YaleCoursesThe Founding of Yale College - Purposes of College Education, Lecture 5
YaleCourses
Setting Up Today's Topic 0:00
The lecture opens with an overview of Yale's founding, promising to cover the Collegiate School's 1701 origins, the broader world of eighteenth century college education, the Great Awakening, and time permitting, Yale's role in the American Revolution. The speaker draws a comparison to Plato's Republic and its account of a city growing from basic trades into one that needs craftsmen, merchants, poets, and teachers, linking this to New Haven's founding in the 1640s with a strong emphasis on education. Connecticut in 1701 had only about 30,000 people, nearly all farmers, and New Haven itself held around a thousand residents, roughly the size of two present day Yale residential colleges combined.
Ten Ministers Petition for a School 3:01
A group of about ten Protestant ministers asked the Connecticut legislature for permission to start a "Collegiate School," a deliberately modest name chosen instead of "college" or "university" so as not to draw royal attention, since Connecticut was a chartered colony trying to avoid interference from the king. For the same reason the school's leader was called a rector rather than a president, a title that did not change until about fifty years later. The founders, most of them Harvard graduates, worried that Harvard was drifting from traditional Calvinist belief and wanted to protect Congregationalist Protestantism while training youth in the arts and sciences for both church and civil employment. A later story claimed the founders donated books to form a library before legal authorization, suggesting a voluntary association, but evidence suggests the donations actually came afterward.
Independence of Church and State 12:01
Students had to follow Protestant practice and attend chapel, but most study time went to general arts and sciences, taught largely in Latin, preparing graduates for both ministry and secular work. The colony paid the rector's salary, about £120 a year mostly in kind, and New Haven's offer of tax money helped settle the college there over rival claims from Hartford. All trustees were clergymen, making the college closely tied to the church without being formally run by it, and independent of government control despite receiving public funds. The speaker frames this independence as the model later adopted by American private colleges and as foundational to academic freedom, even while acknowledging it remained shaped by the trustees' religious views.
Private Autonomy and Government Pressure 15:32
American higher education's success compared to most countries stems from colleges being independent of government control, unlike public universities where pressure from government is more direct even though public institutions can be excellent. Private universities still receive substantial government funding, especially for research, but their independence has proven historically significant, even though the founders in 1701 likely had no such vision when they set up the college that way.
Early Attempts and the Collegiate School 16:32
Hopkins School, founded in New Haven in 1660 through John Davenport's efforts and Mr. Hopkins's money, produced many future Yale students, professors, and presidents, but early attempts to create a college in New Haven itself failed. Increase Mather, president of Harvard and a prominent Massachusetts Bay Colony figure, had conflicts with people not following traditional Protestant teaching and advised ten prominent clergy, mostly Harvard graduates, who met in Branford and petitioned the legislature to create a Collegiate School. Abraham Pierson became the first rector, running the school from his house in what is now Clinton, Connecticut, formerly called Killingworth. In 1707 the college moved to Saybrook, delayed partly because a minister refused to relocate unless the town bought back his house, which only happened after he died.
Naming, Gifts, and the Move to New Haven 19:31
In 1714 the college received 800 books from Jeremiah Dummer, narrowly avoiding being named after him. After a contested vote among ten trustees, with support reaching the Connecticut legislature, New Haven was chosen over Hartford and Saybrook as the permanent location. Around this time Elihu Yale gave a gift worth about 500 pounds, and the building, originally called Yale College, was constructed. Yale was Anglican, as was Dummer, which created tension with the Congregationalist majority, who worried about receiving Anglican books outside the approved syllabus. This tension led to a real crisis in 1722 when Rector Cutler was fired for using the Anglican phrase "and let all the people say Amen" at commencement. By 1726, about twenty-five years after founding, the college graduated roughly sixteen students a year, with about half entering the ministry. A surviving painting of King George I, donated by Elihu Yale, suggests Yale modeled his own portrait on royal styling, reflecting his East India Company background.
