Dichroic Reflections

a little history

Spurred by someone's link to some of its library's old handwritten catalog cards, I've just been having a grand time poking around in the archives of my school's history. I have to say Penn tends to fudge a little; the University claims to have been founded by Ben Franklin and to date back to 1740, and the two claims are a bit contradictory. (That is, the Franklin part is irrefutable, but the 1740 is shaky.) What apparently happened was that other leading Philadelphians began building a charity school in 1740, which never quite got off the ground, then when Franklin proposed an Academy in 1749, he proposed using this building as the center of cmapus. There was a provision made to continue the charity school as part of campus. (More info here.)

The Academy and the Charity School for boys opened in 1751, with a Charity School for girls added in 1753. Then in 1755 the College of Philadelphia was chartered, so for a while all three functioned together. It became officially a University (America's first) in 1765 when the Med School opened, then was renamed a University and briefly became the first state university in the US in 1779. There was some squabbling over this and, for a couple of years, the College and the University were separated until they were joined back together and re-privatized in 1791. (A brief general history is here.)

So as a school the idea of it dates to 1740, but no students were taken until 1750 and no college students until 1755. Then the first class graduated in 1757, which seems awfully quick - but then, as I understand it, Oxford and Cambridge students to this day generally only go for three years. I think Penn may have been the first university where the colleges were divided by subject; as far as I know, at Oxford and Cambridge thecolleges had specialties but weren't divided according to subject. (Their websites say that at both schools, courses and departments now belong to the Universities, while the Colleges offer only tutoring and small group seminars, not lectures.) I don't know anything about universities elsewhere in Europe, though, so the system may not be original with Penn though looking at the Wikipedia entry on the University of Paris, aka the Sorbonne, while the faculties were divided by subject, the schools seem not to have been.

Anyway, apologies to those not interested in academic history, but it's been a pleasant way to fritter away some time. I never was able to find a history of the Penn library itself, but there is a mention of some books being donated to it by Louis XVI of France in 1784.