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Harvard University Is Founded,
October 28, 1636

Amere sixteen years after the Mayflower deposited her few intrepid passengers on the wild and barren shores of Plymouth Harbor, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony determined they were in grave need of a university. It seems an odd necessity to our modern senses when considering a desperately precarious and fresh settlement, one that had been almost decimated by its first winter, one that had barely survived starvations and initial hostilities with the natives of the region. In a scenario of such stringent survivalism, higher education could understandably be prioritized as lesser than trading, infrastructure and judicial appointments. But not to the Puritans, not in the long tradition of Christian scholarship in all ages and under all circumstances. The question was rather: what use is dominion and exploration where there is no ensured preservation of the Gospel?


The Puritan—a bronze statue of Deacon Samuel Chapin (1598-1675)—is a quintessential embodiment of the ruggedly pious men who were the Puritans and Founders

Of the early immigrants who settled Massachusetts, more than a few were great scholars, their women were more rigorously educated than most, and the great majority of their civil leaders and clergy had the benefit of residence at either Oxford or Cambridge. With these roots in the prestigious universities of old England—and more broadly in the universities scattered throughout reformed Europe which fostered an emphasis upon Scriptures—it is not surprising that they deemed university education of value for all and for the clergy an absolute necessity.


Puritan soldier

“Within a short time after their arrival, the Puritans of New England were confronted by the necessity of assuring trained ministerial leadership for the future. Two immediate alternatives presented themselves; dependence on the brethren in England for the supply of properly trained men or the sending of their own sons to England for schooling. The opposition of the crown to the tenets of their sect and the corruption of the old institutions rendered the prospect of a steady supply by the first alternative highly problematical, and the rigors of a long sea voyage invested the second with much difficulty. The only other possibility was to establish an institution of higher learning in the colony, which course they adopted in 1636. Harvard was the step-child of that hot-bed of English Puritanism, Emmanuel College at Cambridge. It was at this bubbling fountain of knowledge that by far the greater portion of the founders of the first-born of colonial universities quenched their thirst for classical lore. It was this institution that the founders sought to reproduce, in so far as facilities would permit, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
—Winthrop Hudson,
 American Protestantism


Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England

Only in Emmanuel College at Cambridge University were Puritan worthies fully in charge of higher English education, and it should be noted that they sent more graduates to New England than any other English college. So, like its parent institution, Harvard University was begun essentially as a seminary, a theological school of paramount importance, its chief mission being the equipping of ministers in teaching and spreading the Gospel in the New World.


The 1805 election of Unitarian and Arminian Henry Ware (1764-1845) to leadership at Harvard marked a drastic turning point away from the school’s roots in Calvinism and Protestantism

By the 1800s, this “narrow-minded” beginning was already being reinterpreted to ascribe a broader, more secular intention to its founders. The irony was, by insisting that Harvard was not merely a divinity school by reason of its teaching a wide variety of languages and the classics of the ancient world, these revisionists were fracturing apart the quintessential Puritan method of education. Certainly there were sects of Puritanism that did not value higher education—such as the Anabaptists—or those who considered outside influences beyond the Bible to be contaminating, but these were primarily fringe sects of the broader, Reformed, scholarly contingent of Puritan leadership. Those who founded Harvard deemed Christianity to be not only a matter of faith but a scholarly discipline, and theology a pursuit that rewarded a broad intellect as well as a humble heart.


Puritans in conference with King James I of England, pleading for religious freedom

With a founding university motto declaring “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae” which translated from Latin means “Truth for Christ and the Church” and a a published set of “Rules and Precepts” adopted in 1648, they laid out their intention thus:

“Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).”


Andover Hall, Harvard Divinity School

Officially founded by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Harvard became the first college in the American colonies, yet it remained nameless and without form beyond its initial grant of 400 pounds for its first few years. The University’s endowment began with its foremost benefactor John Harvard’s initial donation of 400 books and half his estate. John Harvard himself was a Puritan minister in possession of a Masters of Arts degree from Emmanuel College at Cambridge University. He immigrated after his graduation with his wife Ann, and became an elder in Charlestown, Massachusetts. On his deathbed—at the age of thirty succumbing to tuberculosis—John Harvard instructed his wife to bequeath what possessions could be spared and his precious library to the fledgling university voted into existence two years prior. The college was subsequently named in his honor and a statue erected in his memory, yet all but one of his books would be destroyed in the great fire that burned the main hall in 1764.


John Harvard (1607–1638), Puritan clergyman and first benefactor of Harvard University

Harvard University’s Commencement began in 1640 with nine graduates under the supervision of its first president, the remarkable Reverend Henry Dunster. Drafted by Dunster, the Charter of 1650 called for the Harvard Corporation to consist of seven individuals: the President, five Fellows, and a Treasurer. The Charter named the Corporation as the “President and Fellowes of Harvard College” and transferred to them, in “perpetual succession”, the duties of managing the College. The first changes to the Corporation’s structure since 1650 were implemented in 2010.


Grave of Henry Dunster (1609-1658/59), first President of Harvard University


John Eliot—Puritan missionary to the Wampanoag or Massachusettes people

By the 1650s, Harvard’s doors had opened to the Native population of Massachusetts, with its original charter pledging itself to “the education of English and Indian youth”. Indeed, one of the founding Puritan goals in settling the colony was the evangelism of the tribes with whom they had signed treaties and alongside whom they had developed a prosperous peace. This peace was shattered after many decades by the beginnings of King Philip’s War, a conflict sparked by the murder of a converted Indian named John Sassamon, who had attended Harvard and served as an interpreter for the colonists to various Native tribes. A mixed jury of colonists and Indian elders convicted and executed three Wampanoag men for his murder, but it was not enough to calm hostilities.


John Eliot (c. 1604-1690)


An attack on settlers during King Philip’s War

Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the Wampanoag tribe, Class of 1665, would become the first Native American to fully graduate from Harvard College. There would be many more after him and their influence and reach can still be seen today in the churches and communities of Martha’s Vineyard, Ipswich, and all along the New England seaboard.

By 1692 Increase Mather, of the prestigious Mather family, was awarded Harvard’s first Doctor of Divinity degree, a notable first in a college established for and proficient in the training of ministers. Mather would go on to become President of the university and like many of his associates, contribute vastly to America’s intellectual and spiritual heritage. Among those American worthies who passed through Harvard’s halls are our statesmen, preachers, authors, scientists, doctors and olympians. They all submitted themselves to the pursuit of truth in service of Christ and church—by intention if not deed—by attending.


Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck (estimated 1644 – 1666), first Native graduate of Harvard College in 1665


Massachusetts Hall, constructed between 1718-1720, is the oldest surviving building of Harvard University

Among them are such notables as our second President John Adams, his son and our sixth President John Quincy Adams, and John Warren, patriot and martyr of Bunker Hill who served as Professor of Anatomy and Surgery at the Medical School there. Eight Harvard alumni would sign the Declaration of Independence. Giants of the 20th century Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy attended, American literary culturists such as Henry David Thoreau, T.S. Elliot and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, too, and a host of “average” men and women whose names are not recalled in its lists of notable alumni. Many of them are the staggering 52% of graduates from the 17th century who went into ministry, whose quiet dedication won the land for the Lord and equipped the hearts of its people for generations to enact the great legacy of evangelism for which we Americans have long been known.


John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), 6th President and Harvard graduate


John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th President and Harvard graduate


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