John Witherspoon becomes President of the College of New Jersey (Princeton)

Category
Education
Place
United States
Date
1768
Reference
Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"John Knox Witherspoon (...) was a Scottish-American Presbyterian minister and a Founding Father of the United States. Witherspoon embraced the concepts of Scottish common sense realism, and while president of the College of New Jersey (1768–1794; now Princeton University), became an influential figure in the development of the United States' national character." [Wikipedia] "Yet the fact remained that Witherspoon, like many other Scottish Evangelicals, felt drawn to America. . . . A suspicion took hold in their minds, that the place God had destined for the new covenant with his chosen people might not be Scotland after all but America. . . . Witherspoon saw education not as a form of indoctrination, or of reinforcing a religious orthodoxy, but as a broadening and deepening of the mind and spirit . . . Princeton's founders believed, as Witherspoon did, that science was the ally, not the opponent, of religion. . . . He encouraged non-Presbyterians to attend, such as the Episcopalian Virginian James Madison. Even more amazingly, he recruited Native American students and blacks." [How the Scots Invented the Modern World, p. 206-9]

This event is linked to the following periods

PeriodMiner
Begin
End
Category
Universal Human Rights
1753
2020
One Earth
Colonial North America
1492
1776
United States
Religion
-3800
2020
Transcultural