How Christians Started the Ivy League

By Editorial Staff
Published April 6, 2008

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth – all owe their origins to the gospel.

Probably no segment of American society has turned out a greater number of illustrious graduates than New England’s Ivy League. Labels like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, still carry their own mystique and a certain aura of elitism and prestige.

Yet perhaps it would surprise most to learn that almost every Ivy League school was established primarily to train ministers of the gospel – and to evangelize the Atlantic seaboard.

Harvard, 1638

It only took eighteen years from the time the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock until the Puritans, who were among the most educated people of their day, founded the first and perhaps most famous Ivy League school. Their story, in brief, is etched today in an entry way to Harvard Yard:

“After God had carried us safely to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessaries for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

Harvard College’s first presidents and tutors insisted that there could be no true knowledge or wisdom without Jesus Christ, and but for their passionate Christian convictions, there would have been no Harvard.

Harvard’s “Rules and Precepts adopted in 1646 included the following essentials: “Every one shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life. Seeing the Lord giveth wisdom, every one shall seriously by prayer in secret seek wisdom of Him. Every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that they be ready to give an account of their proficiency therein, both in theoretical observations of languages and logic, and in practical and spiritual truths….”

According to reliable calculations, 52 percent of the 17th century Harvard graduates became ministers!

Yale, 1701

By the turn of the century Christians in the Connecticut region launched Yale as an alternative to Harvard. Many thought Harvard too far away and too expensive, and they also observed that the spiritual climate at Harvard was not what it once had been.

Princeton, 1746

This school, originally called “The College of New Jersey,” sprang up in part from the impact of the First Great Awakening. It also retained its evangelical vigor longer than any other Ivy League school. In fact, Princeton’s presidents were evangelical until at least the turn of the Twentieth Century, as also many of the faculty.

Dartmouth, 1754

A strong missionary thrust launched this new school in New Hampshire. Its royal charter, signed by King George of England, specified the school’s intent to reach the Indian tribes, and to educate and Christianize English youth as well. Eleazar Wheelock, a close friend of evangelist George Whitefield, secured the charter.

Read more:

http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X01..._Started_I.html

Harvard, the Ivy League and the forgotten Puritans

Published: 06/30/2007 at 1:00 AM
Ellis Washington

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

~ Justice Louis Brandeis

There’s always a conflict of interest when people who don’t really like America are called upon to teach about its history.

~ Ellis Washington (a paraphrase of Ann Coulter)

How did the eight so-called “Ivy League” schools – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Dartmouth – go from being training grounds for Christian missionaries and ministers and respected citadels of higher education to what they are now – propaganda factories for every leftist, perverted, radical, tyrannical, failed ideology known to mankind? – Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, Higher Criticism, communism, multiculturalism, relativism, naturalism, positivism, socialism, liberalism, egalitarianism, feminist studies, gay studies, transgender studies, transvestite studies, outcome-based education, radical environmentalism, etc.

Did you know that America’s oldest and most venerated colleges and universities like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth were founded by the Puritans? Yes, those same Puritans who along with the Pilgrims were devout Christians and the original founders of America. What do we remember about the Puritans? Now, thanks in large part to the false prophets called “professors” of the Ivy League schools, we equate the Puritans inseparably with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-95 where between 175-200 people were imprisoned, and, tragically, 20 innocent people were given the death penalty for allegedly being a “witch” based solely on the testimony of a few hysterical, emotionally unstable adolescent girls. This incident was indeed a dark chapter of history that has nevertheless been hyped up beyond reason by the secular left to erase the memory of the Puritans from the marketplace of ideas and from American history, from which they remain banished, even until this day.

Despite their Christian roots, currently all of the Ivy League schools are private and are not currently associated with any religion. Why? Because by the mid-1800s the secular revivalist movement called the Age of Enlightenment (1600-1830) had thoroughly infected the academy. The French Philosophes led the movement – Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Dumarsais and Diderot. There were “benevolent” tryants: Napoleon, Catherine II, Leopold II, King George III; would-be tryants: Robespierre, Saint-Just, the indulgents, the Jacobins; as well as Anglo-American and Continental philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Paine, David Hume and John Stuart Mills, some of whom considered religion generally, and Christianity especially, as passe, anachronistic, barbaric and increasingly irrelevant to humanity’s march towards humanism, secularism, higher learning and utopia.

Therefore, over time, as a new generation of professors and university presidents took over, the Ivy League schools forsook their explicitly religious mandate to train missionaries and ministers to spread the Gospel to the world and instead pursued newer fields of study that not only denigrated American’s Judeo-Christian traditions, but were increasingly openly hostile to it. The 19th century saw a continued rise of empiricist ideas and their application to old and new disciplines of knowledge – physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, taxonomy, geology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, psychiatry, economics, political science. This was at the same time Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution and non-theistic creation became popular among intellectuals and academics. Darwin’s famous book, “The Origin of Species” (1859), became their new Bible – its priests and prophets, the professor, its pulpit, the classroom or the seminar, its temple, the academy.

Next came influential thinkers like Darwinians Thomas and Aldous Huxley, Engels, Marx, Hegel, Freud, Franz Boas, Mead, Weber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound, John Dewey, B. F. Skinner, Samuel Atkins Eliot and Charles W. Eliot (president of Harvard), and by the 1930s the Ivy League had totally become temples not only to secular thought, but they were increasingly hostile to orthodox religious ideas of any kind … except of course the new omnipotent religion of Liberalism.

Read more:

http://www.wnd.com/2007/06/42348/

Zitat

---

Though the Ivy League schools eventually turned secular, they fed into the mainstream of society in those earlier days a great army of graduates who could claim Jesus Christ as personal Savior and Lord, and who left a strong impact on our nation. Their presidents and their faculties helped to set a high spiritual tone, and at times their campuses in turn felt the impact of revival. The educators of early America understood that the moral climate of its schools, colleges and universities would shape its future generations, and could ultimately decide the course of the nation.

---

Another ignored piece of American history.

How ironic that after turning secular, the climate in the Ivy League, source of many of the political and business elite, returned to being informed by another religion, that of progressivism / statism / fascism / communism / globalism / environmentalism..

The article by Ellis Washington is a good history of how the Ivy League schools changed over time.

Thanks, I had not seen this before at wnd.

Edit: Another irony occurred to me. IIRC, the enlightenment was not necessarily anti Judeo-Christian morality or religion, more against the bureaucracy of organized religions. The enlightenment was very pro natural law and rights which strongly affected our Founding fathers and documents. The emphasis on science did not preclude the existence of God, often referred to as the Creator or Prime Mover.