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Fellowship Controversy in Colonial New England

In 1721, two Harvard tutors, Nicholas Sever and William Welsteed, made their case to the Board of Overseers. The argument was simple enough on its face: the Harvard Charter of 1650 had created a governing Corporation of “President and Fellows,” and Sever believed the word Fellows was meant to include the resident tutors, men like himself, who actually lived among the students and did the actual teaching. He went looking for precedent to prove it, and the precedent he found was not American at all. Sever and Welsteed argued that the Charter’s language reflected the practice “in ye [sic] Universities abroad,” where, as they put it, “members of their Corporations are Usually residing w’th in ye [sic] Several Houses” (Ye Universities abroad, quoted in Colonial Society of Massachusetts, n.d.). On its face, this looks exactly like Sever reaching back toward the inheritance I spent the last entry describing: the self-governing guild of resident masters at Oxford and Cambridge.

Nonetheless, I resist that reading for the excellent reason that it is not what actually happened; getting this right matters more than waxing romantic. Richard Hofstadter, who traced this episode back to its original documentary sources, found something less noble underneath it. The Sever-Welsteed argument was not a principled stand for faculty self-governance. Rather, the fracas was a proxy weapon in a factional fight: seating the tutors as Fellows would have required removing two sitting Fellows, the liberal ministers Benjamin Colman and Nathaniel Appleton. Moreover, the push originated from the conservative bloc that wanted these men gone (Hofstadter 1996, 129f). Hofstadter states the motive directly: Sever and Welsteed “sought to augment corporate autonomy for reasons that had little to do with freedom” (Hofstadter 1996, 123). And here is the detail that makes the whole episode stranger yet far more interesting than either the conservative faction or, I’ll admit, my own first readings gave credit: Hofstadter’s own judgment is that their underlying reading of the Charter’s original intent was “probably correct” (Hofstadter 1996, 130n29). They were likely right about what the founders meant in 1650. They lost anyway. Royal Governor Samuel Shute sided against them, not on any principle about tutors or governance, but because he happened to be feuding with the Massachusetts legislature at that moment; the liberal faction, for reasons entirely unrelated to Sever’s argument, was on his side of that separate fight (Hofstadter 1996, 130n29).

The tutors never got their seats. But it took another sixty years for Harvard’s governance to complete the shape it has never abandoned since. Samuel Eliot Morison’s verdict on the Corporation, closer to the sources than anything I can offer secondhand, is worth quoting in full: “…Harvard… never functioned like an English collegiate body, and began to evolve into something else before the ink was scarce dry on the Charter” (Morison, quoted in Hofstadter 1996, 129). The handful of tutors who did sit on the Corporation through the seventeenth century were never more than two or three at a time, an unstable body next to the far longer tenures of the president and treasurer, and starting in the 1670s it became routine to seat ministers who had never taught a single tutorial (Hofstadter 1996, 128f). The 1721 controversy foreclosed one specific path back toward resident governance. It did not, by itself, complete the transition. That happened in 1780, when the Corporation, facing real financial distress in the aftermath of the Revolution, began deliberately electing businessmen and lawyers to its vacant seats instead of ministers (Hofstadter 1996, 129). Money finished what factional politics had started. By the time the shift was complete, the Corporation was a wholly nonresident body except for the president himself, holding all the legal authority over an institution none of its members lived inside or taught in.

This is the entry I promised you at the end of the last one. I want to show you exactly how quickly, and for exactly how small a set of reasons, the medieval inheritance got traded away on this side of the Atlantic. I do not think the founders of Harvard set out to betray Bologna and Paris. I think they built the best version of Oxbridge they could manage with the materials the wilderness gave them, and those materials turned out to reshape the whole institution from the inside.

