Critical Mass

Yale’s Woolsey Hall sits on the corner of Wall and College Street and divides the campus (roughly speaking) into two chunks: science on one side and liberal arts on the other. The building itself is a huge ‘L’; one wing is Yale’s official auditorium and the other is Yale’s largest dining hall, known as “Commons.” Joining these two arms together is the rotunda, which provides students with a convenient shortcut from one side of campus to the other.

The thousands of Yale students who pass through this rotunda every day are apt to forget that it is a War Memorial, where the names of Yale graduates who gave their lives for their country are carved in stone on the curving walls. Yale has (appropriately) always forbidden students to use this space to sell tickets or promote events, though this edict is increasingly disregarded and the administration makes little apparent attempt to enforce it.

Yale memorializes its veterans on a grander scale than this alone: the entire space enclosed by the ‘L’ of Woolsey, called Hewitt Quadrangle, is a war memorial too, where the handsome World War One cenotaph stands with the inscription, “In Memory of THE MEN of Yale who, true to Her Traditions gave THEIR LIVES that FREEDOM might not perish from the Earth.”

Running along the front of Commons behind the cenotaph are the names of famous WWI battles carved into the architrave. Most Yale students, far from bothering about these names (which include Cambrai, Argonne, Somme, and Ypres) do not even know what they mean: you might hear an unusually curious Yalie ask you “who those people were.”

It’s easy for men to be ignorant of history – even if it stares them in the face every day of their lives. Every Yale student should know those names by heart.

- Dan Gelernter