nvened in New York City as the "Intercollegiate Commission" at the invitation of John J. McCook, a Union Army officer during the American Civil War and member of Princeton's board of trustees who chaired its Committee on Academic Dress. The primary purpose of the conference was to standardize American academic regalia, which was accomplished through the adoption of the Intercollegiate Code on Academic Costume. This formalized protocol included a provision that henceforth academic pr

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Notes[edit]

Jump up ^ The University officially uses 1740 as its founding date and has since 1899. The ideas and intellectual inspiration for the academic institution stem from 1749, with a pamphlet published by Benjamin Franklin. When Franklin's institution was established, it inhabited a schoolhouse built in 1740 for another school, which never came to practical fruition. Penn archivist Mark Frazier Lloyd [1] notes: “In 1899, Penn’s Trustees adopted a resolution that established 1740 as the founding date, but good cases may be made for 1749, when Franklin first convened the Trustees, or 1751, when the first classes were taught at the affiliated secondary school for boys, Academy of Philadelphia, or 1755, when Penn obtained its collegiate charter to add a post-secondary institution, the College of Philadelphia." Princeton's library [2] presents another, diplomatically phrased view.
Jump up ^ Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution. Penn, Princeton and Columbia originated within a few years of each other. Penn considered 1749 to be its founding date for more than a century, including at the centennial celebration in 1849. In 1895, elite universities in the United States convened in New York City as the "Intercollegiate Commission" at the invitation of John J. McCook, a Union Army officer during the American Civil War and member of Princeton's board of trustees who chaired its Committee on Academic Dress. The primary purpose of the conference was to standardize American academic regalia, which was accomplished through the adoption of the Intercollegiate Code on Academic Costume. This formalized protocol included a provision that henceforth academic processions would place visiting dignitaries and other officials in the order of their institution's founding dates. The following year, Penn's "The Alumni Register" magazine, published by the General Alumni Society, began a campaign to retroactively revise the university's founding date to 1740, in order to become older than Princeton, which had been chartered in 1746. Three years later in 1899, Penn's board of trustees acceded to this alumni initiative and officially changed its founding date from 1749 to 1740, affecting its rank in academic processions as well as the informal bragging rights that come with the age-based hierarchy in academia generally. See Building Penn's Brand for more details on why Penn did this. Princeton University implicitly challenges this rationale, [3] also considering itself to be the nation's fourth oldest institution of higher learning. [4] To further complicate the comparison, a University of Edinburgh-educated Presbyterian minister named William Tennent and his son Gilbert Tennent operated a "Log College" in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from 1726 until 1746; some have suggested a connection between it and the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) because five members of Princeton's first Board of Trustees were affiliated with the Log College, including Gilbert Tennent, William Tennent, Jr., and Samuel Finley, the latter of whom later became President of Princeton. (All twelve members of Princeton's first Board of Trustees were leaders from the "New Side" or "New Light" wing of the Presbyterian Church in the New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania area.[5]) This antecedent relationship, if considered a formal lineage with institutional continuity, would justify pushing Princeton's founding date back to 1726, earlier than Penn's 1740. However, Princeton has not done so, and a Princeton historian says that "the facts do not warr