What the Founders Thought About College—And Why It Still Matters in 2025
Published 8 days ago • 8 min read
Hello, Reader!
A federal court just handed Harvard a major victory this week.
But the story stretches far beyond funding freezes and courtroom battles; it reaches back to 1636 and the very origins of higher education in British North America and the early United States.
🖼️ The Big Picture
What's Happening: On September 3, 2025, a federal judge ruled that the Trump Administration illegally froze more than $2.2 billion in research funds to Harvard. The judge called the government’s actions “a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.” [1]
⚠️ Why It Matters: The Trump Administration claimed Harvard tolerated antisemitism and demanded sweeping changes including eliminating diversity programs and screening international students for ideological views. The court found these demands violated the First Amendment and that antisemitism concerns were used as “a smokescreen” for broader ideological control. [2]
📜 What History Reveals: This constitutional clash over government power and academic freedom echoes centuries of debate about who should control higher education and reflects the same tensions that shaped the United States’ universities from their founding.
🔍 Historical Deep Dive
🏛 Founding Ideas
In 1636, the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony founded Harvard College. The mission of the school was to “advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity” in order to prepare an educated clergy. In 1636, the college was named after John Harvard because Harvard donated his library and half of his estate to the fledgling institution. [3]
Harvard’s early students studied classical languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew), scripture, and theology under faculty who were often ordained Puritan ministers. The founding vision: Harvard represented a revolutionary idea: that a colonial society could create its own centers of learning, independent from European control. For Puritans, intellectual autonomy was vital not just for religious survival, but eventually for political self-determination.
Therefore, a goal of Harvard’s creation was to cultivate an educated leadership class that could think for itself, free from foreign influence, an idea that would later expand far beyond religious education.
🔄 Turning Points
1636-1800
By the late eighteenth century, Harvard and its peer institutions—William & Mary, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Penn, Brown, Rutgers, and Dartmouth—began to shift away from a focus on training clergy to an emphasis on preparing republican-minded citizens who would build and support the United States’ new republic. In 1776, twenty-five of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence had a college education. [4]
In 1780, the Massachusetts Constitution formally recognized Harvard as a university tasked with promoting “virtue and knowledge” to sustain free government. [5] After the American Revolution, college curricula expanded beyond theology to include natural philosophy, law, political economy, and the classics. This transformation marked the rise of civic education as a central component of the American experiment. [6]
Rembrandt Peale, Thomas Jefferson, ca 1800
Thomas Jefferson's Vision
Thomas Jefferson believed that republics needed an educated citizenry to survive. In 1819, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. He aimed to build a “temple of knowledge” free from ecclesiastical control. His model for higher education influenced the founding and maintenance of other institutions of higher learning for generations. [7]
The Through Line
In his 1796 Farewell Address, George Washington called for a national university to “promote science and literature...and unite the minds of America.” [8]
Congress debated Washington’s idea many times in the early nineteenth century. Presidents James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams supported various versions of what a national university might look like. [9]
Yet plans always stalled. Plans were blocked by:
Fears of federal overreach
Regional rivalries over location
Belief in local control of education
Instead of building a national university, Americans built a pluralistic system of higher education; a system defined by a mix of private and public institutions, each guarding its own autonomy and pursuing its own mission.
💬 Final Thoughts: Today’s Echo
Harvard has framed its legal pushback as a defense of institutional autonomy, a value it claims dates back to its seventeenth-century founding.
The fundamental questions early Americans grappled with haven’t changed: Who should shape the purpose of higher education? Should it be a church? A state? Or should it be the school?
The founding fathers’ wariness of centralized control, evidenced by the system of checks and balances they wove into the Constitution of 1787, has also shaped the structure of American higher education.
Rather than creating a single, national system of higher education, the United States had developed a landscape of diverse, decentralized institutions, supported by varied funding sources, and governed by local values and traditions.
Today’s courtroom debates reflect the same foundational tensions: freedom versus oversight, pluralism versus uniformity, and the ever-relevant question of who holds the power to educate.
🎧 Go Deeper
Explore the complex history of education in early America with these episodes of Ben Franklin's World:
Brafferton Indian School, Part 1 Episode 367 Investigate one of colonial British America's first educational institutions for Native Americans and discover how education was used as a tool of cultural transformation and control.
Brafferton Indian School, Part 2 Episode 368 Continue exploring the lasting legacy of Indigenous education and assimilation policies that shaped early American institutional approaches.
Education in Early America Episode 266 Learn how early Americans educated their children and when the nation began creating formal systems of public education.
Everyday Life in Early America Episode 200 Discover answers to listener questions about the establishment of schools and educational practices in colonial America.
💬 What Do You Think?
Should universities reflect public will, or should they protect their freedom to dissent from it?
From Harvard’s Puritan origins to today’s federal courtrooms, the United States has always wrestled with this question.
📩 Hit Reply to share your thoughts. 💬 Join the conversation in our Listener Community.
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P.S. The Royall House & Slave Quarters
Over Labor Day weekend, I checked a historic site off my "Local List."
Local List: A list of all those places and experiences close to home that you could visit or do anytime, which is precisely why you never actually go.
The Royall House & Slave Quarters in Medford, Massachusetts, was a site on my "Local List." Even after producing Episode 360, which featured the site, I somehow never made the trip.
Parking and transportation from Boston always made it inconvenient, but in 2025, I can finally take the T (Boston’s subway) to within half a mile of the site, so a friend and I went for a tour.
The site is impressive. You enter the slave quarters, a long building with four doors and the summer kitchen.
The summer kitchen is in a brick section of the building just out of the picture to the right.
The interior no longer looks like slave quarters; the museum has thoughtfully repurposed the summer kitchen as its visitor center and gift shop, while the former laundry and living spaces house exhibits and offices. Still, you can feel the power of the place whether you’re standing inside or outside.
The tour begins outside the slave quarters, where a guide provides a brief overview: how the property was the Ten Hill Farms estate of Governor John Winthrop, and how the Royall family purchased it in the 1730s with money generated by the labor of enslaved people on their Antigua sugar plantation.
The Royall House
Across from the slave quarters stands the Royall House. Our guide pointed out how the Royalls built the slave quarters to be visible only from the back of the house, a deliberate choice about what they wanted seen and hidden from view. The brick rear of the house also reveals how the Royalls expanded John Winthrop’s original home.
As you would expect from a family that owned a Caribbean sugar plantation, the house interior was lavish. While the guide discussed the large number of window panes (which made the home expensive to heat), the Delft-tiled fireplaces, and elaborate rooms, she was careful to point out all the places where enslaved people slept, ate, and worked. The Royall's kept their enslaved people close to serve the family and guests. They are central to the estate's history.
Royall House Kitchen features three folded pallets where enslaved people slept at night
A sitting room with rugs, portraits, and one of several Delft-tiled fireplaces
What I most appreciated was how the guide personalized both the enslaved people and the Royalls.
The enslaved weren’t presented as a faceless, nameless group, but as individuals with names who lived, worked, and had families on the estate.
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