Yale University

Yale University is a private university in New Haven, Connecticut, chartered by the Connecticut Colony in 1701 as a collegiate school. Its senior society Skull and Bones, its wartime faculty recruited into the Office of Strategic Services and the Central Intelligence Agency, its psychology, psychiatry and neurophysiology laboratories, and its alumni in the federal courts and the executive branch appear in the records of intelligence services, behavioral research, parapsychology, drug policy and finance.

The 1701 charter

The General Court of the Colony of Connecticut passed an "Act for a Collegiate School" at its October 1701 session. It recites petitions for "full liberty and priviledg" for undertakers to found a school "wherein youth may be instructed in the arts and sciences, who through the blessing of Almighty God, may be fitted for publick imployments both in church and civill state," and grants "full liberty, right and priviledge" to ten ministers, James Noyes, Israel Chauncey, Thomas Buckingham, Abraham Pierson, Samuel Mather, Timothy Woodbridge, James Pierpont, Samuel Andrew, Joseph Webb and Noadiah Russell, "to erect, forme, direct, order, establish, improve" the school.¹ The colony's act of May 1745 "for the more full and compleat Establishment of Yale College in New Haven" recites that the General Court "assembled at New Haven, on the ninth day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and one" had made the grant, and that the trustees had "founded a Collegiate School at New Haven, known by the name of Yale College."²

Skull and Bones and the Russell Trust Association

David A. Richards, who is writing a history of American college societies and whose name the magazine's editors note appears in the Class of 1967 list of Skull and Bones members, wrote in the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2015 that Skull and Bones was founded in 1832 on the conception of William Huntington Russell, the valedictorian of the Class of 1833, with Alphonso Taft as a cofounder, and that its members called it the Eulogian Club before a skull and crossbones sketched on a chapel-door notice gave it its name and its badge number, 322. He wrote that in 1856 the society's alumni incorporated it in Connecticut as a trust called the Russell Trust Association, so that a corporation could hold title to the windowless "tomb" on High Street, which was later estimated to have cost about $30,000.³ A reader's letter in the same magazine, citing James Bradley's book The China Mirage, stated that the money for the 1856 building was "Russell money" traced to Russell and Company of Canton, "America's biggest smuggler of Turkish opium into China."⁴ The Connecticut Secretary of the State's business registry lists "The Russell Trust Association" as a domestic business of the type "Special Chartered," status "Active," account number 0269315.⁵

Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Esquire in September 1977 that the society's members included McGeorge Bundy, Averell Harriman, Henry L. Stimson, Henry Luce and Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. He wrote that Bundy's brother William P. Bundy and William F. Buckley entered the Central Intelligence Agency after their years in the society.⁶ Bundy majored in mathematics at Yale and then returned to Harvard University and its Society of Fellows after the war.⁷ A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum of October 20, 1950 from Louis B. Nichols to Clyde Tolson records that Buckley "graduated at Yale in 1950, and was chairman of" the Yale Daily News, and that the editor of the News had promoted a forum at the Yale Law School in 1949 at which Nichols spoke.⁸

George W. Bush entered Yale in 1964 and received a bachelor's degree in history in 1968.⁹ Jacques Leslie, a member of the Class of 1968, wrote in Salon in March 2000 that he and Bush had both been asked to join Skull and Bones, that he refused on Tap Night, and that "Bush, on the other hand, joined Bones." Leslie cited Bill Minutaglio's biography First Son for the account that Bush had considered a society called Gin and Tonic but was swayed when his father, then a congressman, conducted the tapping himself. Leslie listed Stimson (Class of 1888), Stewart, Harriman, Luce, John Hersey and William Sloane Coffin as members, and wrote that students heard rumors that the society's assets made it the largest corporation in Connecticut and that each member was guaranteed a lifetime annual stipend of $20,000, adding that "Nobody knew whether the rumors were true."¹⁰

