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Religion and Higher Education: An Historical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Bernard J. Kohlbrenner
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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
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , June 1961 , pp. 45 - 56
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

9. Mumford Jones, Howard, Theory of American Literature (Ithaca, N. Y., 1948), 85–87.Google Scholar

10. Tewksbury, 24–31, 79.Google Scholar

11. Brubacher and Rudy, 72.Google Scholar

12. Edwards, Newton and Richey, Herman G., The School in the American Social Order: the Dynamics of American Education (Boston, 1947), 253–54.Google Scholar

13. Thomas Hughes, S.J., The History of the Society of Jesus in North America, Colonial and Federal: Documents, I, Part II (London, 1907), 665–66.Google Scholar

14. Gilmary Shea, John, History of the Catholic Church in the United States (New York, 1888), II, 306–9.Google Scholar

15. Hughes, 695.Google Scholar

16. Power, Edward J., A History of Catholic Higher Education in the United States (Milwaukee, 1958), 34.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 47.Google Scholar

18. Tewksbury, 28.Google Scholar

19. Power, 34.Google Scholar

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

21. Honeywell, Roy J., The Educational Work of Thomas Jefferson (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), 125.Google Scholar

22. Brubacher and Rudy, 151.Google Scholar

23. Burns and Kohlbrenner, 74.Google Scholar

24. Brubacher and Rudy, 154.Google Scholar

25. Ibid., 172.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., 175.Google Scholar

27. Ibid., 177.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., 183.Google Scholar

29. Greenough, William C. and King, Francis P., Retirement and Insurance Plans in American Colleges (New York, 1959), 15.Google Scholar

30. Kohlbrenner, Bernard J., “Some Elements of Background among University Presidents,” School and Society, 68, No. 1765 (October 23, 1948), 283–85.Google Scholar

31. See Beck, Hubert P., Men Who Control Our Universities: the Economic and Social Composition of Governing Boards of Thirty Leading American Universities (New York, 1947).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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