A learned clergy was the immediate and pressing social need that Harvard was expected to supply; but the advancement of learning was the broad purpose of the College. Harvard students were reminded that the object of their literary and scientific studies was the greater knowledge of God…

Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is the oldest and most prestigious university in the United States. It was founded by Puritan settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 as a college to train up a learned clergy. A Puritan minister was expected to be able to quote and expound Holy Scripture from the original Hebrew and Greek and to have a good knowledge of the writings in Latin of the Church Fathers, the Scholastic Philosophers, and the Reformers.

In 1639, the college was named after John Harvard who, upon his death a year earlier, had bequeathed to the infant college his library of over 400 books and a large sum of money to be used for building.

The first Harvard president of note was Henry Dunster, a 30-year-old graduate of Cambridge University who arrived in Boston in 1640. He expected the new college to live up to the standards of England’s two great universities, Oxford and Cambridge. A three-year course in the Liberal Arts, the Three Philosophies, and the Learned Tongues was instituted for the Bachelor’s degree.

In 1650 President Dunster was able to obtain from the General Court, the colony’s legislature, the Charter under which Harvard University still operates. The president and treasurer and five fellows were incorporated as the ruling body of the college. In later years they became known as the overseers. Samuel Eliot Morrison writes in Three Centuries of Harvard (p. 23):

A learned clergy was the immediate and pressing social need that Harvard was expected to supply; but the advancement of learning was the broad purpose of the College. Harvard students were reminded that the object of their literary and scientific studies was the greater knowledge of God; and that the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, without “laying Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation” was futile and sinful.

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