Nine colleges, one curriculum, no elective anything

Moving backward from the governance question, I owe you the plain historical ground, because the trustee innovation did not happen inside a vacuum. Nine colonial colleges were chartered before the Revolution: Harvard in 1636, William and Mary in 1693, Yale in 1701, Princeton in 1746, Columbia in 1754 as King’s College, Brown in 1764, Rutgers in 1766 as Queen’s College, Dartmouth in 1769, and Pennsylvania, whose roots as Franklin’s Academy of Philadelphia reach back to 1751. Every one of these except Pennsylvania was founded by or for a specific religious body, and every one of them was, in its founders’ own understanding, a machine for producing ministers.

They were also, structurally, tiny and rigid in ways worth sitting with before we romanticize them. The curriculum ran on Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, history, and the nature of plants, with no courses in the modern sense at all. Students studied one subject a day, eight in the morning to five at night, Monday through Friday and a half day Saturday (Arthur and Van Pelt 2021, chap. 1).

There were twenty-five degree-granting colleges in the country by 1800, enrolling fewer than one thousand students total, most of them entering in their mid-teens because high schools did not yet exist and the college occupied that social position instead (Arthur and Van Pelt 2021, chap. 1).

Instruction ran on lecture; on recitation, meaning the verbatim oral repetition of assignments; and on disputation, i.e. formal debate by Aristotelian syllogism on set themes (ibid). If that last method sounds familiar, it should. It is the same pedagogical core Haskins traced directly back to the medieval university’s lecture and disputation in my last entry. What crossed the Atlantic was not just an aspiration toward Oxbridge. It was, in this one narrow respect, a genuinely unbroken pedagogical inheritance.

What did not cross intact was the governance.

What a colonial charter actually did

Harvard’s Charter of 1650 created a Corporation, “President, Fellows, and Treasurer,” alongside a separately chartered Board of Overseers that folded in colony magistrates and ministers as a check on the Corporation’s decisions (HOLLIS for Archival Discovery, n.d.). For a genuine stretch of the late seventeenth century, this arrangement functioned closer to the medieval model than what came after: the college’s small resident faculty made up a real portion of the Corporation’s voting membership, and Harvard briefly had something recognizable as internal, faculty-weighted self-governance.

Then the 1680s happened. In 1684, an English court voided the entire Massachusetts colonial charter, which took Harvard’s 1650 Charter down with it, along with the Corporation and the Board of Overseers both (HOLLIS for Archival Discovery, n.d.). What followed was improvisation: a provisional “Rector and Tutors” arrangement under Increase Mather, then a 1692 charter that merged the Overseers and the Corporation into a single board of President, Treasurer, and eight Fellows, then finally, in 1707, the restoration of the original 1650 Charter under newly elected President John Leverett, secured through a political compromise with the Massachusetts General Court (HOLLIS for Archival Discovery, n.d.). By the time Sever and Welsteed made their case in 1721, the college had already been through four distinct governing arrangements in less than forty years, and the question of who actually held a seat at the table was, quite reasonably, still unsettled enough to fight over. Harvard’s governing structure through the colonial period was genuinely contested and genuinely unstable, buffeted by English politics, colonial politics, and internal college politics all at once, and the Sever-Welsteed episode was one skirmish inside a much longer war rather than the single decisive battle I first made it out to be.

William and Mary’s story runs in almost the opposite direction and ends up in nearly the same place, which I think makes it the more instructive of the two. The 1693 Royal Charter actually built the eventual transfer into its own design from the outset: the college was placed under a board of Visitors, fourteen laymen and four clergymen, with the explicit provision that once the college had its full complement of six professors, its properties and governing authority would pass to “the President and Masters,” the resident teaching faculty itself, established as “a body politic with perpetual succession” (Hofstadter 1996, 131). That transfer finally happened on February 27, 1729, once the full faculty was at last in place (Hofstadter 1996, 132). For a real stretch of the eighteenth century, roughly 1729 to 1755, William and Mary’s faculty “probably enjoyed more self-government than did the faculty of any other early American college” (Hofstadter 1996, 133). This is, as far as I have been able to trace, the single closest approximation to the medieval self-governing guild that the American colonial college ever actually produced.

