SC Connecticut News

In 2022, the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (Yale Engineering) began operating as an autonomous school with a distinct faculty. With this new structure came new needs, including a deeply symbolic one: Yale Engineering needed a new mace.

This ceremonial staff, carried during each year’s university commencement, represents Yale Engineering faculty and students—joining those of the residential colleges, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the graduate and professional schools, along with the university mace itself, an emblem of the authority of Yale’s president and trustees.

"The fact that it was created by one of our undergraduates is kind of a crowning notion for what this piece of pageantry and symbolism should represent on behalf of the school," said Jeffrey F. Brock.

Jacob Eldred, a mechanical engineering major from New York City who graduated from Yale College this spring, took on the project. Eldred had already produced insignia permanently installed in two Yale residential colleges—an 80-pound brass trident for Grace Hopper College and a nine-foot-tall neon axe for Morse College.

Eldred's vision was to create something that represented engineering’s history at Yale, captured the full range of the discipline’s remit, and looked like engineering. This vision unfolded over two years through roughly 1,500 hours of labor involving more than a dozen collaborators and multiple machining processes. Most elements were fabricated in Connecticut at Yale’s cabinet and machine shops.

"This project was meant to be about Yale and by Yale," said Eldred. "Yale University has some of the most talented artisans in the country—students and staff—who can make anything you want. And the mace highlights that not only can we design this, not only can we show it off at graduation, but we can make it ourselves."

The resulting mace "truly represents what I think is the rebirth of Yale Engineering," said Brock. He added that it symbolizes "the full spectrum of ideas and departments and faculty and intellectual emphases."

While focused on engineering academically, Eldred also pursued various artistic expressions such as photography, furniture making, neon bending, letterpress printing, and even worked one summer in artist Matthew Barney's studio. His grandfather Charles J. Eldred was also an artist—a sculptor working primarily in brass—and a professor at SUNY Binghamton.

"I think that art and engineering are functionally the same thing," said Eldred. "Engineering is problem-solving purely technically, and art is problem-solving mostly aesthetically."

For Eldred, artistic freedom posed its own challenges. "The shapes reveal themselves in engineering because they just meet whatever function you have," he explained. He drew inspiration from medieval maces at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art; princely treasures in Dresden's Green Vault; Albertus Seba’s “Cabinet of Natural Curiosities”; as well as from Yale's silver gilt mace.

Eldred aimed to ensure multiple disciplines could see themselves represented in his design: "It could look like a textbook diagram of a blood vessel or data or power flowing through a cable."

The final design balances organic and mechanical shapes—from walnut, cherry, and maple roots at its base to repeated copper-and-brass elm leaves culminating in mirror-polished stainless-steel petals held by a 3-D printed stem.

Eldred leaned heavily on Nick and Vincent Bernardo—brothers who direct Yale Engineering's machine shops—for expertise throughout fabrication. Other students also contributed: his computer-science-major roommate wrote code for dot patterns on the shaft; classmate Archana Sharma ’24 hand-drilled nearly 1,200 holes produced by that code.

Though arduous towards completion, Eldred found fulfillment in seeing his two-year effort realized into a tangible object weighing 12 pounds and measuring just over four feet long made from aluminum, brass, copper stainless steel wood.

"It was the perfect way to end college," said Eldred who carried the mace into Old Campus during commencement celebrations. "Making a physical object...felt like a distillation of effort."

"The effort was all there," he concluded proudly holding his creation.

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