Why Yale?

What makes a college work, what gives it life? Looking at contemporary Yale for clues, we might say what is needed is a sizeable endowment, an extensive physical plant, cutting-edge academic departments, a huge support staff, a colossal library, generous alumni, and, not the least, parents who are willing to pay impressive sums toward tuition. But Yale, [now over] three hundred years old, started out with none of these. The story of fledgling Yale (see our [Fall 2000] issue) is a story of struggle against enduring obstacles: against the lack of a physical setting for the college, the lack of adequate textbooks, the lack of continuity in leadership, and a persistent lack of money. Why did Yale’s founders start the school, and what encouraged trustees and administrators—to persist in the face of looming failure and defeat? Yale’s early documents offer a distinct and surprising answer. Here’s an excerpt from the minutes of the first Yale trustees’ meeting, held November 1, 1701:

Whereas it was the glorious publick design of our now blessed fathers in their removal from Europe into… America, both to plant, and under [the] Divine blessing to propagate in this wilderness [the] blessed, reformed, Protestant religion… not onely to their posterity, but also to [the] barbarous natives… we their unworthy posterity lamenting our past neglects of this Grand errand & sensible of our equal obligations better to prosecute [the] same end, are desirous in our generation to be serviceable therunto—where unto the liberal & religious education of suitable youth is under [the] blessing of God, a chief & most probable expedient.

The “grand errand” of the pioneers of New England was to establish truly Biblical worship of Christ in America and to offer His Gospel to the natives. Yale’s founders, who belonged to the second generation of New Englanders, saw the college as a means to that end. They knew about the losses of the last generation; that John Davenport, one of the founders of New Haven, had worked toward a college in New Haven for thirty years, only to see his efforts fail. They were dismayed that Harvard, though begun in Christ, had not continued in Him. If New England’s Gospel purpose was not to lapse in their generation, someone had to take it up. In Yale’s ten founders, God discovered men who were ready.