Manhattan's Collegiate Says It's Oldest

In the ongoing squabble over which school in the oldest in America, Manhattan's Collegiate School has just pulled a coup by adding 10 years to its age.

Collegiate social studies teacher Massimo Maglione, in a recent essay updating the school's history, argues that the school was actually started in 1628, not 1638--which would make the elite all-boys school eight years older than Harvard.

Collegiate was so eager to find out how old it is that Headmaster Richard Barter and Trustee William L. Frost '47 in 1974 sent head librarian David Mallison to Holland to research the school's background.

"Officially, Collegiate still began in 1638," Maglione says, "but there was an informal setting where education was taking place before."

Historical Evidence

Maglione says various evidence backs up the school's claim, including two letters written by Jonas Michaelius, the first ordained Dutch Reformed Protestant Church minister in Manhattan. Michaelius wrote that he began teaching in Manhattan in 1628, and Maglione says the minister's efforts later led to the founding of Collegiate.

Frost acknowledged, though, that 17th century Dutch immigrants were "a bunch of grubby traders," while "educators were a dime a dozen in Massachusetts"--and so Harvard's informal teaching history may still predate Collegiate's.

"It's really coincidental that its date happened to supercede Harvard's," said Bruce J. Breimer, Collegiate's director of college guidance. "There was no ulterior motive."

"It's more an intellectual argument than over any significant date that has true importance to it," agrees Barter.

Still, according to Maglione, "several people were very interested in pushing forward this notion" of the school being old. "You'd better believe it. I don't care what anyone else says. We believe it!" says a secretary in Collegiate's development department.

But when asked whether the information would affect Collegiate's prestige, director of development Richard P. Fitzgerald says, laughing, "it obviously doesn't need any more recognition."

Is Harvard miffed at being called young by an upstart high school? No, says University spokesman David Rosen--"that's a high school and wouldn't really be in the picture" of the competition for the title of "oldest institution of higher learning." Rosen adds that Boston Latin School is probably older than Harvard anyway.

"It's been Harvard's long claim that it is the oldest college, not the oldest school in the U.S.," agrees Robin Carlaw of the University Archives.