funds for the University because the impression was current that the professors lacked piety “& that their ladies pattern too much after the vain & fashionable of the world in the manner & expense of their parties.”
Noteworthy as these personal and social irritations are as background for the Removal Controversy, they are overshadowed by financial matters. When the University Trustees first met in 1846, they had “a charter to sustain the dignity of a University but not a dollar of invested capital.” The Education Society had failed to obtain funds and carried a $20,000 debt. In the First Compact the University Board had agreed
to make earnest and extended efforts for the collection of an endowment sufficiently large, to exempt [the University] from the necessity of continued appeals to the Churches, but never so increased as to foster inaction in the Faculty, or independence of the Churches.
Their goal was $50,000, half of the income to be expended for the theological professors’ salaries and the remainder for general instruction. Nothing had been accomplished, however, by the time agitation for removal began.
The constantly depleted treasury had borne heavily on the faculty, who were not content to accept the frugal standard of living of their predecessors two decades before. Particularly vexatious was the inability of the Treasurer to pay them promptly at the end of each quarter. Professor Raymond, for example, was sometimes paid in $5.00 driblets. In 1847 the University Board raised the salary scale to $1,000 per year for theological professors and $800 for those in the collegiate department, but there was no assurance that these promises could be kept consistently.
The tide of dissatisfaction might have been stemmed had Nathaniel Kendrick been a younger man and in good health. His influence in the faculty, so significant in the past, had given way gradually before the energy and iniative of his colleagues, the oldest of whom, Conant, was his junior by twenty-six years. Though they greatly respected the venerable Nestor, some of these younger men were restive and discontented. In the Education Society, also, Dr. Kendrick ceased to be active because of the illness which confined him to his bed from 1845 until his death three years later. He and his generation were becoming historical figures. Deacon Olmstead died in 1842 and Samuel and
