by Allan Appel
It might be The Declaration’s 250th birthday this year, but, hey, move over a bit, America, because Friday, Oct. 9, was also the 325th anniversary of the founding of Yale.
The school’s 24th president, Maurie D. McInnis, was among several hundred students, faculty, staff, and visitors who dropped by the basement display room at the Beinecke Library to celebrate.
They were there to ponder the significance of the event and of the mysteries of Time and Change, which such an occasion connotes and which can be embodied in the rare documents on view.
Special recipient of their greetings was none other than . . . no, not a bulldog or an image, if such were available, of Yale’s first enrollee or its first professor, but rather a document.
The birthday boy or girl was Yale’s original 1701 charter, out of its special box designed to preserve parchment and ink from light.
Though it was showing its age a bit — it lay in three neatly preserved sections, not its original whole self — the charter still sported a happy-looking red seal, as if to say, “Yes, after all these years, you may behold me. Here we are. Isn’t it amazing what Yale has become.”
Click here to read the charter’s full text.
McInnis, as she leaned over the document with City Historian Michael Morand, had a far more reasoned and sober take on the significance of the document, which was created in 1701 by the Connecticut General Assembly — “An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School.”
“What is so amazing,” she said, of the ten local ministers, led by Abraham Pierson, who had successfully lobbied for permission to create the school, “is that they had such a clear purpose.”
That was, per the charter’s language, not only physically to build a school but it allowed for the “endowing & ordering a Collegiate School within his Majties (sic) Colony of Connecticot (sic) wherein Youth may be instructed in the Arts & Sciences who thorough (sic) the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church & Civil State.”