When David Gallagher ’22 placed an order for his ROTC lapel pins, he did not anticipate that the sender would abbreviate a crucial part of his address line — David Gallagher, Yale University — to just “David University.” Moreover, he did not expect Yale Campus Mail Service, which processed the package on Sept. 16, to email all 42 of Yale’s Davids in an attempt to unearth his identity.
All this considered, he likely did not foresee the Davids coalescing and communicating extensively in a 15-part email chain that would give rise to a David-only GroupMe, a group photo appointment and a planned meetup.
“Ah yes, the formation of David University,” said David McElfresh ’25, when I asked him about Yale’s current “David Situation.” “Quite a formative moment of Yale history.”
Formative, indeed. But how did this all begin? I could not help but wonder: why did one simple email spiral into all of this? Who, or what, enabled it to grow, to flourish?
The story, it seems, starts with our protagonist — Gallagher, and the famed “reply all.”
The Initial Correspondence
“David Gallagher — he is the guilty David,” said David Foster ’24, referring to the source of the David saga. “I say this out of the kindness of my heart.”
Foster has a point. When Gallagher discerned the package was his from the tracking number Campus Mail provided, he replied all to his fellow Davids with the following message:
“I wanted to indicate to everyone that the package in question is in fact my package,” he wrote. “Anyways, I’m glad that I now have a mailing list in case I want to email every single David on campus.”
According to David Metrick ’24, this sparked further discussion about the legitimacy of Gallagher’s claim.
“People were saying, ‘David Gallagher may claim it is his package, but we don't know for sure. Let's meet at Cross Campus at dawn and fight over it,’” Metrick jokingly said. “And then there was a whole chain of like, people explaining why they were the best David.”
Once the discussion took off, McElfresh, who had been carefully following the correspondence, realized that there needed to be a more streamlined way of connecting all the Davids. After all, some had already started laying down the framework for a “David University” base of operations in Yale’s Schwarzman Center. Thus, McElfresh felt compelled to create a GroupMe, which would ideally serve as a space for the Davids to thrive.
Unfortunately, this David-exclusive space did not last for long.
“The Davids had started trickling in,” McElfresh said, “and we look, and suddenly, there was someone named Michael.”
A few messages later, Michael was swiftly removed.
The Aftermath
“Good afternoon,” said the Campus Mail Service in another package inquiry on Sept. 21. “I am once again asking the council of Davids for assistance.”
Not five days had passed, and another package addressed to David, with no last name, had surfaced. Then, a third David package appeared, just three hours after the second incident.
Gallagher noted that the Campus Mail Service included all Davids in these emails’ recipient list, without BCC’ing anyone. He speculated that this could be intentional.
“This was made possible by somebody who I think was probably having a lot of fun writing that email at the packaging center,” he said, “but I feel like all the Davids kind of played into it too.”
In stressful times, instances like these are often healing.
“I might take a break from my p-set for a while and then look on my phone and see a notification. And as soon as I would see the notification where it's a package inquiry, I knew that was one of the David things,” said McElfresh. “It just kept me laughing. And it was really nice, because again, it broke up some of the stress. And especially being a first-year, there's a lot of stress.”
Metrick echoed McElfresh’s sentiments. “It was the little moments of just getting to enjoy a few minutes laughing with people, when you know there's so much else going on,” he said, “that's what made it so memorable for everyone.”
And while the Davids I spoke with maintained that the escalation of their email chain was a unique occurence, there have been similar situations in the past.
“I had heard they had done this before, with another name,” Foster said. “I spoke to my operations manager who had somehow heard about this … and she mentioned that Yale would never throw out the package or get rid of it because it was addressed incorrectly, and they would do what it takes [to find the owner] — which I really respect.”
Foster, additionally, posted a screenshot of the initial exchange on a Facebook group titled “Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens,” where it has since garnered 976 comments and nearly 8,000 likes. Many in the Facebook group began likening the Davids’ experience to the Josh Fight of April 2021 — where hundreds of Joshes showed up in Lincoln, Nebraska with colorful pool noodles and staged a mock fight for their right to the name.
“There was supposedly going to be a fight like the ‘Joshes’ that never did end up occurring,” Foster said. “Unfortunately, [the Davids] are probably a group in name only.”
Name-only group or not, I cannot help but marvel at the various Davids I’ve met during these past few days: a David recovering from the Yale plague; a David working his way through the notorious p-sets of “Intro to Systems Programming and Computer Organization,” commonly known among Yale students as CS323; a David preparing to join the military; a David interested in bookbinding. Each wholly individual, yet unequivocally interconnected. They were brought together almost entirely by one exceptionally accommodating package receiving center staff member and a seemingly trivial piece of misaddressed mail. After all, as one Facebook comment asserts: “It’s David’s University, and we’re all just living in it.”
