American Colonial Colleges 267
charter as “The Trustees of the College, Academy, and
Charitable School of Philadelphia,” which gave them for
the first time the right to grant academic degrees. The first
class, of seven students, graduated B.A. in 1757; and the
M.A. was granted to them three years later, according to
the immemorial custom.
Provost Smith’s course for the B.A. degree has been
widely praised by historians of American education as a
“new departure” from the traditional Arts and Sciences and
Philosophies, but it actually contained little if anything that
was not then being taught at Harvard, Princeton, and Wil-
liam and Mary. Provost Smith, with the tenacity of a Scot
and the zeal of an Anglican convert, insisted, despite Frank-
lin’s wishes, in teaching the traditional subjects for the first
Arts degree, and in a religious spirit. The same old methods
of lectures, recitations, declamations, and disputations con-
tinued; students were “every day called to converse with
some of the ancients” ; Metaphysics, which Franklin tried to
do away with, was stressed; and, as Dr. James J. Walsh
justly remarks, none of our colonial commencement theses
“are quite so redolent of Scholasticism as the Philadelphia
theses.”1
Nevertheless, one gathers from the records that the Phila-
delphia College was more inspired by the spirit of that age,
the “Century of Enlightenment,” than her colonial rivals
and contemporaries. She was less conscious of transmitting a
“sacred heritage,” and more eager to serve the immediate
needs of the community. Although Provost Smith was him-
self a clergyman, and boasted in his first commencement
1Education of the Founding Fathers (1935), p. 218. The Philadelphia Com-
mencement Theses for 1763 are printed in the Nenv England Quarterly, v.
517-23. The seal adopted by the Academy under Provost Smith shows a pile
of seven books, labelled with the traditional subjects, and crowned by
Theologia, the traditional “Queen of the Arts.”