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Revision as of 19:26, 24 April 2013
The Colonial Colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the American Colonies before the United States of America became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution.[1] These nine have long been considered together, notably in the survey of their origins in the 1907 The Cambridge History of English and American Literature.[2] Seven of the nine colonial colleges are part of the Ivy League athletic conference: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, and Dartmouth. (The eighth member of the Ivy League, Cornell University, was founded in 1865.)
The two colonial colleges not in the Ivy League are now both public universities—The College of William & Mary and Rutgers University, the state university of New Jersey. William & Mary was a private institution from 1693 until just after the American Civil War, when it received some support from the state. It became public in 1906. Rutgers became the State University of New Jersey after World War II.
The Nine Colonial Colleges
Seven of the nine colonial colleges began their histories as institutions of higher learning de novo (i.e., with no predecessor parent organization). Dartmouth College began operating in 1768 as the collegiate department of Moor's Charity School, a secondary school started in 1754 by Dartmouth founder Eleazar Wheelock. Dartmouth considers its founding date to be 1769, when it was granted a collegiate charter. The University of Pennsylvania began operating in 1751 as a secondary school, the Academy of Philadelphia, and added an institution of higher education in 1755 with the granting of a charter to the College of Philadelphia.
| Institution (present name, where different) | Colony | Founded | Chartered | First instruction (degrees) | Primary religious influence | Ivy League |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New College[nb 1] (Harvard University) |
Massachusetts Bay Colony | 1636 | 1650 | 1642 (1642) | Puritan (Congregational) | Yes |
| The College of William & Mary | Colony and Dominion of Virginia | 1693[nb 2] | 1693 | Church of England[nb 3] | No | |
| Collegiate School (Yale University) |
Connecticut Colony | 1701 | 1701 | Puritan (Congregational) | Yes | |
| College of New Jersey (Princeton University) |
Province of New Jersey | 1746 | 1746 | 1747 (1748) | Presbyterian but officially nonsectarian | Yes |
| College of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania) |
Province of Pennsylvania | 1740[nb 4] | 1755 | 1755 (1757) | Church of England but officially nonsectarian[9][nb 5] | Yes |
| King's College (Columbia University in the City of New York) |
Province of New York | 1754 | 1754 | Church of England with a policy of commitment to "religious liberty."[14] | Yes | |
| Rhode Island College[15] (chartered as the College or University in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, in America[16]) (Brown University) |
Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations | 1764 | 1764 | Baptist (no religious requirement for admissions)[nb 6] | Yes | |
| Queen's College (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey) |
Province of New Jersey | 1766 | 1766 | 1771 (1774) | Dutch Reformed | No |
| Dartmouth College | Province of New Hampshire | 1769 | 1769 | 1768 (1771)[nb 7] | Puritan (Congregational) | Yes |
Other colonial-era foundations
Several other colleges and universities can be traced to colonial-era "academies" or "schools," but are not considered Colonial Colleges because they were not formally chartered as colleges with degree-granting powers until after the formation of the United States of America in 1776. Listed below are the founding dates of the schools which served as predecessor entities and the years in which they were chartered to operate an institution of higher learning as well.
See also
Notes
- ^ The institution was founded in 1636 by a vote of the legislature of the colony to provide money for "a school or college" at Newtowne (the present Cambridge.) Nothing further was done about actually creating a school until 1638, when in his will John Harvard bequeathed money and books to the yet-uncreated college. Construction began shortly thereafter on a school that was given the name of its first benefactor.
- ^ The College of William & Mary sometimes asserts a connection with an attempt to found a "University of Henrico" at Henricopolis (also known as Henricus) in the Colony of Virginia, which received a charter in 1618; but only a small school for Native Americans had begun operation by 1622, when the town was destroyed in a Native American raid. A page on their website says "The College of William & Mary [...] was the first college planned for the United States. Its roots go back to the College proposed at Henrico in 1619." However, it immediately proceeds to note that "The College is second only to Harvard University in actual operation."[3] Since William & Mary describes itself as "America's second-oldest college" and gives its year of founding as 1693, it does not seem to be suggesting institutional continuity with the University of Henrico, rather, W&M is providing historical perspective. However, this depends upon the orientation and competitiveness of the administration at any given time, for instance, when a Harvard grad is President, Wm & M is presented as "second college", but when Va grad is president, it is "the first college in its roots". (This original college has been revived , in 1992, as "Henricus Colledge (1619), America's 1st College.".[4] William & Mary has a published list of its early graduates by its Swem Library.
