WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Yale University plans to strengthen campus spiritual life by cutting all ties to religion.
The school, founded in 1701 specifically to train clergy for the Congregational Church, ends its association with that denomination next month.
The decision is mostly symbolic since the school has long been a secular institution. Still, it seems a little radical for what began as a divinity school to sever relations with its founding faith.
A committee was asked to explore ways to "strengthen the growing expression of religious and spiritual life" at Yale. It recommended that the school end all association with the United Church of Christ, the successor body to the Congregational Church.
Universities must be open and gracious to students from countless religious traditions and those from no religious background at all, but they don't have to deny their history.
Yale tries to serve the spiritual needs of students from Jewish, Buddhist, Sikh, Islamic and many other faiths who walk the hallowed halls of the university today.
The school will offer an ecumenical Protestant service on Sundays.
No one will notice the difference, according to the chaplain.
But Yale will have parted from its roots. Most of our early colleges began specifically to raise up clergy for the young country. Harvard began to train Puritan (Congregational) ministers in 1636. A theological spat led to the founding of Yale to do the same thing from a slightly different angle.
Virginia's College of William and Mary was the second college in the new land. It was founded by clergy of the Church of England in 1693.
Columbia (1754) was named Kings College before Independence Day and trained Anglicans. Princeton, originally in 1746 the College of New Jersey, advertised that it was open to any person of any denomination, but its leadership tended to be Presbyterian.
The University of Pennsylvania, founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1751, claims to be the first college not to focus on educating clergy, but it was identified with the Anglican Church.
Brown University, in 1764 the College of Rhode Island, was the Baptist answer to Congregational and Anglican institutions.
Yale still has a fine graduate school of divinity to educate Protestant and Episcopal students. Nevertheless, the university has abandoned its heritage.
The school slogan, "For God, Country and for Yale forever," rings a bit hollow.