Yale's Controversial Singapore Adventure

To find the origins of Yale University, don’t go to New Haven, Conn., the New England city where this hallowed American institution sits. Instead, spin your globe and head to the old British redoubt of Fort St. George in Chennai (formerly Madras), India. This was where in the late 17^th century a certain Elihu Yale made his fortune as a top official of the East India Company — riches that enabled him to eventually donate a carton of 32 books in 1718 to an obscure college he would never see across the oceans in colonial Connecticut. Those books, summarily sold in Boston for the kingly sum of 800 pounds, helped shore up the fledgling school that would take his name: Yale. What later became the training ground for five U.S. presidents, myriad world leaders and generations of American cognoscenti (and, indeed, was also this reporter’s alma mater) would not be what it is were it not for its ties to Asia.