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As you walk through Davenport’s gates, the gothic exterior gives way to a large Georgian quadrangle with a white tower in the far left corner. This unusual architecture was the result of a compromise between the donors, who believed that Davenport should distinguish itself from the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge—the original inspirations for the residential college system—and Yale Provost Charles Seymour, who insisted that the college fit in with Yale’s gothic aesthetic.
The college is named for John Davenport, a rather eccentric 17th century Puritan minister. He left England in disgust after the country relaxed its laws on infant baptism, and shortly thereafter founded the colony of New Haven. In his new home, he proved tireless in his efforts to suppress any form of pleasure. It is ironic that Davenport—a college that, according to its first Master, Emerson Tuttle, “dances, mixes, drinks and plays with equal intensity”—should bear the name of such a Puritan killjoy.
Tuttle was a beloved professor before he became Master, referred to by almost everyone as “Em.” Students knew Tuttle for his exacting standards: “He cared too much for us to pretend, when we did a mediocre job, that it was a good job,” recalled one of the first Davenport students, in a pamphlet published after Tuttle’s death.
Despite the harshness he at times displayed in pursuing these standards, many adored Tuttle for his eccentricities. In 1934, he made a perfectly earnest enquiry as to whether the mascot for Davenport could be “a live bird upon a perch, possibly a chained owl,” which his assistant would carry at all times.
Tuttle stood out, too, for his firmly progressive views on low-income and black students. He gave out scholarships generously, and tartly informed the Master of Silliman in 1941 that “discriminating against a thoroughly qualified negro should be out of the question.”
At the same time, though, he also cemented the “Old Boys’ Club” atmosphere that characterized Davenport’s first decades. He once asked the registrar to send him fewer Jewish students, often pulled strings to get the sons of his friends into Davenport, and made no secret of his opinion that “all sons of Yale men who have been prepared at reputable schools should be accepted.”
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Davenport was first rocked by scandal in 1937, when Irvine Fulman Belser Jr., the heir to one of the largest plantations in Virginia, impregnated a young housemaid, Anna Modina, and paid for her to have an illegal abortion. Anna almost died, and, once doctors realized what had happened to her, they arrested and jailed her. She testified that Belser had paid for and forced her to undergo the procedure. The local newspaper reported on the incident, which ultimately led to Belser’s expulsion.
The university correspondence on the scandal is overwhelmingly sympathetic to Belser and the “embarrassment” that he and his family suffered. Tuttle wrote him a reference, in which he described his “determined character” and recommended that the “mistake in conduct and error in judgment be forgotten.” Tuttle also met Belser’s father on several occasions to discuss the best options for his son’s future. In all of Yale’s correspondence on the scandal, Anna Modina is scarcely mentioned.
This was not the first time that Davenport had experienced problems with women. Three years before, in 1934, Tuttle had written to the campus police department asking that they better control the “rather persistent solicitation” of Davenport undergraduates on York Street, as there could “undoubtedly be undesirable consequences.” A lengthy report from that year detailed occasions when Davenport men were found with unregistered girls in their rooms. In one, the campus police used their master key to open a locked bedroom door, and found a couple sitting on the bed, with “evidence that liquor had been consumed.” The girl was banned from Davenport, but, thankfully, “it was the officers’ opinion that the time was too short for anything to have happened.”
WWII significantly affected life in Davenport. In 1942, a national incident occurred when Robert J Randall, a black Davenport student, was rejected from the Naval reserves on racial grounds. Emerson Tuttle and the student body rigorously defended him, and the matter was sent to Washington, where it was eventually resolved in his favor. From July 1943 to June 1945, the Navy took over Davenport, when they used it as a training college. Students returned in the fall of 1946 to find the lawn so torn-up that Master Tuttle ordered it to be flooded and turned into an ice-rink, which the undergraduates considered a tremendous success, as it attracted large numbers of girls from Vassar. Emerson Tuttle died at the end of the winter and was greatly mourned.
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The 1950s saw Davenport strengthen its reputation as a hard-living college. Notices from 1954 invite students to fortify themselves with college sponsored liquid breakfasts and happy hours in the common room, prepared by the Davenport barman, Don. The student-run magazine, The Davenport Rogue’s Gallery, shows students and co-eds enjoying elaborate champagne picnics on the lawn and drinking German beer with the Master and Dean. At a 1957 costume party, Marie Antoinette sits on a table with her legs wrapped around a Pharaoh.
In pictures, the few black students stand apart. The apparent lack of social cohesion is even less surprising considering that, until the late 1970s, students on financial aid were expected to work in the college dining halls, serving and bussing their classmates’ plates.
Davenport’s reputation as a party college continued into the 1960s. The Felon’s Head, a student-run newsletter, advertised numerous events, often organized by the somewhat sordid Bob Brown, who always promised “girls galore.” In one dispatch, Bob clarifies that, at a Davenport-Vassar mixer, if they wished to ensure their dates didn’t “go away unhappy,” students “may go and romp in the woods” with the “young lovelies.” Another invites students to a “Stoned Freaks of D’Port Unite!” party in the common room, where they were instructed to arrive “stoned and naked.”
The largest party of the year was the annual Davenport Mardi Gras. The party, held each February, started as a Yale event by Cole Porter at the turn of the century. Connecticut Blue Laws soon led to its shutdown. For several years, in the mid-1960s, Davenport seniors took a college-funded bus down to New Orleans for the festival as “representatives” of Yale. Enthusiastic Davenport students made two legal attempts to move Mardi Gras from New Orleans to New Haven. When both proved unsuccessful, Davenport began to organize on its own.
