Jonathan Edwards College - Namesake

Namesake

Jonathan Edwards matriculated at Yale (then the New Haven branch of the several campuses of the Collegiate School of Connecticut) in 1716 near his 13th birthday. Four years and one intense conversion later, he graduated as valedictorian of his class of about twenty students. This was at a time when entrance into either Harvard or what became Yale (two of the only three "colleges" then extant in colonial America) required ability in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Edwards received his Masters of Arts from Yale two years later, in 1722, and eventually became one of America's most renowned theologians and philosophers. The Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University contains many of Edwards' original writings.