Introduction

Before the Ivy League and the Ivory Tower, the institution we now call “Penn” was at the center of early Philadelphia, and of the American Revolution. Revolution at Penn? traces this school from the 1750s through the 1790s. It connects several histories: of an institution and its founders, teachers, and students; of Philadelphia, which grew from a town into a metropolis; and of a colony, region, and nation during an era of profound crisis and change.

Conceived idealistically by Benjamin Franklin and leading Philadelphians at mid-century and located in the growing and diverse city, the school became enmeshed in Pennsylvania’s social and political conflicts. The revolutionary decades created divisions inside and outside the institution. In 1779, state leaders dismantled and reinvented it as a new university. After a decade, however, an older ruling order returned, and a final uneasy compromise formed the University of Pennsylvania in 1791.

Debates over education were part of larger arguments about liberty, freedom, and power that consumed the colonies. Those debates were not contained to a small elite: many voices, including students, teachers, artisans, workers, women, free and enslaved Blacks, Indigenous peoples, and the impoverished were part of the conversation.

Who is a college education for? How should schools be led and managed, and by whom? What should students learn, and who should pay? What is the role of a university in a city, and in society? These questions are as vital today as they were in eighteenth-century Philadelphia.