In the Year of Our Lord 1718 an affluent London merchant who had been born in the American colonies received several visits from a Bostonian named Jeremiah Dummer about a struggling institution of higher learning in Say-brook, Connecticut called The Collegiate School. These visits, along with some very persuasive letters from another Bostonian named Increase Mather, succeeded in convincing the London merchant to give a substantial donation to the small school, which was promptly named Yale College in his honor. Today that college celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding.

The remarkable fact is not that Yale is 250 years old today, but how it managed to get that old. For Yale, which is now Gothically situated in New Haven, was spawned, nursed, and sent out into the Great World by Harvard men. In return for this loving care Yale, like Frankenstein's monster, has turned on its creator and done all sorts of outrageous things--such as beating the Crimson quite regularly in football. This type of thing is quite like Yale, which has capitalized on Harvard's temporary weaknesses all through its life.

Even in its first fifty years Harvard had a reputation as being the place where rich merchants sent their idle sons. This, coupled with its aura of religious liberalism, was enough to set wealthy Connecticut burghers to thinking about a college of their own as early as 1650, but nothing was done about it until 1701.

In that year a group of ten stern-faced men gathered in the parsonage of Abraham Pierson in Branford. Connecticut and each tossed some books on a table as their contribution to the founding of a college. These men were all ministers who outraged at Harvard's unenthusiastic attitude toward such Calvinistic doctrines as infant damnation and predestination, had decided to establish a rival institution. All but one of the ton were Harvard graduates.

Until 1718 the Collegiate School wandered around in various small Connecticut towns, always under the heavy influence of Harvard and Harvard men. Its first full-time instructor was Daniel Hooker 1700. Its first B.A. was awarded to John Hart, a transfer student from the Harvard Class of 1704. Indeed, The Collegiate School seemed rather anxious to accept Harvard transfers, while Cambridge authorities were at first unwilling to recognize Collegiate's degrees.

Commencements Sinful

Harvard officials, however, were from the first quite friendly toward the pathetic school to the South. Benjamin Colman 1692, despite the fact that he was dead set against Yale's Calvinism, opposed Harvard's admitting any Connecticut students so as not to shut off The Collegiate's supply of Bright Young Men.

Both Dummer and Mather, the two men who persuaded Elihu Yale to make his gift, were Harvard graduates. Dummer, in fact, was one reprimanded by a classmate for boasting that "in a little time that nursery Yale would exceed Harvard." As for Mather, he was president of Harvard at the time he was soliciting so strenuously for Yale. He never did quite get into the swing of things at Cambridge, however, once denouncing Harvard Commencements as "very expensive and the occasion of much sin."

Harvard's helping hand to its Connecticut rival was exemplified by Edward Holyoke 1705, who became the seventh president of Harvard. During his 30-year term of office he corresponded regularly with his counterparts at Yale, sagely advising them on matters of College administration. He warned President Thomas Clap of Yale against putting gutters on his buildings because the students would undoubtedly clog them up with refuse. He also advised against lining Yale's windows with lead, writing Clap that the students would probably steal the lead and sell it.

Despite the administration's cordial attitude toward the rapidly-growing school in New Haven, individual Harvard graduates were apt to be a bit contemptuous of Yale. Peter Thatcher 1704 had a son twice refused for admittance by Harvard, and then wrote a friend that "I might send him to Yale, which takes many inferior scholars." Jacob Eliot 1720, lived near New Haven and once visited a Yale Commencement. It was, he bitterly wrote to a friend. "Dull, dull, dull."

Flogging Cut Out

In its own bumbling way Yale tried to do the Massachusetts school favors in return. When President Holyoke of Harvard died, President Ezra Stiles of Yale recommended a certain Rev. Samuel Locke to the Harvard Corporation as a worthy successor to him. Locke served three years until 1773 and then resigned suddenly and without apparent reason. His motive was uncovered recently when the publication of Stiles' diary revealed that his protege had made a maidservant "great with childe."

Yale's ingratitude began to manifest itself more obviously in the middle of the 18th century, when, by stoutly defending the stern Calvinism of Edwards, it succeeded in attracting students whose parents were growing suspicious of Harvard's increasing "liberalism." Harvard, by this time had abandoned the custom of flogging students for college offenses.

By 1836, Yale was graduating the largest class of A.B.'s in the East. The Albany Journal reveals that during the spring the New Haven college granted 81 degrees; Union 71; Princeton 66; Dartmouth 44; and Harvard only 39.

100 Years of H-Y Crew