The George H. W. Bush Presidential Library describes its file FOIA 2009-0116-F as records "related to the Skull and Bones Society at Yale University, of which George H. W. Bush and his father Prescott Bush were both members." The file contains correspondence from President Bush to Buckley and Thomas W. Ludlow Ashley about a Buckley article in National Review answering Pat Buchanan's characterization of Bush's foreign policy as "Skull and Bones foreign policy" during the 1992 campaign, administrative forms for a Skull and Bones tea held at the White House on October 20, 1989, and newspaper articles on the rumor that Prescott Bush and a group of Skull and Bones members had taken the skull of the Apache leader Geronimo.¹¹ Vesting Order 248 of the Alien Property Custodian, executed October 20, 1942 and published in the Federal Register on November 7, 1942, vested "All of the capital stock of Union Banking Corporation," 4,000 shares held for the benefit of Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, N.V., Rotterdam, "which bank is owned or controlled by members of the Thyssen family." It lists the registered owners as E. Roland Harriman (3,991 shares), Cornelius Lievense (4), Harold D. Pennington (1), Ray Morris (1), Prescott S. Bush (1), H. J. Kouwenhoven (1) and Johann G. Groeninger (1).¹²

The Library Project, the Research and Analysis Branch and X-2

Yale's wartime collection of enemy publications served as cover for an Office of Strategic Services operation. In April 1943 Joseph Toy Curtiss, an assistant professor of English, sailed for Istanbul with a $25,000 fund to acquire books and war material for Yale and other libraries; he had been recruited to collect intelligence on the Axis powers, and the operation was called the Library Project. Donald Downes, an OSS officer and Yale graduate, formed the plan after reading a notice in the Yale Library Gazette. Only Curtiss and the collection's two curators, Russell Pruden and Thomas Mendenhall, knew the purpose at Yale; President Charles Seymour was not told. The OSS sent the money to Walter L. Pforzheimer, a trustee of the Yale Library Associates, who presented it to the university as a gift from anonymous alumni, and two sets of accounts were kept, one for Yale and one for the OSS. The Library Project remained secret until 1953, and Curtiss returned to Yale in the summer of 1946 and taught there for twenty more years.¹³ The Yale research archivist who wrote that account cites Robin W. Winks, a Yale history professor, and his book Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 for the Yale connections of the new intelligence service.¹⁴ A Walter Pforzheimer received a letter from the chief investigator of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee on May 9, 1955, and a letter from Daniel O. Graham on September 23, 1980 enclosing a partial membership list of the National Strategy Committee; the records found do not state whether that recipient is the Yale trustee of the same name.¹⁵

Norman Holmes Pearson, a Yale University professor, headed X-2, the OSS counterintelligence branch, in London, according to a review in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence of the memoirs of Richard W. Cutler, a Yale-educated lawyer who built X-2's agent vetting section at Pearson's direction.¹⁶ James Jesus Angleton (class of 1941) entered Yale in 1937, majored in English literature, and edited the poetry review Furioso, which published T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound; he entered Harvard Law School and then joined the Army in 1943.¹⁷ According to Tom Mangold's biography, he co-founded the magazine with the poet Reed Whittemore and developed close ties to Eliot and Pound during those years.¹⁸ David Robarge wrote in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence in 2009 that Winks's chapter "The Theorist" in Cloak and Gown, partly derived from conversations with Angleton, was "the most insightful biographical sketch of Angleton yet written," and described the argument of the scholar David Holzman that the New Criticism prominent at Yale when Angleton attended shaped his approach to counterintelligence.¹⁹

Sherman Kent was born in Chicago in 1903, graduated from Yale in 1926 and received a Ph.D. in history there in 1933. In 1941 he left Yale for the Research and Analysis Branch of the Coordinator of Information, later the OSS, and in January 1943 became chief of its Europe-Africa Division. The CIA's collected essays on his years as chairman of the Board of National Estimates, 1952 to 1967, say that his Yale classes had been popular because his enthusiasm brought history to life, and that he bestowed D's and F's "with abandon" on sham or lack of preparation.²⁰ One essay says he served on the staff of the National War College before "returning to Yale in 1947," where he wrote Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy, published in 1949, and that a year after its publication he left Yale for the CIA in the wake of the Korean War. The editor's note to another essay says Kent "did not return to teach at Yale until 1949," having taught at the National War College in 1946-1947 and held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947-1948, and that he joined the CIA's Office of National Estimates in late 1950 under William L. Langer.²¹

