252 History of Universities
leges; but beer was as much a necessity in education as books.
Eaton was fined and dismissed, and fled the colony; eventu-
ally he died in a London jail.
Practically a fresh foundation was made in 1640 when
Henry Dunster, a Cambridge Master of Arts thirty years
old, was engaged as President. Dunster recalled Eaton’s
pupils to the scene of their freshman floggings, and began all
over again. American education owes more to Dunster than
to any other educational founder; for it was he who insisted
that Harvard College should have the standards of an Eng-
lish university college. The college building already begun
was finished, and there the first Commencement in the United
States was held in 1642, when nine young men were created
Bachelors of Arts according to a simplified form of the cere-
mony used at the University of Cambridge. This conferring
of degrees was the boldest, though not the most important
thing, that President Dunster did; for it was equivalent to
a declaration of independence. In Europe, the right to grant
degrees was a prerogative of sovereignty which universities
derived from Pope or King; Harvard College did so by no
higher authority than that of the colonial legislature. And
she was justified when, only seven years later, the University
of Oxford admitted an early Harvard graduate to equivalent
standing there, thus recognizing our first colonial college as
a full-fledged member of the Republic of Letters.
As a matter of prestige, this recognition was important;
but other achievements of the founders of Harvard were
more substantial. In the first place, they insisted, in spite of
the country’s poverty, on providing college life for their
students. It would have been simple enough to have hired
a room or two for lectures, paid some of the learned min-
isters around Boston to drop in and lecture once or twice
weekly, and otherwise have let the students shift for them-