Presidents, professors, and politics: the colonial colleges and the American revolution

 PRESIDENTS, PROFESSORS AND POLITICS': THE COLONIAL COLLEGE AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION' by ALTHEA STOECKEL When in the seventeenth century the graduates of English universities who had come to New England and Virginia could turn from the immediate problems of providing for necessities of life to establishing educational institutions they naturally founded schools as close to the ones they had known as circumstances would permit. These men were familiar with the invididual colleges which made up the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Each college was made up of organized bodies of students who lived in a dormitory, ate at the same table, worshipped in their own chapel, and were governed by their own masters according to an established set of rules. It was certainly impossible to transfer this kind of a university to the frontier of colonial America, so one autonomous college at a time was attempted. During the period between the founding of Virginia and the American Revolution nine colleges were founded in the English colonies of North America. All of these schools survived the trials of their early years and exist today. They are Harvard (1636) founded in Massachusetts by Puritans; the College of William and Mary (1693) in Virginia under Anglicans; (Yale 1701) in Connecticut, another Puritan school; the College of New Jersey (1746), now Princeton University, under Presby-terians; King's College (1754), the present Columbia University, another Anglican institution; the College of Philadelphia (1755), now the University of Pennsylvania, a non-denominational school; the College of Rhode Island (1764), today Brown University, established by the Baptists; Queen's College (1766) in New Jersey, the present Rutgers University, by the Dutch Reformed Church; Dartmouth (1769) in New Hampshire, under Congregational auspices. These schools were established as liberal arts colleges. None was a seminary exclusively for training clergymen; although a substantial number of the students and graduates went into the ministry, many others pursued careers in law, medicine, and business. The colleges offered an education that would introduce a youth to the thought and literature of the past, discipline his mind, form his character, and prepare him for leadership in business, government, or the church. American colleges were deliberately founded and the faculties employed for the specific purpose of transmitting the cultural heritage to youth. Each college became a dispensary of learning rather than a center of creative ideas, and the instructors, at first tutors, were merely schoolmasters rather than productive scholars. In the Much of the information in this lecture appeared in an expanded form in my dissertation, "Politics and Administration in the American Colonial Colleges" (University of Illinois, 1958).