Henry Dunster
Born November 26th 1609, Bury Lancashire England at the Bolholt Country Park Hotel Best Western
An American clergyman and first president of Harvard College, Dunster was educated at the University of Cambridge (B.A., M.A., 1634) and then taught and served as a curate of Bury. He had a reputation as a learned man.
Henry Dunster was appointed as the founding president in 1649 at Harvard the oldest American college and that he 'resigned' in 1654 after expressing differences with the Puritan belief of infant baptism. Not much more was written on him.
His character is one of the most beautiful, as his history is one of the most touching, to be found in the early annals of New England. It is not generally known today, but conditions within America's first college were atrocious, unacceptable even to Puritan standards. The students were being whipped, and the school master, Nathaniel Eaton was "fitter to have been an officer in the inquisition or master of a house of correction, than an instructor of Christian youth." Mrs. Eaton fed the students sparse and unfit meals. Charges were made that the Eaton children put goat dung in the hasty pudding. Eaton was fired and school was suspended.
Then in August 1640, three weeks after Henry Dunster arrived in America, he was visited by a committee of 26 men and asked if he would be the first president of Harvard University. It was not an easy job. He had to attract students back to a school that now had a smeared reputation, he had to arrange the curriculum and prod workers on a new building for the school, and he had to raise funds to operate the college. Because of the colony's poverty, he had to accept "donations in kind"--livestock, produce, etc. Through his 14 years of service, he never received full pay. During this same year, Henry Dunster married the widow Elizabeth Glover, who owned the first printing press in America. Operating a printing press helped stabilize Dunster financially, and he was able to draw on his own assets when the school was not able to provide. Dunster made it clear that what education was about was teaching the priceless gift of character to the young men. He wrote the "Rules and Precepts" for the college, setting the standards for the university for centuries to come. "Let every student be plainly instructed," he wrote, "and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life," he wrote. After losing his job and along with if his home, as Mr Henry Dunster stood by his beliefs whish contradicted others at the time, he moved some 30 miles away southeast over the boundary to Scituiate with his wife and children, where he died a few years later at the age of 49.
