I
HISTORY AND PRESENT TENDENCIES OF THE AMERICAN COLLEGE
1. THE COLONIAL PERIOD
The predominance of the religious motive
The American colonies were founded chiefly by Englishmen who came to America for a variety of reasons. Some of these were economic and political, but the most important of their reasons was the desire to practice their religious convictions with greater freedom than was permitted at home. Apart from the state religion, however, all the colonists were animated by a love for English institutions which they transplanted to the New World, and among these institutions were the grammar school and the college. Wherever the Reformation had been chiefly a religious rather than a political and ecclesiastical movement, the interest in education and the effect upon it were direct and immediate. This was true where Calvinism prevailed, as in the Netherlands, Scotland, and among the Puritans in England. Hence it is natural to find that the first effective movements in America toward the establishment of educational institutions, both elementary and higher, should have taken place in New England.
A large proportion of university graduates were included among the settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They were chiefly graduates of Cambridge, which had always been religiously more tolerant than Oxford, and especially of Emmanuel College, which was the stronghold of Puritanism at Cambridge. It was natural that these men, leaders in the affairs of the colony, should want to establish a New Cambridge University, but it is astonishing that they were able to do so as early as 1636, only six years after the founding of this colony. Two years later the college was named after John Harvard, a clergyman and a graduate of Emmanuel, who upon his death bequeathed half his estate and all his fine library of three hundred volumes to the college. The religious motive predominated in the founding of Harvard, for though the colonists longed "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity," they were actuated chiefly by dread "to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust."
Harvard remained the sole instrument in the colonies for that purpose for more than half a century. In 1693 the College of William and Mary was founded in Virginia, with the most generous endowment of any pre-Revolutionary college, generous because of the help received from the mother country. It was the child of the Church of England, and its president and its professors had to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles. Subscription to a religious creed was also demanded of the president and tutors of the third American college, founded in 1701. This Collegiate Institute, as it was called, moved from place to place for more than a decade, but finally it settled permanently in New Haven in 1717. It afterward received the name of Yale College in honor of Elihu Yale, who had given it generous assistance.
As a result of the founding of these three institutions, the New England and the Southern colonies had their need for ministers fairly well supplied, but this was not yet true of the Middle colonies. However, the Presbyterians had become particularly strong in the Middle colonies, and their religious zeal resulted in the establishment of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, in 1746.
A few years later Benjamin Franklin advanced for the college a new raison d'être. In 1749 he published a pamphlet entitled "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania," in which he advocated the establishment of an academy whose purpose was not the training of ministers but the secular one of developing the practical virtue necessary in the opening up of a new country. The Academy was opened in 1751, and the charter, granted in 1755, designated the institution as "The College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia." Though the extremely modern organization and curriculum suggested by Franklin were not realized, the institution, which was afterward called "The University of Pennsylvania," offered the most liberal curriculum of any college in the colonies up to the Revolution.