page_title: Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / History
caption_attribution_description: English: MacDougal Center in the Hall of Graduate Studies, Yale University
context_page_description: The Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is the graduate school of Yale University. Founded in 1847, it is the oldest graduate school in North America, and was the first North American graduate school to confer a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
  The Graduate School is one of twelve constituent schools of Yale University and the only one that awards the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy, Master of Philosophy, Master of Arts, Master of Science, and Master of Engineering. While doctoral programs are also available in five of Yale's professional schools, students are enrolled through the graduate school, which confers their degrees. The school is administered in four divisions—Humanities, Social Sciences, and Biological and Physical Sciences—and its faculty are divided into 52 departments and programs. Nineteen of these programs terminate with the master's degree.
  The Graduate School enrolls approximately 2,800 students, one-third of whom come from outside the United States. Approximately 900 faculty are involved with the graduate students as teachers, mentors, and advisors. Most of these faculty also teach in Yale College, the undergraduate school of the university.
context_section_description: Established by an act of the Yale Corporation in August 1847, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was originally called the "Department of Philosophy and the Arts" and enrolled eleven students who had completed four-year undergraduate degrees. The Department was also the precursor of the Sheffield Scientific School, which was cleaved from the department in 1854. The program offered seminars in chemistry and metallurgy, agricultural science, Greek and Latin literature, mathematics, philology, and Arabic. The faculty consisted of two full-time science professors, chemists Benjamin Silliman, Jr. and John P. Norton, and five Yale College faculty members who offered advanced courses in their subject areas.
  Following the model of German research universities, the Scientific School faculty established a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1860. At Commencement in July 1861, the school awarded the first three Ph.D.'s in North America to Eugene Schuyler (philosophy and psychology), Arthur Williams Wright (physics), and James Morris Whiton (classics). NYU's School of Practical and Analytical Chemistry, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, and Princeton University established similar programs over the next two decades.
  In 1892, seven years after Yale organized as a university, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was officially formed, and Arthur Twining Hadley was appointed dean. Hadley became Yale's 13th president in 1899. In 1920, the Graduate School was assigned its own governing board, and under Dean Wilbur Lucius Cross (1916-1930), it attracted a large and distinguished scholarly faculty.
  Beginning in the late nineteenth century, race and gender restrictions on graduate admissions were gradually relaxed. In 1876 Edward Alexander Bouchet (Yale B.A. 1874) received a doctorate in Physics, becoming the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in the United States and the sixth recipient of a doctorate in the field. Women were admitted into the Graduate School in 1892. In 1894, seven women received Ph.D.s from Yale, including Mary Augusta Scott (English), Laura Johnson Wylie (English), Elizabeth Deering Hanscom (English), Margaretta Palmer (Mathematics),  Charlotte Fitch Roberts (Chemistry), and sisters Cornelia H. B. Rogers (Romance Languages and Literatures) and Sara Bulkley Rogers (History).
  A Hall of Graduate Studies for the school was completed in 1932, giving the school its first centralized home. In 1996, the McDougal Graduate Student Center was established in the Hall of Graduate Studies. It now has professional staff to head offices of Teaching Fellow Preparation and Development, Graduate Career Services, and Student Affairs. The Graduate Student Assembly was established in 1997.
caption: MacDougal Center in the Hall of Graduate Studies
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