268 History of Universities
sermon that “there is not a greater regard paid to . . .
pure evangelical religion in any seminary in the world than
here,” the Philadelphia College, in comparison with the
other colonial colleges, was secular in control, and spirit.
Very few clergymen were on the Board of Trustees, and the
teachers did not have to be members of any particular church.
And in 1765 the Philadelphia College took a decidedly for-
ward step, in appointing one of her first graduates, Dr. John
Morgan, who had subsequently taken an M.D. at Edinburgh,
“Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physick,” and his
friend Dr. William Shippen, “Professor of Anatomy and
Surgery.” These appointments founded the first medical
school in the United States. Medical degrees were granted
as early as 1768. So Philadelphia College is justly entitled
to the honor of first among our colonial colleges attaining
university status; and when reorganized in 1779, she was
properly rechristened the University of Pennsylvania.
King’s College, the nucleus of Columbia, followed hard
in the footsteps of Philadelphia, and then stood almost still
for a century; the astounding growth of Columbia University
in the last forty years has been, as her most recent historian
frankly remarks, “a function of the growth of the city” of
New York? That early zeal of the Netherlands for higher
education, which resulted in the founding of five universities
flagrante bello, was not translated to New Netherlands, and
English New York continued the purely trading traditions
of Dutch New Amsterdam. In 1753, when the city had a
population of 13,000 or over, there were said to be only
thirteen college graduates living on Manhattan Island. Yale
and Princeton were near enough to satisfy the collegiate
ambitions of Congregational and Presbyterian New Yorkers,
but the number of unsatisfied New Yorkers was growing.
1Frederick P. Keppel, Columbia (1914), p. xi.