Nation's Nurse

As old Cantabrigians see it, Cambridge University has never quite been given its due. "Other institutions of learning can produce brilliant poets, scholars, scientists or jurists," says the current Cambridge Journal, "[but] which of them can claim to have nursed a great republic through its infancy?" Indeed, the Journal adds, the U.S. might never have prospered as it did had it not been for Cambridge men.

Between 1630 and 1640, some 140 Cantabrigians stepped on to American soil. At the beginning of the decade, John Winthrop arrived and became the first governor of Massachusetts. Three years later came Thomas Hooker, former Dean of Emmanuel College, who eventually trudged off into the wilderness to establish the first settlement in Connecticut. Meanwhile, Cantabrigian Roger Williams was off in the direction of Rhode Island and "a third New England state had been brought to birth by a Cambridge graduate."

The Cantabrigians did not stop with nursing the states through their early years. One of their number was John Harvard, who gave -L-779 to help found a college on the Charles. Under its first three heads, the college did so well that Cambridge began "accepting a Harvard degree as equivalent to [its] own." Such success was only to be expected, says the Cambridge Journal: the three Harvard gentlemen were Cantabrigians too.

The rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge is as keen as the rivalry between Ford and Chevrolet--and a good deal older. Last week George Trevelyan, Master of Trinity College and High Steward of the Borough of Cambridge, announced that he was petitioning the Crown to change Cambridge's status from town to city. Cried one Oxonian on hearing the news: "Good gracious! In their efforts for equality, Cambridge will be wanting a bishop next." Oxford has been both bishopric and city for more than four centuries.

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