This one will be a little different, but bear with me. I know you will learn something.

Edie’s first cousin, once removed (the son of her first cousin, Ted), Steven Tepper was inaugurated as the President of Hamilton College about two weeks ago. Before taking on this enormous responsibility, Steven had occupied senior level positions at Princeton, Vanderbilt and Arizona State. We watched the impressive inauguration ceremonies on YouTube last night.

Hamilton is located, as you may know, in upstate New York, in the “village” of Clinton. I was on the campus one time, about twenty five years ago, when Hannah was looking for schools and she and I did a New York/New England trip. I was very impressed with Hamilton then (we had a very good tour leader), and thought that it would be a very good place for Hannah. She, as I recall, had no interest in the place, and the second she stepped on the Sarah Lawrence campus, said “this is where I want to go”. She made a good choice.

I had not focused on the obvious. Hamilton College was named after Alexander Hamilton. It was founded, I learned last night, by a Presbyterian minister named Samuel Kirkland with the active cooperation of Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s, and officially chartered in 1812 and named after Hamilton eight years after he was killed by Aaron Burr in 1804. Kirkland also was no longer alive when the school was formally chartered as Hamilton College.

The ceremonies began with a reference to the College being established on the land of the Oneida Indians, and with a further reference to the work that Rev. Kirkland had done with the Oneidas. It was proudly stated that the school was started as a school for both “White” and native boys, and that this was unique and something to be proud of. I was intrigued and decided to look a little further.

Well…….

Samuel Kirkland spent decades among the Oneidas and other Iroquois tribes. But it wasn’t because he loved them; it was because he wanted to civilize them and convert them to Christianity. In this, I believe he was somewhat successful. But he was also a negotiator who convinced the Oneidas to sell their land, or a part of it, to the State of New York, and to the federal government, and in the process he himself wound up to be a landowner. And he started the school (as you would expect in those times) as a Christian seminary, and (as Wikipedia tells it), none of the Oneidas who enrolled in the new school lasted more than a year. None of this was mentioned during the inauguration ceremony.

I am not necessarily being critical of the ceremony planners (I really don’t know enough to be critical), but as I have listened to several classes of the eleven class series involving Yale and its relationship to slaves and slavery by Professor David Blight, and how Yale has had a special project to dig into this touchy question, I wonder whether Hamilton has done the same, and if they will under Steven’s leadership.

Samuel Kirkland died in 1808. He and his wife had six children, only two of whom survived into full adulthood, a son and a daughter. His son, John Thornton Kirkland, became a Unitarian, not a Presbyterian, minister and more importantly became president of Harvard, where he served from 1810 to 1828. He was an important Harvard president, liked by all. Not that I have searched hard, but I haven’t found anyone who had anything to say about Kirkland that wasn’t good, as a teacher, an administrator and a human being. Kirkland House at Harvard, one of the Harvard residential houses, each of which is named after an ex-president, was (I guess, obviously) named after John Kirkland. I lived in Kirkland House for three years (Suite B-22, overlooking Boylston Street), and never once thought to look to find out anything about John Kirkland. I don’t even think I knew President Kirkland had a first name.

Samuel Kirkland’s daughter married a man named Lothrop, and her daughter (Samuel’s granddaughter) confused things completely when she, a Lothrop, married a man named Lathrop, John Hiram Lathrop. John Hiram Lathrop was also a university administrator in the mid-19th century.

Ready for this? Lathrop became the first President of the University of Missouri at Columbia (the first state land grant college west of the Mississippi), and then became the first Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and then became (not the first) President of the University of Indiana, following which he became, for the second time, the President of the University of Missouri. Before his administrative career, he had graduated from Yale, taught high school, become a lawyer, become a professor of mathematics, a professor of philosophy, and a professor of English literature. Oh, yes, one more thing. Before he took the Missouri job, his professorial work was at Hamilton.

So, you can’t say you didn’t learn anything today.

As Steven begins his career as the President of Hamilton College, we wish him nothing but the best. I think Hamilton and Steven both made a very good choice, and am sure they will both go from strength to strength.