It did not last, and it did not lose cleanly. The Visitors had retained the power to write the college’s statutes even after the 1729 transfer, and Hofstadter shows them construing that power into an ongoing right to intervene in academic matters whenever they judged it necessary, creating a legal structure he calls “utterly anomalous,” the faculty formally in charge of college business, the Visitors legally entitled to reach into academic affairs at will (Hofstadter 1996, 133). Through the 1750s this hardened into a genuine running argument, over faculty members’ right to marry and live off campus, over hiring and discipline, over who actually controlled college revenues, a fight the mostly Oxford-trained faculty pursued with real persistence, in part because they had real recourse: they could appeal the Visitors’ decisions directly to the Bishop of London (Hofstadter 1996, 133 to 134). What ended it, at last, was not any single dramatic episode but the Revolution itself, which severed that recourse entirely, followed by a Virginia Court of Appeals decision in 1790, Bracken v. the Visitors of William and Mary, that formally reaffirmed the Visitors’ sweeping authority, including the power to remove a professor outright (Hofstadter 1996, 134). Hofstadter’s own summary is the one I want to leave you with: William and Mary was “the only sustained attempt by college teachers to reproduce in the colonies the English pattern of academic autonomy,” and it lasted as long as it did only because it rested on institutions entirely outside the American milieu, the Privy Council, the Church of England, the Bishop of London, none of which existed anymore once independence was declared (Hofstadter 1996, 134).

What Jaspers would call this; what Ortega would say we miss

Karl Jaspers gives me a vocabulary that lets me be precise about what kind of education this actually was, rather than either romanticizing or dismissing it. He distinguishes three forms:

1. Scholastic instruction: Transmits a fixed, authoritative tradition.
2. Apprenticeship: Binds a student to reverence for a master’s personality.
3. Socratic education; This alone puts teacher and student “on the same level,” genuinely free, given over to “endless questioning” (Jaspers 1960, 49 to 50).

The colonial college was scholastic instruction, nearly without remainder. Recitation is the verbatim reproduction of a fixed text. Disputation, at least as the colonial curriculum practiced it, argued fixed syllogistic conclusions from fixed premises rather than the kind of open exchange Jaspers calls genuine discussion, where, in his words, “there are no set principles and standpoints firmly maintained until victory” and “nobody wins” (Jaspers 1960, 65). I noted in the last entry that the medieval university itself was closer to scholastic instruction than to the Socratic ideal it is sometimes credited with. The colonial college inherited that scholasticism intact and then, I think, intensified it, because it dropped the one feature of the medieval model that had at least given the institution itself a Socratic shape even when its classroom pedagogy did not: the self-governing guild, answerable to no authority but its own internal deliberation. I want to resist a temptation here, one I nearly gave in to myself before I had the fuller record in front of me: reading Sever’s petition as a lone Socratic gesture, an appeal past fixed authority back to genuine first principles. It was not that. Both sides of the 1721 controversy were already conducting what Jaspers calls debate rather than discussion, a contest governed entirely by whoever already held the fixed institutional premises, deployed by a conservative faction to remove two ministers it disliked, decided by a governor whose real motive was a separate political feud entirely. Jaspers’ genuine discussion, the kind with “no set principles and standpoints firmly maintained until victory,” where “nobody wins” (Jaspers 1960, 65), never actually happened at Harvard in 1721. What happened was two competing debates layered on top of each other, dressed in the vocabulary of the medieval inheritance, deciding a matter that had almost nothing to do with the vocabulary being invoked.

I do not want to let this become a simple story of villains, though, and here is where I think Ortega y Gasset earns his place in this entry even though he is writing two centuries later about an entirely different crisis. Ortega insists that culture, properly understood, is never ornament. Rather, culture is “the vital system of ideas of a period,” the actual working map a person needs to move through their own historical moment without becoming, in his phrase, a barbarian (Ortega y Gasset 1946, 44). The Puritan founders of Harvard were not failing to transmit culture in Ortega’s sense. They were transmitting exactly the vital system of ideas their world actually needed: a coherent theological, civic, and moral framework for a small, precarious, densely religious colonial society that genuinely required trained ministers and magistrates to survive as the kind of community it understood itself to be. (This description is just that: describing the situating worldview not necessarily assessing its veracity or authenticity.) The curriculum was narrow by any later standard, but narrowness is not the same failure Ortega diagnoses in the modern research university, where a proliferation of specialized knowledge outpaces any vital synthesis at all. The colonial college had a vital synthesis. It simply had a very small and very homogeneous world to synthesize.

