A History of Education in Kentucky

Chapter 2. The Early History of Higher Education

Chapter 2 The Early History of Higher Education War and rumors of war, funding difficulties, reticent and sometimes rebellious students, underpaid and overworked faculty, sectarian strife, helpful as well as meddling alumni and supporters, and feckless and sometimes downright hostile legislators and governors are all problems we are familiar with today in higher education. Yet the same could be said for the earliest days of higher education in Kentucky. One of the most provocative books about the early history of the commonwealth probed the history of ideas in the frontier environment in the early Republic. Niels Henry Sonne, in Liberal Kentucky, 1780–1828, published in 1939, described the late-eighteenth- to early-nineteenth-century battle between “infidel” liberals, or sons of the Enlightenment, and the proponents of orthodoxy, in this case overzealous conservative Presbyterians. Sonne examined the conflict played out in Kentucky during its earliest days as a state over the struggle for control of Transylvania University. There is no doubt that his heroes were the liberals Horace Holley, president of the university, and alumnus Joseph Buchanan.1 The designation college or university in the early nineteenth century did not mean that an institution with either title offered what would be considered today college-level coursework. Moreover, there were no state, regional, or national accreditation agencies. “Many Kentucky towns still have a College Street,” Lowell Harrison explained, “named for some long-ago educational institution. Most of those schools were actually no more than academies [elementary and high schools at best], and most had short lives.”2 Shortly after white settlement began, and a dozen years before Kentucky became a state, there was a positive attempt to bring public education to the frontier. Chartered in 1780 while Kentucky was a county in far western Virginia , Transylvania University’s forerunner was the first such school founded 37 38 A History of Education in Kentucky west of the Allegheny Mountains. The Virginia General Assembly chartered a “public school or Seminary of Learning” and granted it eight thousand acres of “escheated” land, confiscated from three loyalists who had large Kentucky land grants. Three years later Caleb Wallace, representing Woodford County in the Virginia legislature, introduced legislation to recharter the school and amend the original charter by increasing to twenty-five the number of trustees of a self-perpetuating board and adding twelve thousand acres to the endowment.3 As John D. Wright Jr. pointed out in Transylvania: Tutor to the West, it is surprising that the school was intended to be “public” from the beginning and that it functioned at all on the frontier during the early settlement of Kentucky . Among the early trustees was Wallace, a Presbyterian minister now practicing law; Revolutionary War veteran and future governor Isaac Shelby; and Christopher Greenup, one of the commonwealth’s first representatives to Congress, who was elected governor in 1804. Even the infamous General James Wilkinson served on the board for two years, while secretively hatching plans to separate Kentucky and the new west from the United States.4 Transylvania’s trustees faced a daunting task. The quasi-public school never received the one-sixth of surveyors fees collected within the county of Kentucky for its maintenance, as promised by the Virginia General Assembly . The trustees took a leap of faith and opened a school anyway. Because there was no national currency at the time, tuition was set in Spanish coin, four pistoles a year. The first classes at the academy level of Transylvania Seminary were held in the home of Rev. David Rice, one of the founders of Presbyterianism in Kentucky, near Danville in 1785. With all its failings, “it was a beginning,” said Wright in his magisterial history of the school. Rev. James Mitchell, another Presbyterian minister, received an annual salary of thirty pounds as the school’s first teacher. During these early days of Transylvania , as it searched for its identity, such observers as the pseudonymous “Catholicus” maintained that orthodoxy was the best protection against Jefferson ’s idea of religious neutrality. Probably a trustee of the school, Catholicus feared “that the students may embrace that which is erroneous.” When Mitchell returned to a ministry in Virginia, the school languished for a few months before moving to Lexington in 1789.5 Before Louisville became a larger city owing to its position on the Ohio River and the expansion of trade by development of the steamboat, Lexington shone as the business and the cultural center of the state. Presbyterians intended to keep control of the...