Campus Clips

Imagine a seminar that introduces undergraduates to 14 different disciplines—including video lectures by top professors from all over the country. That’s the idea behind “Great Big Ideas,” a seminar being offered at Yale, Harvard, and Bard this fall with the help of a project called the Floating University. It is the brainchild of real estate developer Adam Glick ’82, who is coteaching the seminar at Yale with provost Peter Salovey ’86PhD. The professors tapped to talk about their disciplines include Steven Pinker and Larry Summers from Harvard, Leon Botstein from Bard, and Paul Bloom from Yale.

A forgotten cemetery was uncovered by construction crews at Yale–New Haven Hospital in July. After four bodies were found on the site, research revealed that there had been a cemetery there in the mid-1800s—when New Haven’s first Catholic church occupied the site—but the headstones had been removed. The exhumed remains will be reburied in another cemetery.

Dinner in Commons is a thing of the past … again. Yale’s largest dining hall stopped serving dinner in 1990, but resumed evening service in 1998 for undergraduates displaced from their dining halls by residential college renovations. Now, with the last of those renovations complete, Commons is strictly a daytime destination.

Wilmarth S. Lewis ’18 (1895–1979) spent his lifecollecting everything he could about the eighteenth-century English polymath Horace Walpole. Lewis and his wife Annie (1902–1959) gave the collection and their Farmington, Connecticut, estate to Yale, which established the Lewis Walpole Library there. Now, the library wants to collect everything it can about the Lewises. It has launched an oral history project and wants to interview people who knew the couple. Those interested in participating can contact the library’s director, Margaret Powell, at margaret.powell@yale.edu.