The Shepherd's Tent

HISTORIANS HAVE LONG NOTED THAT THE GREAT AWAKENING WAS AN important moment in early American higher education. During the early 1740s, prorevivalists attacked colleges as institutions inimical to the awakening and questioned the compatibility of learning and piety. Some of them, like George Whitefield, criticized Harvard and Yale Colleges for failing in their mission to train pious ministers while others, like Gilbert Tennent, complained that the colleges so corrupt that new ones would have to be formed. The call for new colleges produced few immediate results. The College of New Jersey (later Princeton) was founded by New Side Presbyterians in 1747, but not until the 1760s and 1770s did revivalists or their spiritual heirs establish the College of Rhode Island (later Brown), Dartmouth, and Queens (later Rutgers). The founding of the first three of these, Edwin Gaustad argued, was directly related to influences arising the awakening although, as Richard Hofstadter noted, those influences were felt very tardily and indirectly. Rhode Island, Dartmouth, and Queens, he pointed out, were founded in a distinctly different intellectual environment, a quarter of a century and more after the Great Awakening in New England and the Middle Colonies had passed its peak.' It is difficult, therefore, to understand the full meaning and import of prorevivalists' educational views by examining these later institutions. The four so-called colleges of the awakening not all that different from the colleges the awakeners had attacked. The reasons for this fact are several: times had changed, tempers had cooled, and the supporters of the revivals had modified their earlier views. Many influences contributed to that modi

Enthusiasm · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Psychology · Social Psychology

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