entrance originated among friends of the Institution who asked whether the Education Society might open the collegiate department to non-ministerial students without prejudice to the Society’s original objective. They considered the moral and religious influence pervading the Institution made it especially desirable as a place to which they might send their sons for a liberal education.
The Trustees and faculty spent long hours at meetings in June and August, 1839, deliberating the proposal. In exploring all of its phases they were not unmindful of the contribution which the tuition of non-ministerial students would make to the, chronically empty treasury. Dr. Kendrick, alone among the faculty, strongly opposed the change. He foresaw that it would be the entering wedge for reorienting the Institution’s character and educational program. Prospective preachers, he believed, should be protected from the contaminating worldly influence of non-theological students. “Can our young men,” he asked “preparing for the ministry, in the incipient state of their piety, before their religious habits are formed, become the companions of prayerless youth, to room and study, and lodge with them for a term of years, and not be retarded in the cultivation of their Christian graces?” He feared also that the “prayerless youth” might create disciplinary problems. The most serious objection he raised, however, was that the change would impair the confidence of the churches and cause them to withdraw their patronage.*
When the decision was made, with Dr. Kendrick’s the only negative vote, he announced that, though he had used every means to prevent the step, he would do all he could to make the new policy successful. His arguments, however, were responsible for many of the qualifying restrictions attached to the resolution as finally adopted. It provided that, “for the time being,” the faculty might admit to the collegiate department “a limited number of young men, who may not have the ministry in view,” but in no case were they to exceed the total of ministerial students in all departments of the Institution. Lay students were to possess good religious or moral character. They were to be well prepared for whatever classes of the collegiate department they proposed to enter, and no modifications for their benefit were to be made in the course of instruction. Their tuition and fees were to be
*Seymour W. Adams,Memoirs of Rev. Nathaniel Kendrick, D.D. and Silas N. Kendrick (Philadelphia, 1860), 172-176.