After long deliberations, in which Sears and Whitman seem to have been prominent, the faculty set up a six-year program which the Executive Committee and the Board approved. It provided for four years of college work comparable to that at other colleges and two years of theological study. For those not ready for the program a two-year preparatory department was to be maintained. The shorter “English course” was continued for those who found it impossible to take the entire program. The Executive Committee noted that “provisions for an extended course could no longer be withheld” and pointed out that, even though the curriculum had been expanded, students taking their work at the Institution saved a year over what they could at other seminaries because, by putting Hebrew and New Testament in college work, the theological course was shortened to two years whereas it was three elsewhere.
When ideas for the curriculum had become somewhat well established, the Baptist Register in 1832 carried a series of articles about the course of study. Written probably by one of the professors, they were designed to justify to the denomination the innovations and to provide information for “the youth who contemplate resorting here for instruction….” Though they contain little that is unique, they are interesting because they show how the faculty interpreted for their own purposes the educational philosophy of the time.
In Greek and Latin courses the writer believed “the character” of the student’s scholarship is formed….” Greek civilization was stressed, he stated, as a means of stimulating a student’s intellectual interest. “For until he burn with an impatient desire to cast a searching eye on everything that meets him in his path, the faculties of his soul will lie slumbering, and the benefit of mental discipline will be lost.” The chief reason for studying Greek, however, was to learn the language of the New Testament. That language mastered, the student went on to Hebrew, Biblical antiquities, interpretation, and exegesis. Thus equipped, he would not have to depend on translations of the Bible by others; he himself could discover the various shades of meaning in its passages and on the basis of sound scholarship he could then build sound doctrine. In the theological courses the students used the Bible as the text, each part of which they were instructed to regard as revelation. The faculty considered mathematics helpful for investigating the sciences, fixing attention, developing the powers of the mind,