Silliman College

Silliman College is a residential college at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The college is named for Benjamin Silliman, the first science professor at Yale. It opened in September 1940 as the last of the original ten residential colleges, and contains buildings constructed as early as 1901.

Silliman is Yale's largest residential college by its footprint, occupying most of a city block. Due to its size, the college is able to house its first-year students in the college instead of on Yale's Old Campus. The college's architecture is varied: though architect Otto Eggers completed most of the college with Georgian buildings, the college also incorporates two early-20th century buildings in the French Renaissance and Gothic Revival styles.

The college has links to Harvard's Pforzheimer House and Dudley House, as well as Trinity College, Cambridge and Brasenose College, Oxford. Its rival college at Yale is Timothy Dwight College, located directly across Temple Street.

Silliman College is located on the lands of the Quinnipiac people. The oldest known non-Indigenous settlement at the college's current site was the farm of Robert Newman, whose barn hosted the meeting that incorporated the Colony of New Haven in 1639. The tract later became one of the blocks of New Haven's original nine-square city plan. Yale's first buildings on the site were for the Sheffield Scientific School. Byers Hall, a three-story building of Indiana limestone, was built in 1903 and designed by Hiss and Weekes architects in the modified French Renaissance Style. The Vanderbilt-Sheffield dormitory, a five-story building of the same material, was built between 1903 and 1906 by architect Charles C. Haight in the Gothic Revival style.

In 1936, the university demolished the block of university buildings and houses that stood at the site, retaining only Van-Sheff, Byers Hall, and the adjacent St. Anthony Hall society building. The New Haven home of Noah Webster, occupied by its namesake from 1822 to 1843, was one of the structures scheduled for demolition. During ensuing controversy over the home's preservation, Henry Ford purchased the building and had it disassembled and re-erected at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. A plaque now marks the site of the Webster House on the college's northeast corner.

The "Quadrangle Plan," primarily funded by Edward Harkness, opened nine residential colleges for Yale between 1933 and 1934. Eight colleges were intended for Yale College, and two further for the Scientific School, one of which would be funded by Frederick W. Vanderbilt. This tenth college was planned by 1931, when Charles Hyde Warren was appointed as a college master, and named for Benjamin Silliman in 1933. Warren, also Sterling Professor of Geology and Dean of the Sheffield Scientific School, wrote a biography of Silliman but only retained his appointment until 1938, two years before the college's opening. Otto Eggers of Eggers & Higgins, previously a draftsman for John Russell Pope's buildings at Yale, was selected as the college's architect. Eggers' design preserved Van Sheff, reconstructed the interior of Byers Hall, and created a quadrangle of Georgian buildings to complete the college and harmonize it with the adjacent Timothy Dwight College, established six years earlier.

When the college opened in 1940, philosopher F. S. C. Northrop was appointed its master.

Under the Yale College policy that let incoming students express a residential college preference, Silliman developed a reputation for attracting engineers until the policy ended with the class of 1958.