Morse College
| Morse College | |
|---|---|
| Residential college at Yale University | |
Coat of arms of Morse College
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| University | Yale University |
| Location | 304 York Street |
| Coordinates | 41°18.755′N 72°55.830′W / 41.312583°N 72.930500°WCoordinates: 41°18.755′N 72°55.830′W / 41.312583°N 72.930500°W |
| Motto | In Deo Non Armis Fido (Latin) |
| Motto in English | In God, not arms, I trust (Samuel F.B. Morse family motto) |
| Established | 1961 |
| Named for | Samuel Morse |
| Colors | Black, white, red |
| Sister college |
Mather House Christ Church Churchill College |
| Head | Catherine Panter-Brick |
| Dean | Joel Silverman |
| Undergraduates | 471 (2013-2014) |
| Mascot | Walrus |
| Website | morse |
Morse College, known on campus as "The Big M," is one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale University, built in 1961 and designed by Eero Saarinen. It is adjacent to Ezra Stiles College. The current Head of College (formerly Master) is Catherine Panter-Brick. The Associate Head of College is Mark Eggerman. Joel Silverman is the Dean of Morse College.
In his report on the year 1955-56, Yale President A. Whitney Griswold announced his intention to add at least one more residential college to the system Yale had launched only two decades earlier. "We have the colleges so full that community life, discipline, education, even sanitation are suffering," he stated. This news bred wild rumors about four or five new colleges being added to Yale's system. Nothing substantial was announced until the spring of 1959 when Eero Saarinen '34 was chosen as the architect, and the Old York Square behind the Graduate School became the designated site. The Old Dominion Foundation, established by Paul Mellon '29, provided money to build two "radically different" colleges, which would alleviate the growing strain on the older colleges.
Morse College is an eclectic structure built on an odd, angular site with many design features that are reminiscent of Tuscan villages, most notably San Gimignano. The college's original construction consisted almost entirely of single rooms, and in a modern attempt to capture the spirit of Gothic architecture, Saarinen eliminated all right angles from the living areas. (There are, of course, right angles in every window, between the floors and the walls, and the walls and the ceilings.) This resulted, notoriously, in two rooms which had eleven walls, none of which was long enough to put the bed against and still be able to open the door. In a 1959 article in the Yale Daily News, Eero Saarinen discussed his design for Morse, noting "[o]ur primary effort was to create an architecture which would recognize the individual as individual instead of an anonymous integer in a group." However, right angles have been reintroduced into the architecture of Morse College after renovation in 2010.
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