Cedarville College Bulletin, October 1922

A conference of the American Bar Association was held al \Vash– ington in 1922 to discuss standards of legal education. Elihu Root dwelt upon the relation of the law to American ideals and held that lawyers should have the broadening benefits of college education. Chief Justice Taft and William G. McAdoo spoke for higher stand– ards. The specific proposals that lawyers should be required to have at least two years of college study and three subsequent years in a professional school was overwhelmingly approved by the conference. "I would bet my money on a graduate of a college of liberal arts who had decided to go into engineering and had never studied engineering a single hour rather than on a graduate engineer without this liberal outlook. I would rather take a man who goes out from college without any training in the specific things that lead to medicine than the man who has spent two or four years of that time in a medical school and failed to get this fundamental training." -Edmond J. James. ORIGIN A D PURPOSE OF THE COLLEGE "Up to 1650 Harvard was as nearly like a state university as the colony was like a modern state, but the college was strongly eccle- , siastical in its bent and purpose. * * * The Bishop of London was the first Chancellor of William and Mary and Rev. James Blair was the first president. The ecclesiastical purpose of this insti– tution is strongly accented in its charter."-Elmer E. Brown. The origin. of Yale was legally recognized as the contribution of a library by ministers and in 1701 the school was officially chartered with a body of trustees, "ministers of the gospel inhabiting in the colony and above the age of forty years." Princeton was practically the result of a religious revival by the Tennants and of the 23 members of its first Board, 12 were ministers. The first president of King's College (Columbia) was a minister and six other ministers were ex-officio members of the Board. Brown University was wholly a church school and Rutgers and Dartmouth largely under church control. In the words of Commissioner of Education Brown: "Nearly all, perhaps all, of the nine Colonial colleges were established primarily for a religious purpose." The only college founded before the eighteenth century that was not, the creation of the church or of individual ministers was the University of Pennsylvania, but even in this the_Bible was named as a textbook, the founder, Benjamin Franklin, saying: "When - 14-