Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission?
Like Massachusetts Bay Colony, other homogeneous religious
communities also founded colleges to train those who would govern.
During the colonial years, a multiplicity of Protestant sects led in
turn to a proliferation of church-dominated colleges. The Anglicans
founded William and Mary in 1693. The Connecticut Congregationalists
founded Yale College in 1701. This pattern of congregationally
based colleges accelerated during the first Great Awakening which
produced the College of New Jersey (Princeton) founded by the Presbyterians
in 1746, Brown founded by the Baptists in 1764, Queen’s
College (Rutgers) founded by the Dutch Reformed Church in 1766,
and Dartmouth founded by the Congregationalists in 1769. In addition,
an Old Light coalition with Anglican leadership and Presbyterian
support founded King’s College (Columbia) in 1754 and the College
of Philadelphia (the University of Pennsylvania) in 1755. Despite
denominational sponsorship and control, however, these institutions
were liberal arts colleges not divinity schools per se; they served their
particular communities by producing public leaders.
During the 18th century, the character of public life in the
colonies began to change. Population growth and colonial sprawl,
increased immigration of new European ethnic groups, intermarriage
between different sects, and the expansion of commerce, all
worked together to create a larger and more heterogeneous public
realm—a public realm populated by not only “Yankees,” but also
the Scotch-Irish, Scots, Germans, and Dutch, not only Congregationalists
but also Presbyterians, Quakers, Baptists, Lutherans, Mennonites,
Anglicans, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, some
Catholics, and a small number of Jews. This burgeoning heterogeneity
combined with the flowering of the Enlightenment, as well as
monarchical demands for religious freedom and suffrage for Anglicans,
created an increasingly tolerant atmosphere in 18th-century
America. Moreover, even Puritanism itself began to relax as a second
generation, raised under more prosperous conditions and without
the hardships of religious persecution, came of age.
Princeton was the first college conceived within the newly
formed heterogeneous public. It was the first college chartered in a
province with no established church, was the first to receive no state
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