Richard Bissell took a doctorate at Yale in 1939 and taught economics there before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1942, according to the CIA's official history of the U-2 program by Gregory W. Pedlow and Donald E. Welzenbach.²² Tracy Barnes graduated from Yale and Harvard Law School before joining the OSS, and served in Europe as a paramilitary operative.²³

The 1958 Conference on America's Human Resources

A letter of February 7, 1958 from Howard L. Bevis, chairman of the President's Committee on Scientists and Engineers, to Allen Dulles, then Director of Central Intelligence, thanks Dulles for addressing the Conference on America's Human Resources at Yale on February 3 and 4, 1958 and for an address that "was a distinct contribution." The enclosed list of participants names Max Ascoli ("Editor and Publisher, The Reporter," of The Reporter), the publisher William Benton, Lloyd Berkner of Associated Universities, and Frank H. Bartholomew, president of United Press. The program's campus map locates the Institute of Human Relations, the Cowles Foundation, the Institute of Far Eastern Languages and the society buildings Skull and Bones, Scroll and Key, Wolf's Head, Book and Snake and the Elihu Club.²⁴

The Institute of Human Relations and behavioral research

The Yale Institute of Human Relations was first organized in 1929 to integrate teaching at Yale on the study of man. Mark A. May, professor of educational psychology at Yale from 1927 to 1960, was its executive secretary and then its director from 1935 to 1961; its work addressed juvenile delinquency, psychotherapy, cultural conflicts and child rearing. May was a scientific consultant to the War Department in the Second World War on psychological warfare and the psychological effects of weaponry, conducted research for the Office of Scientific Research and Development on psychological damage in soldiers caused by different weapons, and after the war served on the Advisory Commission on Information of the United States Information Agency, chairing it from 1952; Yale holds his papers.²⁵ Ernst Kris joined Yale's Child Study Center in 1949 and became professor of psychology there in 1951 and of psychiatry in 1953, after attending the September 1947 Project RAND conference of social scientists.²⁶

The congressional record of the CIA's behavioral modification program cites Yale work on drug interrogation. A survey titled "'Truth' Drugs in Interrogation," which Stansfield Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, supplied for the record of the August 3, 1977 joint Senate hearing on Project MKULTRA, reports that "Redlich and his associates at Yale" administered sodium amytal to nine volunteers who had invented cover stories for guilty episodes in their pasts, and cites F. C. Redlich, L. J. Ravitz and G. H. Dession, "Narcoanalysis and truth," American Journal of Psychiatry 107 (1951).²⁷

Stanley Milgram described his obedience experiments in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in 1963 while "Now at Harvard University." The paper reports that the subjects were 40 men aged 20 to 50 drawn from New Haven and surrounding communities by newspaper advertisement and direct mail, who believed they were taking part in a study of memory and learning at Yale; that they were paid $4.50; and that the experiment was conducted "on the grounds of Yale University in the elegant interaction laboratory." Of the 40, 26 obeyed the experimenter's orders to the end, up to the 450-volt switch on a 30-switch shock generator, while fourteen Yale seniors asked beforehand to predict the behavior of 100 hypothetical subjects estimated from 0 to 3 percent, with a mean of 1.2 percent. Milgram acknowledged a grant (NSF G-17916) from the National Science Foundation and a 1960 grant for exploratory studies from the Higgins Fund at Yale, thanked the research assistants Alan C. Elms and Jon Wayland, and wrote that he gave the National Science Foundation a first report in January 1961 and first submitted the article to the journal on December 27, 1961.²⁸

Neuroelectric research, psychoenergetics and the STARGATE file

José M. R. Delgado is listed as a contributor to the 1971 proceedings of the Fourth Annual National Conference of the Neuroelectric Society, held in San Antonio, Texas, with the affiliation "Department of Psychiatry, Yale University." The proceedings, edited by Norman L. Wulfsohn and Anthony Sances, Jr., were filed as CIA-RDP96-00787R000500200005-2 in the Project Stargate collection.²⁹ An early proposal titled "Direct Brain Perception," submitted by Edgar Mitchell and prepared by Andrija Puharich, includes biographical sketches of its consultants. One states that Delgado "came to Yale in 1952 as an Instructor."³⁰

