Tufts University - Jumbo Yearbook (Medford, MA)

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a century of enlightenment, Tufts College was chartered by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1852. The original act of incorporation stated that the funds of the college should be used “in such manner as shall most effectually promote virtue and piety, and learning in such of the languages and of the liberal and useful arts and sciences as shall be recommended. ' ' It was further provided that no particular religious opinions were ever to be required of officers or students in the college. The motto of its seal, Pax et Lux , has become the motto of the college. The movement that led to the foundation of Tufts began almost before the end of the eighteenth century. By the 1840’s funds were being actively canvassed for the new institution. This was a period of rapid economic development and intellectual and social ferment in the country. The American inland empire was pushing westward. For the first time, large-scale manufacturing was being established. Every ocean port of the world was coming to know American com¬ merce borne by fast sailing ships, many of which were built in yards on the Mystic River in the shadow of Tufts College. In 1852, in spite of the gathering clouds of the slavery question, enterprise and optimism about the future were in the bracing sea breezes of New England. During this active period there was, however, a growing discontent with the state of higher education. A new enlightenment had been responsible in New England for the rise of various liberal churches and for the 1 21

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A century has passed, 4 20

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since the inaugural year . religiously heterodox transcendentalist move¬ ment of Emerson and his associates. Science, especially hardheaded applied science, was exerting a new power in the world. The rigid Calvinism of the time was shaking. In this feverish, active, and forward- looking industrial and yet religiously alert period education alone seemed to present too static a picture. Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Williams, Bowdoin, Amherst, Middlebury, and most of the other existing institutions were rigidly Calvinistic or definitely affiliated with one of the then very conservative Protestant churches. Presidential offices and memberships on the governing board of these colleges were typically held by ministers and tight-lipped theologians who viewed the new liberalizing movements of the day with mis¬ giving and even alarm. Long, compulsory, daily chapel exercises were the rule in all colleges. Proselyting for the denominational faith of the college was a standard practice. Any student who entered a college without having already become a member of the church controling it was from the first subject to strong pressure. In such environments boys who had been reared in homes of the new religious liberalism were often brought back to old-fashioned orthodoxy. An old letter tells us that they returned home to bewail the fact that their own parents were eternally damned. As a result of these conditions, men and women of liberal religious tendencies were anxious to provide a strong college which did not have about it what they had come to consider the shackling chains of reactionary thought. Harvard, alone among the institutions of higher learning in New England, had already been won by the forces of religious liberalism. A few years before the founding of Tufts, Harvard had essentially become a Unitarian college. But to many cautious, middle-of- Festival at the Dedication of Tufts College. i 22