The Rise And Fall Of Harvard (1636-1805) -- By: David Beale

Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 03:1 (Fall 1998)
Article: The Rise And Fall Of Harvard (1636-1805)
Author: David Beale


The Rise And Fall Of Harvard (1636-1805)

David Beale*

David Beale*

* Dr. Beale is Professor of Church History at Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC.

The purpose of this study is to trace the spiritual, doctrinal, and moral rise and demise of Harvard College,1 the Puritans’ first school of higher learning in America. While New England’s earliest permanent, nonconformist Puritan settlement was Salem (1628), Boston, with its fine harbor, soon became the hub of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Deeply concerned for the education of their youth, the Puritans acquired a charter from the English Crown in 1636 to found a college in Cambridge, just across the Charles River from Boston. Their express purpose was to train successors for their churches. The plaque on the brick wall just outside the Johnston Gate at Harvard Yard captures their own words:

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.2

The founders named the college for John Harvard (1607–1638), who, having no children, willed half of his estate and all of his library to the school. This amounted to some four hundred books and between £700 and £850.3 The school opened its doors in 1637 with Nathaniel Eaton as “Head Master.” By 1639 he was unsuccessfully defending himself against bitter charges of failing to feed the students properly and of being a tyrant. The school quickly ousted him and the church excommunicated him. Eaton and his wife escaped to Virginia while the college closed temporarily to recover from its failed beginnings.

In 1640 Henry Dunster,4 a Cambridge graduate, became Harvard’s first president and real founder, serving until 1654. Dunster arguably was the best president ever to serve Harvard. He not only set the academic, moral, and spiritual standards which prevailed for generations, he also established the basic permanent administrative and financial base for the institution:

Dunster found Harvard College deserted by students, devoid of buildings, wanting income or endowment, and unprovided with go...

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