- ^ In the wake of the American Civil War, the College ceased to enroll students in 1882 due to attendant financial pressures. Students returned in 1888 after the Commonwealth of Virginia authorized $10,000 for it to become a "State normal" school for men. In 1906 it became a public, non-sectarian school with the college's royal charter still in effect, except where superseded by state or federal laws.
- ^ There is some disagreement about Penn's date of founding as the university has never used its legal charter date for this purpose and, in addition, took the unusual step of changing its official founding date approximately 150 years after the fact. The first meeting of the founding trustees of the secondary school which eventually became the University of Pennsylvania took place in November 1749. Secondary instruction for boys at the Academy of Philadelphia began in August 1751. Undergraduate education for men began after a collegiate charter for the College of Philadelphia was granted in 1755. Penn initially designated 1750 as its founding date. Sometime later in its early history, Penn began to refer to 1749 instead. The school considered 1749 to be its founding date for more than a century until, in 1895, elite universities in the United States agreed that formal academic processions would place visiting dignitaries and other officials in the order of their institution's founding dates. Four years later in 1899, Penn's board of trustees voted to retroactively revise the university's founding date from 1749 to 1740 in order to become older than Princeton, which had been chartered in 1746. The premise for this revised founding date was the fact that the Academy of Philadelphia purchased the building and assumed the educational mandate of an inactive trust which had originally hoped to open a charity school for indigent children. This was part of a 1740 project that had been planned to comprise both a church and school though, due to insufficient funding, only the church was built and even it was never put into use. The dormant church building was conveyed to the Academy of Philadelphia in 1750.[5][6][7] To further complicate the comparison of founding dates, Princeton University has historical ties to an older college. Five of the twelve members of Princeton's first board of trustees were very closely associated with a "Log College" operated by Presbyterian minister William Tennent and his son Gilbert in Bucks County, Pennsylvania from 1726 until 1746.[8] Because the College of New Jersey and the Log College shared the same religious affiliation (a moderate element within the "New Side" or "New Light" wing of the Presbyterian Church) and there was a considerable overlap in their boards of trustees, some historians suggest that there is sufficient connection between this school and the College of New Jersey which would enable Princeton to claim a founding date of 1726. However, Princeton does not officially do so and a university historian says that the "facts do not warrant" such a claim.[8] [citation needed]
- ^ Penn's website, like other sources, makes an important point of Penn's heritage being nonsectarian, associated with Benjamin Franklin and the Academy of Philadelphia's nonsectarian board of trustees: "The goal of Franklin's nonsectarian, practical plan would be the education of a business and governing class rather than of clergymen.".[10] Jencks and Riesman (2001) write: "The Anglicans who founded the University of Pennsylvania, however, were evidently anxious not to alienate Philadelphia's Quakers, and they made their new college officially nonsectarian." Franklin himself was a self-described "thorough Deist." Starting in 1751, the same trustees also operated a Charity School for Boys, whose curriculum combined "general principles of Christianity" with practical instruction leading toward careers in business and the "mechanical arts",[11] and thus might be described as "non-denominational Christian." The charity school was originally planned and a trust was organized on paper in 1740 by followers of travelling evangelist George Whitefield. The school was to have operated inside a church supported by the same group of adherents. But the organizers ran short of financing and, although the frame of the building was raised, the interior was left unfinished. The founders of the Academy of Philadelphia purchased the unused building in 1750 for their new venture and, in the process, assumed the original trust. Since 1899, Penn has claimed a founding date of 1740, based on the organizational date of the charity school and the premise that it had institutional identity with the Academy of Philadelphia. Whitefield was a firebrand Methodist associated with the Great Awakening; since the Methodists did not formally break from the Church of England until 1784, Whitefield in 1740 would be labelled Episcopalian, and in fact Brown University, emphasizing its own pioneering nonsectarianism, refers to Penn's origin as "Episcopalian" [12]). Penn is sometimes assumed to have Quaker ties (its athletic teams are called "Quakers," and the cross-registration alliance between Penn, Haverford, Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr is known as the "Quaker Consortium.") But Penn's website does not assert any formal affiliation with Quakerism, historic or otherwise, and Haverford College implicitly asserts a non-Quaker origin for Penn when it states that "Founded in 1833, Haverford is the oldest institution of higher learning with Quaker roots in North America."[13]
- ^ Brown's website characterizes it as "the Baptist answer to Congregationalist Yale and Harvard; Presbyterian Princeton; and Episcopalian Penn and Columbia," but adds that at the time it was "the only one that welcomed students of all religious persuasions."[12] Brown's charter stated that "into this liberal and catholic institution shall never be admitted any religious tests, but on the contrary, all the members hereof shall forever enjoy full, free, absolute, and uninterrupted liberty of conscience." The charter called for twenty-two of the thirty-six trustees to be Baptists, but required that the remainder consist of "five Friends, four Congregationalists, and five Episcopalians"[17]
- ^ Dartmouth College began operating during 1768 as the collegiate department of Moor's School (1754) in Columbia, Connecticut. The collegiate department was being described in writing as "Dartmouth College" by January of 1769, when the Township of Hanover, New Hampshire voted to offer it a grant of land. The institution received a royal charter on December 13, 1769 and its students moved from Columbia to Hanover during October 1770. The first degrees were awarded in August 1771. Queen's College, although granted a charter earlier, began operation during 1771, after Dartmouth College began awarding degrees.