The 1992 "Phenomenological Research and Analysis Technical Volume" of Science Applications International Corporation, by Edwin May and Wanda L. W. Luke, lists Robert B. Livingston, M.D., of the University of California, San Diego as a member of its Institutional Review Board with Louis J. West of the University of California, Los Angeles, and prints Livingston's 1991 curriculum vitae: Yale University School of Medicine, instructor to assistant professor of physiology under John F. Fulton, 1946-1952, with a publication list that includes work "with José Delgado." The same volume adds Professor Steven A. Hillyard of UC San Diego to its Scientific Oversight Committee and states that his resume is included in its Section IV, which holds a curriculum vitae recording a Yale Ph.D. in psychology in 1968 with a traineeship under Robert Galambos.³¹

Annie Jacobsen wrote that Puharich's theory of an energy linking the brain and the cells gained traction when Lloyd H. Beck and Walter S. Miles of Yale reported that the olfactory nerve of a bee radiated energy in the infrared range.³² Harold Saxton Burr published "Diurnal Potentials in the Maple Tree" in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine in July 1945.³³ A 1984 interim report on a geophysical effects study, prepared by Harold Puthoff and Marsha Adams of SRI International for the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command under the Center Lane special access program, states that its ultra-low-frequency measurements "were stimulated by the work of Burr on relatively steady-state tree potentials," and its reference list cites Burr's 1945 and 1947 papers in the Yale journal and his 1956 paper in Science.³⁴

A survey of international parapsychology research, held in the CIA reading room as a chapter of the book New Psychic Frontiers, lists Yale University, New Haven, among the institutions with parapsychology activity. The entry names Henry Margenau and Dieter Brill as the professors involved.³⁵ A Defense Intelligence Agency report of August 7, 1984, titled "Psychoenergetics Research," prints an Exhibit 7 headed "Universities Involved in Courses, Research, or Degrees in Parapsychology," on which Yale University appears on the same line as the University of California, Berkeley.³⁶

Physics, the Space Shuttle and Dimona

Myron S. Malkin was a member of the Yale physics faculty from 1952 to 1961. He then worked at General Electric on re-entry vehicles and later directed the Space Shuttle program at NASA headquarters from 1973 to 1980.³⁷ Robert T. Webber earned a doctorate in physics at Yale and served as scientific attache at the American embassy in Tel Aviv. According to Seymour Hersh's account in The Samson Option, he shared the interest of William N. Dale in the Dimona reactor.³⁸

Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow and the Yale Law School

Walt Rostow received a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1940.³⁹ His brother Eugene V. Rostow, dean of the Yale Law School, is listed as a member of Panel IV of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Rockefeller Brothers Fund Special Studies Project, whose 1961 report Prospect for America names him as "dean, Yale University Law School."⁴⁰ Max Millikan took a B.S. in physics at Yale in 1935 and a Yale Ph.D. in 1941 before working at the Office of Price Administration in 1942.⁴¹

Pharmacology and the 1979 cocaine hearings

Robert Byck of the Yale Department of Pharmacology, described in the hearing record as a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale who had just returned from an international conference on cocaine in Peru, testified on July 26, 1979 before the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control in the hearings published as Cocaine: A Major Drug Issue of the Seventies.⁴² He opened by saying that, cocaine as then used in the United States was not dangerous in the usual sense, and that the emphasis had been placed in the wrong place. His prepared statement, printed in the same volume, says that freebase smoking "can represent the same threat that the speed epidemics of the 1960's represented in their time," that the United States did not yet have an epidemic of freebase or coca paste smoking, and that "The possibility is strong that this might occur. It is occurring in the countries of South America."⁴³ Gary Webb wrote in Dark Alliance in 1998 that Byck had warned Congress of the coming crack epidemic in 1979 and had been ignored.⁴⁴

