Colleges

Origins and Sponsorship of Early North American Colleges

The North American college dates back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when British colonists, who wanted some of their young people to pursue what today would be called higher education without having to travel to England, founded Harvard College (1636), the College of William and Mary (1693), and Yale College (1701). These institutions and the handful of others established before the American Revolution largely followed the English educational model based on the medieval trivium (which focused on grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (which focused on arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy), and intended to develop in students (usually male) a broad knowledge of philosophy, rhetoric, mathematics, classical languages, history, and literature. Because of the lack of educational institutions beyond primary schools, these early colleges typically offered curricula blending secondary and tertiary education. As the most educated persons in the colonies were often Protestant ministers, they often served as teachers, ensuring a strong religious influence in most educational settings. Denominational sponsorship of colleges encouraged moral education for all students and created a supply of clergy for Protestant churches that was independent of European seminaries.

Migration to western and southern frontier regions during the nineteenth century led to the founding of hundreds of new colleges. Many were sponsored by Protestant denominations and supported by community booster groups seeking to attract colleges to their locales. Concern about the dangers of urban life often led colleges to locate far from cities. Thus, many colleges founded before the twentieth century were, of necessity, primarily self-sufficient residential communities in which young people could mature unsullied by unplanned, and unhealthy, encounters with forces beyond the community's control. These communities were often small (several hundred students), homogeneous (students were predominantly white Protestant men from nearby), with a highly prescribed curriculum (with no elective courses; all students took the same courses). Although there was socioeconomic diversity in the student body, and students displayed widely varying degrees of religious intensity, they often had similar backgrounds and collegiate experiences. Not surprisingly, strong bonds and lifetime friendships were forged in these communities among students and between students and faculty. Later in the nineteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church began to create a parallel system of colleges, usually sponsored by a religious order or a diocese (or both), and colleges for women and African Americans also arose, under varying sponsorships.

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