The Travails of Becoming a University, 1888-1902

Abstract

In bringing the College of New Jersey to the brink of university status, McCosh stood on the verge of the promised land. As the nineteenth century was coming to a close, alumni, professors, and trustees in Princeton, like those at many other American colleges and universities, were eager to see the institution position itself so that it would be better able to meet society’s need for moral and thoughtful leaders, practical knowledge, and scientific expertise once the nation entered the twentieth century. With the future direction of the institution hanging in the balance, the choice of who should succeed McCosh divided the college community along the same lines as had emerged earlier over both the alumni’s attempt to secure direct representation on the Board of Trustees and McCosh’s failed attempt to make the college a university. Whereas McCosh harmoniously upheld the college’s dual mission through the breadth of his scholarly interests, the warmth of his evangelical piety, and the force of his personality, the two candidates who vied for the presidency after his resignation possessed only a portion of McCosh’s qualities and appealed to only one part of the Princeton community. Francis L. Patton appealed to those primarily, though not exclusively, interested in preserving Princeton’s heritage as an evangelical college. According to McCosh, the “older men” among the trustees, faculty, and alumni “want a minister,” and on these grounds, the forty-five-year-old Patton seemed like a natural successor to McCosh. A native of Bermuda, Patton had graduated from University College of the University of Toronto; had attended Knox College, also of the University of Toronto; and had graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865. Ordained that same year in the Old School Presbyterian church, he served as pastor of a church in New York City. Cyrus H. McCormick (1809-1884), the farming machine magnate and patron of conservative Presbyterian causes, persuaded Patton to accept a position as the Professor of Didactic and Polemical Theology at the Presbyterian Seminary of the Northwest (later McCormick Theological Seminary) in Chicago in 1873.