What it did not have–and what I think this entry has now revealed in sufficient concrete detail to trust–was any lasting institutional mechanism for the people who held that vital synthesis, the resident teachers themselves, to govern the conditions of its transmission. Sever tried to build one and failed. The William and Mary faculty briefly had one and lost it. Both losses happened for reasons that had far more to do with English and colonial politics than with any considered argument about what a college actually is or who should run it.

The lock closes: Dartmouth, 1819

I want to close this entry exactly fifty years past its own chronological boundary, because what happened in 1819 is the moment the trustee arrangement stopped being an improvised colonial habit and became permanent constitutional law. In Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the New Hampshire legislature had attempted to convert Dartmouth from a private college into a public university by rewriting its charter and installing a new board over the objections of the existing trustees. Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion for the Supreme Court held that a private college’s charter constitutes an inviolable contract, protected against state legislative interference under the Constitution. The immediate effect was to shield private colleges from exactly the kind of state takeover New Hampshire had attempted. The longer-term effect, and the one I want you sitting with as we move into the next entry, was to constitutionalize the external lay board itself as the load-bearing legal structure of the American college, private and, eventually by direct extension, public alike. Whatever governance shape a college happened to have in 1819 was the shape the Constitution would now defend. Harvard’s Corporation kept its shape. William and Mary’s Board of Visitors kept its. The brief window in which a Nicholas Sever or a William and Mary faculty member might have argued their way back toward the medieval inheritance closed, legally, for good.

So… What comes next in this series is the explosion. Twenty-five colleges in 1800 became roughly two hundred by the eve of the Civil War, then five hundred and sixty by 1869, nearly all of them built on precisely this trustee template, multiplied across a continent by denominational competition and small-town civic ambition (Arthur and Van Pelt 2021, chap. 1). I grew up inside a fragment of that explosion without knowing it for what it was. The town of Waxahachie, Texas, hosted Trinity University at its second location from 1902 until 1942, a Cumberland Presbyterian college founded to train ministers as the denomination moved west and, not incidentally, to add prestige to whichever town could claim it. It also hosted Marvin College, a Methodist institution that failed financially within a generation of its 1868 founding and whose building eventually became, of all things, the public elementary school I attended from third through fifth grade. Two colleges, one denomination each, one trustee board each, founded within a year of one another, on the same handful of acres, one succeeding well enough to relocate twice and eventually secularize, one failing into a schoolhouse. Although in 1990, Waxahachie Independent School District quasi-resurrected the purpose of Marvin Colleg when Navarro Junior College moved into the building until its new campus was built on the northwest side of town.

References

Arthur, William, and Michael Van Pelt. 2021. The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Colonial Society of Massachusetts. n.d. “Preface.” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. Accessed August 2026. https://www.colonialsociety.org/node/1180.

Hofstadter, Richard. 1996. Academic Freedom in the Age of the College. Introduction by Roger L. Geiger. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Originally published as part of Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).

HOLLIS for Archival Discovery. n.d. “Charters and Legislative Acts Relating to the Governance of Harvard, 1650 to 1814.” Harvard University Archives. Accessed August 2026. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/catalog/hua10011.

Jaspers, Karl. 1960. The Idea of the University. Edited by Karl W. Deutsch. Translated by H. A. T. Reiche and H. F. Vanderschmidt. Boston: Beacon Press.

Ortega y Gasset, José. 1946. Mission of the University. Edited and introduced by Howard Lee Nostrand. London: Routledge.

Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518 (1819).