- ^ Although most early records of the university were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1845 as well as a subsequent fire in 1849, it is known that the school began its life as a preparatory academy, possibly as early as 1770,[18] or at some point in the 1880s.[19][20] Presumably starting its life in a log cabin[21] on what was then the nation's frontier, Hugh Henry Brackenridge sought and obtained a charter for the school from the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that was passed by the assembly on February 28, 1787. The school's charter was altered in 1819 to grant it university status and conferring on it the name of the Western University of Pennsylvania. The university received its current name, the University of Pittsburgh, with a subsequent alteration to its charter in 1908.
- ^ At Transylvania's founding, its original location near Danville, Kentucky was still part of Virginia. Its current location of Lexington, Kentucky was also still in Virginia when the school moved there in 1789. Kentucky separated from Virginia in 1792.
- ^ Founded 1787 as York County Academy; 1929 merged with York Collegiate Institute; 1941 added York junior college; became four-year bachelor's degree institution in 1968 and became York College of PA
References
- ^ Stoeckel, Althea (1). "Presidents, professors, and politics: the colonial colleges and the American revolution". Conspectus of History. 1 (3): 45.
{{cite journal}}: Check date values in:|year=(help) - ^ "XXIII. Education. § 13. Colonial Colleges.". [[The Cambridge History of English and American Literature]].
{{cite book}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help) - ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ The College of William & Mary. "William & Mary - About". Wm.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ "Table of Contents, Penn History, University of Pennsylvania University Archives". Archives.upenn.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ "Gazette: Building Penn's Brand (Sept/Oct 2002)". Upenn.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ "Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library : FAQ Princeton University vs. University of Pennsylvania: Which is the older institution?". Princeton.edu. November 6, 2007. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ a b "Log College". Etcweb1.princeton.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ Jencks, Christopher (2001). The Academic Revolution. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-7658-0115-9.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) pp. 314–5, " "The Anglicans who founded the University of Pennsylvania, however, were evidently anxious not to alienate Philadelphia's Quakers, and they made their new college officially nonsectarian." - ^ "Overview of holdings, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania University Archives". Archives.upenn.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ "The Charity School in the 18th century, University of Pennsylvania University Archives". Archives.upenn.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ a b Brown University. "Welcome to the Office of College Admission | Undergraduate Admission". Brown.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ "About Haverford College". Haverford.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ A Brief History of Columbia, Columbia University. Referenced 05.10.2011
- ^
"Providence". The Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 22 (11 ed.). p. 511.
...and although still under its original charter was known for the first forty years as Rhode Island College.
- ^ http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Corporation/downloads/charter-of-brown-university.pdf
- ^ "PROVIDENCE - Online Information article about PROVIDENCE". Encyclopedia.jrank.org. Retrieved February 19, 2012.
- ^ a b Annual catalog of the Western University of Pennsylvania, Year Ending 1905. Western University of Pennsylvania. 1905. p. 27. Retrieved December 21, 2009.
- ^ "Early Schools". Pittsburgh School Bulletin. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh Teachers Association, Inc.: 25 1928-05. Retrieved December 22, 2009.
{{cite journal}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ Holland, William Jacob (1893). First Alumni Year Book: Our University. Pittsburgh, PA: Alumni Association of the Western University of Pennsylvania. p. 36. Retrieved December 21, 2009.
- ^ Starrett, Agnes Lynch (1937). Through one hundred and fifty years: the University of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 26.
- ^ Guthrie, Dwight Raymond (1952). John McMillan: The Apostle Of Presbyterianism In The West (PDF). University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 80.
- ^ "Our History". Ycp.edu. Retrieved February 19, 2012.