Narrative #8 -- King's College Curriculum

Faculty staffing changes over the years both reflected and effected a move away from President Johnson's intention to have the sciences prominently featured in the King's College curriculum. His advertisement announcing the College's opening promised instruction conferring "knowledge of all nature in the heavens above us, and in the air, water and earth around us, and the various kinds of meteors, stones, mines, and minerals, plants and animals…" The decision to turn to Harvard to recruit the "outsider" Daniel Treadwell attests to his commitment. But with Treadwell's death in 1760 and Johnson's own replacement three years later by Myles Cooper, the curriculum reverted largely to elementary instruction in classical languages, "polite literature" and moral philosophy, this last almost certainly taught less rigorously by Cooper than it had been by Johnson, who, after all, wrote the book. Treadwell's successor, Robert Harpur, represented a similar slippage in instructional quality.

The presence of a substantial medical faculty after 1767 is misleading. The only scientist on the King's College regular faculty, after Harpur's relegation to the role of private tutor in 1767, was the Trinity-trained Irishman Samuel Clossy, whose energies were divided between regular undergraduates and his medical students. Cooper had no personal interest in the sciences and no professional reason to see them flourish at King's College, as doing so would have required recruiting outside his tight circle of Oxford-trained Anglican clerics and King's-College-trained clerics-in-the-making such as John Vardill and Benjamin Moore, upon whom he favored his patronage. Cooper's curriculum, announced to the governors, in 1763, omitted mathematics and natural philosophy

Sources: Humphrey, From King's College, ch. 10; Early Minutes of The [King's College] Trustees, 1755-1770, Columbiana Room, Columbia University

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