These parties were always wildly excessive: one year, administrators disciplined Harton Semple Jr. for riding into the party naked on a live pony, claiming he was Lady Godiva. Another year, several live pigs featured in the party, and the senior class put on a comic version of War and Peace, which the New York Times covered in an unmistakably earnest review. In 1967, John Badman dressed as “Chicken Man,” a superhero whose entrance into the party was trailed by a flock of live chickens that he procured the day before. The handfuls of chicken feathers that his friends proceeded to toss into the air stuck to many “priceless works of art.” The Dean wrote him a rather amused letter, telling Badman that “it should not have been impossible to predict what a mess the chicken feathers would make.”
David Richards, DC ’67, recalls that, during those years, Davenport was considered an “Animal House” among colleges. One of his most enduring memories is the way the dining hall smelled on Sunday morning, “reeking of open cups and stale beer spilled from kegs.”
One such morning, after a night of hard drinking, his roommate and his date surprised those eating breakfast by dancing on the parapet above the dining hall to “Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. David came from a low-income background, and his class was the first in Yale’s history in which students from public schools outnumbered the “preppies.”
He was placed in a suite with Cornelius Searle Vanderbilt Whitney IV and Anthony Van Schaick, both of whom had attended Choate, an elite prep school. “I was nonplussed at their savoir faire,” he said. “But when we were visited by women and I saw how strangely uncomfortable they seemed, I realized I knew something they didn’t, and would survive.”
He became friends with many of the Davenport characters of the time, including Harton Semple Jr.—or Lady Godiva—who got their entire entryway put on probation in their first semester for using surgical tubing to invent a device that launched water bombs at the Taft Hotel. Richards was a prominent figure on campus, tapped for Skull and Bones in his junior year. He, in turn, tapped George W. Bush, a popular but academically mediocre Davenport student. On the day of his tap, Richards ambushed Bush in the Davenport courtyard wearing his gold Skull and Bones pin. He escorted the future President, blindfolded, to the society tomb.
Later in the 60s, the question of coeducation at Yale began to emerge. In 1968, Davenport hosted “Coeducation Week” just before students voted on the issue. Male students gave up their rooms for the “girls” and surrendered their keys in return for being able to “personally meet” the women assigned to their rooms. To insure against “invasion by local youths,” additional full-time guards were stationed at the college.
Yale became coeducational in 1969. The move horrified many alumni. The Chair of the Class of 1938 Alumni Board wrote that he had been unable to collect donations because of the growing feeling that Yale was turning away applicants with family ties in favor of “women, blacks and poor students.” Davenport students were generally keen to admit women in theory, but more reluctant once they realized that they had to give up what had formerly been the prestigious senior entryway for women’s housing.
This reluctance was molded into a weak semblance of organized protest by an enigmatic Davenport figure known as “Fleck.” Fleck was a well-padded, hard-drinking eccentric, who talked about himself in the third person, was obsessed with the possibility of a communist plot, and held strictly to a self-imposed policy of opening the door to his suite never more than once a week.
One evening in January 1969, however, on account of some unusual humanistic impulse, or perhaps after reading a particularly compelling existential novel, he found his way to a Davenport College Council meeting. The minutes report that he interrupted the meeting “waving a cryptically-worded, beer-stained petition in his right hand,” which called for a reevaluation of coeducation. He bellowed that students “might have a chance at a single rather than a double or a triple if there aren’t any girls.” The minutes wryly note that there “was no confusion as to how the petition became beer stained.” Several students, possibly disoriented at seeing Fleck outside his room, signed the petition, at which point Fleck began to recite the opening scene of “Waiting for Godot.” He promptly fell over, got up again, and wandered out of the meeting, “muttering that Godot was waiting for him.”
After welcoming its first female students, Davenport attracted a number of other interesting characters in the 1970s. A 1970 memo records that in the Davenport Class of 1974, there were “two horse breeders, two founders of coffee houses, at least three Woodstock veterans (one of whom went on the David Susskind Show to discuss his experience), the son of a 1957 Nobel Prize winner, a pond builder, and a student of witchcraft.”
The 90s marked a dark time for Davenport. On December 4, 1998, Davenport senior Suzanne Jovin was stabbed 17 times in the head, neck and back, and left dead on the side of the road in a residential area of New Haven. Jovin was exceptional, even by Yale standards. She spoke four languages, volunteered with disabled adults, and was tremendously popular. As the news began to spread, students gathered in the Davenport courtyard, many rendered physically unable to stand from shock. The Christmas decorations in the dining hall were taken down and the annual holiday dinner cancelled. Jovin had worked part time in the dining hall and the staff beloved her. Many of these staff members still work at Davenport and attend the annual vigil at Jovin’s memorial in the lower courtyard. Although her thesis advisor, James van de Velde, was a long-term suspect, Jovin’s murder was never solved.
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Davenport’s checkered history is replicated in each residential college. There were wealthy boys who got away with terrible things. But there were also desperate searches to scrape together the money for another scholarship, or times when the entire student body rallied behind a black student facing a racist establishment. The complexity of the residential college system is rooted in its self-renewal; each college is re-made every four years. But how do we deal with features—Calhoun’s name being the most relevant example—that cannot be shed alongside another graduating class? To be a Yale student is to walk a tightrope between revering the traditions that built our campus, and remembering those who they excluded and oppressed.