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Religion and Higher Education: An Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Extract

After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's worship, and settled the Civil Government: one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust. And as we were thinking and consulting how to effect this great Work; it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard (a godly Gentleman, and a lover of Learning, there living amongst us) to give the one-half of his Estate (it being in all about 1700 pounds) towards the erecting of a College: and all his library: after him another gave 300 pounds others after them cast in more, and the public hand of the State added the rest: the College was, by common consent, appointed to be at Cambridge, (a place very pleasant and accomodate) and is called (according to the name of the first founder) Harvard College.

In this quotation is recorded the beginnings of the first successful effort to establish higher education within what came to be the continental United States. There may be some disagreement concerning the role of Master Harvard, but that there was an immediate involvement of religion in this educational undertaking is very obvious. There has been, however, no single interpretation of the role of religion in this the first of our colleges. Some students of the subject find here the beginnings of a narrow ecclesiastical training from which American higher education was to suffer for many decades. Others, on the contrary, see this as the origin of liberal education available to all acceptable students, bent on careers in both state and church.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1961, University of Pittsburgh Press 

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References

Notes

1. Morison, S. E., The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), 432. This furnishes a facsimile edition of New England's First Fruits, printed in London in 1643, a basic source for this subject.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 434.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., 436.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., 276.Google Scholar

5. Tewksbury, Donald, The Founding of American Colleges and Universities Before the Civil War (New York, 1932), 33.Google Scholar

6. Quoted by Brubacher, John S. and Rudy, Willis, Higher Education in Transition: An American History, 1636–1956 (New York, 1958), 8.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., 69–70.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 73.Google Scholar

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20. Quoted by Burns, James A. and Kohlbrenner, Bernard J., A History of Catholic Education in the United States (N. Y., 1937), 263.Google Scholar

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26. Ibid., 175.Google Scholar

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32. For accounts of what has been accomplished and some of the remaining problems see: Seymour S. Smith, Religious Cooperation in State Universities: an Historical Sketch (Ann Arbor, 1957); and Erich A. Walter, ed., Religion and the State University (Ann Arbor, 1958).Google Scholar