Students and Daily Life in the 1700s 25:04
Admission required passing an exam in Latin, a little Greek, and arithmetic, and was reportedly easier at Yale than at Harvard. Students prepared at one of four grammar schools in the colony, including Hopkins, or studied privately with a local minister, which required family money. Most students' parents were ministers, government officials, or farmers, though wealthier farmers were overrepresented among farming families. Connecticut then had about thirty thousand people, with one thousand in New Haven, an established church funded by taxes, very few Native residents due to earlier wars and disease, and a small Black and African-American population, some of whom were free. Daily life, visible today in Connecticut Hall, involved small dormitory rooms, two prayer sessions a day, classes six days a week, Sunday chapel, and widespread complaints about food. Students matriculated around age sixteen, younger than today, fitting a four-year system built on general education. Career paths beyond ministry included becoming merchants, doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, and government officials, and some schools of the era seated students according to academic rank.
Seating by social rank 30:32
Students once processed and sat in order of social rank rather than alphabetically. The governor's son went first, then sons of the dean or rector, then ministers' sons, with farmers' sons toward the back, and a legacy whose father had attended Yale moved a bit forward in line, showing how deeply the college reflected the social hierarchy of its time.
The early Yale curriculum 31:03
Yale largely copied Harvard's older curriculum, so Locke and Newton were not initially taught, though their books sat in the library and entered teaching by the 1720s. Jonathan Edwards, largely self-taught and arguably the best educated colonist of his day, even taught himself calculus to keep pace with Newton. Students spent their first year on Greek and Latin, with Hebrew growing under Ezra Stiles later, plus logic and natural philosophy, moving from pre-Newtonian to Newtonian physics, read in Latin since Newton's Principia was written in that language. Later years added metaphysics, senior-year ethics taught by the rector, and mathematics, with Fridays and Saturdays devoted to rhetoric, and oral Latin orations serving as the main form of examination. Misbehavior was common too, with Edwards once complaining to his father about students stealing hens, geese, turkeys, pigs, and meat, plus night-walking, window-breaking, card-playing, and swearing.
Religion, the elect, and schism 37:00
Yale's stated purpose was to help students know God and live a godly, sober life, reflecting Congregationalism, the colony's official religion, where only the elect, those demonstrably saved by God, could fully belong, often shown through a teenage conversion experience, with the Half-Way Covenant debating partial membership for their children. Congregationalists rejected the Church of England's bishops and apostolic succession, favoring bottom-up authority, a stance later tied to Revolutionary ideas despite the society itself being hierarchical rather than democratic. Calvinist belief rested on three solae: scripture alone, faith alone, and grace alone. This fed into the Great Awakening, an evangelical movement stressing a personal relationship with God, which authorities dismissed as enthusiasm. Jonathan Edwards, Yale's valedictorian at sixteen, led a revival in Northampton emphasizing sudden conversion, alongside preachers like Whitefield, Tennent, Wheelock, and James Davenport.
The Great Awakening splits Yale 46:01
Yale's congregation split between old lights, who kept the traditional restrained style of worship, and new lights, who embraced the emotional revivalism of the Great Awakening. Jonathan Edwards led the new lights, and this group eventually broke away to found the College of New Jersey in 1746, which later became Princeton. Edwards became its president shortly before his death. Although Yale and Princeton began as near-identical institutions at that moment, their later differences owed more to the political and social contrast between Connecticut and New Jersey than to theology.
A recurring American pattern 48:03
The episode points to a deeper pattern in American religious life, the belief in a personal, direct relationship with God that can override established rules, a stance called antinomian. This enthusiastic, rule-questioning streak reappears across generations, surfacing in the Vietnam War protests, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and more recently in the woke movement, all of which share a questioning of authority and a search for more justified, even utopian, rules of behavior.
Yale's institutional growth to 1769 49:33
Bishop Berkeley donated books and a Rhode Island farm worked by enslaved people. By 1735, Yale graduated its largest class yet, 24 students. Rector Clap closed the college briefly in 1742 due to the Great Awakening, and a new 1745 charter created the president and fellows of Yale College, the structure still in use today. Connecticut Hall was built largely by enslaved and free people of color. Yale gave Benjamin Franklin an honorary degree in 1753 and founded its first college church in 1757. By 1769, undergraduates were already boycotting English goods to protest British taxes.
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