American Colonial Colleges 259
tory,” wrote that stout old Puritan, Samuel Clarke, to young
Lord Brooke, when going to college in England, “will be a
recreation and yet you will find it exceedingly useful and
profitable, and that which doth very much accomplish a
Gentleman. Its the Sovereign Judge of all men, and all
exploits.”
Yale was given by the Connecticut Colony a form of gov-
ernment that has in general been followed by American col-
leges and universities ever since. Instead of incorporating
the President and teaching fellows, as in England and at
Harvard, the Connecticut legislature incorporated a self-
perpetuating board of clerical trustees, who had full powers
to “hire and fire” the President and Tutors, and make
academic arrangements over their heads. Undoubtedly the
reason for this change was the desire to keep the College
under a firm ecclesiastical control; for the Harvard tutors,
in the previous decade, had shown a tendency to flirt with
liberalism. The Harvard men who founded Yale were of an
earlier vintage ; and, consciously or unconsciously, they
poured the new Connecticut college into the mould that Har-
vard was showing a tendency to break through. These tra-
ditionalist tendencies were strengthened by the forced resig-
nation of an early Rector of the College, Timothy Cutler
(A. B. Harvard 1701), after his defection to the Anglican
Church; and during the rest of the colonial period, Yale was
the most conservative of the American colleges in curriculum
and temper. She seems to have gone in more for “character
building” (that now hackneyed phrase) than her rivals; it
is typical that beside the roll of revolutionary statesmen of
which other colleges boast, Yale places Nathan Hale, the
young man who regretted that he had but one life to give for
his country. Even within my memory, Yale was the favorite
university of pious New England Congregationalists, who