page_title: Timothy Dwight IV
section_title: Presidency of Yale College (1795–1817)
hierarchical_section_title: Timothy Dwight IV / Career / Presidency of Yale College (1795–1817)
caption_attribution_description: English: Engraving of Timothy Dwight IV, eighth president of Yale College. Courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts &amp; Archives Digital Images Database.
context_page_description: Timothy Dwight was an American academic and educator, a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and author. He was the eighth president of Yale College.
context_section_description: Dwight was the leader of the evangelical New Divinity faction of Congregationalism—a group closely identified with Connecticut's emerging commercial elite. Although fiercely opposed by religious moderates, most notably Yale President Ezra Stiles, he was elected to the presidency of Yale on Stiles's death in 1795. Shortly afterwards, he was elected an honorary member of the Connecticut Society of the Cincinnati. His ability as a teacher and his talents as a religious and political leader soon made the college the largest institution of higher education in North America. Dwight had a genius for recognizing able protégé such as Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel W. Taylor, and Leonard Bacon, all of whom would become major religious leaders and theological innovators in the antebellum decades.
  During troubled times at Yale College, President Timothy Dwight saw his students drawn to the radical republicanism and "infidel philosophy" of the French Revolution, including the philosophies of Hume, Hobbes, Tindal, and Lords Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. Between 1797 and 1800, Dwight frequently warned audiences against the threats of this "infidel philosophy" in America. An address to the candidates for the baccalaureate in Yale College called "The Nature and Danger of Infidel Philosophy, Exhibited in Two Discourses, Addressed to the Candidates for the Baccalaureate, In Yale College" was delivered on September 9, 1797. It was published by George Bunce in 1798. This book is credited as one of the embers of the Second Great Awakening.
  Yale's faculty, still small and theological at the end of its first century, significantly transformed when Dwight hired three new professors between 1801 and 1803: Jeremiah Day, professor of mathematics; James Luce Kingsley, professor of classical languages; and Benjamin Silliman, professor of chemistry and geology.  Silliman, Yale's first chemist, introduced science education at Yale became the "patriarch" of American science. Day, a minister as well as a mathematician, succeeded Dwight as Yale College president upon his death.
caption: Engraving of Timothy Dwight IV with signature
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