Jonathan Edwards College

Jonathan Edwards College was one of the original eight residential colleges — completed in 1933 — and named for Jonathan Edwards (YC 1720), the theologian, philosopher, and later Yale president. Its site was a dense downtown block of small commercial structures and boarding houses between High and York, cleared during Yale’s great 1930–33 building campaign. Among the structures previously on the footprint of today’s JE College included the Sloan Physics Laboratory (1890s), an important Sheff/early-Yale science building that stood roughly where the JE Master’s House sits today. Designed by James Gamble Rogers, JE was intentionally small and “Oxford-tight,” with the most carefully scaled courtyards and some of the most detailed Gothic stone carving of any of the colleges. Its size and architectural intimacy created an unusually strong internal culture almost immediately, and JE remains famous for being one of Yale’s most cohesive and tradition-centric residential communities.