Yale-China

The Yale-China Association, known first as Yale-in-China, was founded on February 10, 1901 by young Yale alumni, who chose Hunan Province as the field; a renovated building in central Changsha provided classrooms and a Western medicine clinic by Christmas 1906. Edward H. Hume, Yale class of 1897, opened a small hospital and with Yan Fuqing secured land and funding for the medical school, and the 1913 Xiang-ya Agreement with the Hunan authorities was described as a turning point; the preparatory school became Yali High School.⁴⁵ Yale's own China timeline records that Yan Fuqing graduated from the Yale School of Medicine in 1909 and became head of Xiangya Hospital, founder of Shanghai Medical College of Fudan University, and Minister of Health, and that Yung Wing graduated from Yale College in 1854 and organized the Chinese Educational Mission that sent 120 students to New England.⁴⁶

Courts, the Law School and the executive branch

José A. Cabranes graduated from Columbia University in 1961 and from Yale Law School in 1965. He was general counsel and director of government relations at Yale from 1975 to 1979. Jimmy Carter nominated him to the District of Connecticut on November 6, 1979, and Bill Clinton nominated him to the Second Circuit on May 24, 1994. He served on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review from 2013 to 2020, presiding from 2018 to 2020.⁴⁷ Robert W. Sweet graduated from Yale in 1944 and from Yale Law School in 1948, after service as a Navy lieutenant junior grade from 1943 to 1946. Carter nominated him to the Southern District of New York on February 17, 1978.⁴⁸

Stephen Cutler graduated summa cum laude from Yale and received his law degree there before being named Enforcement Director of the Securities and Exchange Commission in October 2001.⁴⁹ William Bradford Reynolds received a B.A. from Yale in 1964.⁵⁰ Richard Thornburgh earned a B.S. in engineering from Yale in 1954.⁵¹ Cyrus Vance graduated from Yale in 1939 and received his law degree there in 1942.⁵² Dean Acheson also graduated from Yale.⁵³ Mark W. Everson received a B.A. in history from Yale.⁵⁴ Porter Goss took a B.A. in classics and Greek from Yale in 1960.⁵⁵

Other lawyers and officials who took their law degrees at Yale include David Boies (LL.B. 1966),⁵⁶ Alan Dershowitz,⁵⁷ Hillary Clinton, who met Bill Clinton there,⁵⁸ Cory Booker,⁵⁹ Ro Khanna,⁶⁰ JD Vance (2013)⁶¹ and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar.⁶² John Morley of Yale Law School helped design the governance structure of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust.⁶³ William H. Draper III, nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981 to head the Export-Import Bank of the United States, held a Yale B.A. from 1950.⁶⁴

Money, presidents and families

The Thiel Foundation's 2006 return reports a grant of $25,000 to Yale University in the education category.⁶⁵ Richard Levin, the economist who served as Yale's twenty-second president from 1993 to 2013, is the father of Jonathan Levin, who was named president of Stanford University in 2024.⁶⁶ Larry Summers left his advisory role at the Yale Budget Lab in November 2025.⁶⁷ Nick Bostrom was teaching at Yale in 2001 when he met James Hughes and Mark Walker in the meeting that began the second phase of the World Transhumanist Association.⁶⁸ David Goslin took his doctorate in sociology at Yale in 1962.⁶⁹

The Yale Center for British Art describes Paul Mellon as its founder.⁷⁰ Cari Tuna studied political science at Yale and worked on the college paper before she and Dustin Moskovitz began the giving that became Good Ventures.⁷¹ Francis Shelden, the owner of North Fox Island, testified in a 1982 deposition that he received a bachelor of arts degree from Yale.⁷² Frederic J. Truslow is recorded in the 1963 Harvard Law School yearbook as "B.A. Yale '61."⁷³

Yale's Manuscripts and Archives holds the papers of Alvin Johnson (MS 615, 1902 to 1969), given by Johnson, Agnes de Lima and Edith Levy in 1967.⁷⁴ Christopher Mellon took a master's degree in international affairs at Yale.⁷⁵ Rob Reich holds a B.A. in philosophy from Yale.⁷⁶