Yale University

Ten Congregationalist ministers, most of them Harvard graduates, chartered the Collegiate School in 1701 out of concern that Harvard had grown too liberal in its theology and too worldly in its governance to keep producing orthodox Calvinist clergy for Connecticut's churches. The school moved between several towns before settling in New Haven in 1716 and took the name Yale College the following year, after Elihu Yale, a former East India Company official whose donation of goods and books the trustees judged large enough to merit the honor.

Training ministers remained a central purpose of the college for its first century, and its charter language committing the school to fit youth for public employment in Church and Civil State reads as a direct answer to what its founders saw as Harvard's failure to do the same. A dedicated professorship in divinity was established in 1746, formalizing theological instruction within the college rather than leaving it to individual tutors, and by the early nineteenth century a distinct body of divinity students had grown large and organized enough to ask for recognition as a school in their own right, a request the college granted in 1822, creating what would become Yale Divinity School and beginning its long separation from the increasingly diverse, increasingly secular university growing up around it.

Yale Divinity School granted its first professional theological degree, the Bachelor of Divinity, in 1867, and admitted women as candidates for that degree in 1932, decades before many of its Protestant peer institutions did the same. Somewhere across the twentieth century it stopped training clergy for one denomination and became what it describes today as interdenominational and nonsectarian outright, with faculty drawn from Catholic, Orthodox, mainline and evangelical Protestant traditions as well as other world religions, and students preparing for ministry across several dozen denominations rather than for the Congregationalist pulpits its founders had in mind. This trajectory mirrors Yale University's own broader path from a colonial ministerial college into a religiously unaffiliated research university, but the Divinity School occupies an unusual position within that larger institution: it is the one part of Yale that still exists explicitly to form religious leaders, even though it now serves traditions its Puritan founders would barely have recognized as legitimate at all. Its library, Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library among the university's wider holdings, and its faculty's work across biblical studies, world religions and practical ministry keep it a significant center for the academic study of religion quite apart from its original sectarian purpose.