby Douglas mapped Ezra Stiles's original map onto modern New Haven to show where these events unfolded, revealing that much of the land between Long Wharf and the Green was later reclaimed from the harbor.
Colleges as Communities of Learning 21:30
Turning to the theme of community, the speaker cites Chaucer's Canterbury Tales character the clerk, a poor Oxford scholar who spends all his money on Aristotle's books and is described as one who would gladly learn and gladly teach, a phrase later adopted as a school motto. This idea of a college as a shared space for living and learning together traces back to Oxford and Cambridge colleges like Merton, built mainly in the 13th and 14th centuries, whose courtyards and niches inspired Yale's residential college architecture built in the 1920s. Philosopher John Dewey is quoted calling the school primarily a social institution where a child's work is shaped through community life. The speaker contrasts Yale's 1776 scale, about 150 students taught by five people, with today's roughly 6,600 Yale College students, over a thousand faculty, and almost 200,000 living alumni, then has students list communities they belong to, including religious groups, hometowns, families, sports teams, residential colleges, and identity-based or cultural societies, prompting discussion of what duties members owe each other.
Imagined Communities and Nationhood 32:04
The discussion turns to the idea of imagined communities, drawn from the anthropologist Benedict Anderson, who studied nationalist movements across Southeast Asia and beyond. Anderson argued that a nation is imagined because its members will never meet most of their fellow citizens, yet still feel connected to them. He described nations as limited, since even the largest has boundaries beyond which other nations begin, as sovereign, because the idea arose as Enlightenment thought undermined divine-right monarchy, and as a community, because it is felt as a deep horizontal comradeship despite real inequality. The American Revolution is treated as the first major instance of this kind of anti-colonial, nation-based revolution, with the name United States of America itself only proposed in 1775 or 1776 before becoming official policy by July 4th.
Yale as a Kind of Nation 39:34
The comparison shifts to Yale itself, noting that alumni often feel a connection to the university resembling the bond people feel toward a nation, something rarely matched at other universities. Edmund Burke's idea of society as a covenant between past, present, and future generations, rather than a contract that can be easily dissolved, is offered as a way to understand this loyalty. Unlike a nation, though, Yale membership is not inherited at birth but granted through admission or hiring, which raises the question of how such a community decides who belongs.
Sandel's Critique of Meritocracy 41:35
Michael Sandel's book The Tyranny of Merit is introduced as a challenge to how elite colleges select their members. Sandel argues that meritocracy lets winners believe their success is fully earned through talent and hard work, ignoring the large role of luck, family background, and available schooling. He warns that treating a college degree as the precondition for dignified work and social esteem breeds credentialism, which he calls the last acceptable prejudice, and fuels political backlash, something visible in candidates who present themselves as outsiders to the educated elite. Sandel calls instead for humility about luck as a civic virtue that could move society away from a harsh ethic of success toward a more generous public life, a question that sets up the next discussion of Plato's noble lie and how guardians are chosen.
Two Problems with Community 47:02
The lecture closes by naming two tensions worth watching for in the coming weeks' readings. The first is the question of who counts as part of a community and who is left out, echoing points made earlier in the lecture. The second is whether a community can push too hard toward conformity, effectively giving itself a veto over what its members are allowed to say or express.
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