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American College Presidents in the Eighteenth Century - Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College, by Louis Leonard Tucker. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1962. 282 + xv pp. $7.50. - The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795, by Edmund S. Morgan New Haven and London: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by Yale University Press, 1962. 490 + xiv pp. $10.00.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Extract
Biography, if it is done well, reveals to the reader the subject's times as well as the details of his life. Institutions are what men make them, and as men are influenced by their past and by their circumstances, any understanding of an institution's development must be made from a knowledge of the interplay of man and institution, society and man. These excellent biographies of two eighteenth-century presidents of Yale present a vivid picture of academic education and an insight into the social and intellectual world two centuries ago. The scene is at once antique and familiar; it is as though one were to find in a collection of Hanoverian portraits the face of a friend. Wars, student tumults, graffiti, “irrelevance” of curricula, desperate need for endowment, fights with the state legislature, all of this was as much a part of colonial and federal college life as it is in the current time. One finishes these two volumes endowed with a knowledge of the past and an insight into the present.
- Type
- Essay Review I
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 1971 History of Education Quarterly
References
Notes
1. Leonard Tucker, Louis, Puritan Protagonist: President Thomas Clap of Yale College (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), p. 61.Google Scholar
2. Ibid., pp. 78, 79, 232.Google Scholar
3. Ibid., p. 139.Google Scholar
4. Ibid., p. 89.Google Scholar
5. Earlier appraisals of Clap were harsh. The sketch by Harris Elwood Starr in the Dictionary of American Biography, IV, 116–17, stressed Clap's role as a disciplinarian and ignored his science. Similarly, Alexander Cowie in the 1930s wrote that Clap's “harsh methods” produced riots that were “crude signs of something inherently wrong in the government of Yale….” [Educational Problems at Yale College in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1936), p. 30.]. Of Stiles's scientific contributions, Cowie is also silent. As late as 1958, Clap was still being regarded as something of a martinet by Ralph Henry Gabriel, who rather played down Clap's part in advancing science. [Religion and Learning at Yale…. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 22, 26.]. Historians of American science have been kinder. Theodore Hornberger's Scientific Thought in American Colleges, 1638–1800 [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1945] mentions Clap several times in connection with science at Yale, but attempts no general assessment of him. Similarly Brooke Hindle writing a decade later makes occasional references to Clap as an astronomer and more importantly as a bringer of science to Yale. [Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956).]. Tucker's work appears to be the first well-balanced account.Google Scholar
6. Morgan, Edmund, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 320–22.Google Scholar
7. Ibid., p. 392.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., pp. 400–3.Google Scholar
9. Ibid., p. 419.Google Scholar
10. Ibid., pp. 329–30.Google Scholar
11. Stiles has received a universally good press. Starr wrote a long, favorable account in the DAB, XVIII, pp. 18–21, which emphasizes Stiles's humanism rather than his science. Cowie, in the work cited above, treats Stiles a bit less kindly than Morgan but arrives at much the same conclusion: “Inclined to be a stern disciplinarian,… he too discovered that college students can become ‘a Bundle of Wild Fire’: but his innate common sense tided him over most of his administrative difficulties” [p. 48]. Hindle's Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America refers frequently to Stiles and his many scientific activities.Google Scholar
12. Tucker, Puritan Protagonist, pp. 226–27.Google Scholar