author
Mark Hopkins
1802–1887
Best remembered as the long-serving president of Williams College, he became a symbol of teaching at its most personal and memorable. His name still survives in the famous image of a great education as one teacher and one student in close conversation.
2 Audiobooks
The Connexion Between Taste and Morals: Two lectures
by Mark Hopkins
About the author
Born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 1802, Mark Hopkins grew into one of the best-known American college leaders of the 19th century. He studied at Williams College, later trained in medicine, and then returned to Williams, where he taught moral philosophy and rhetoric before becoming president in 1836.
Hopkins led Williams College for more than three decades, serving until 1872. He was also known as a Congregationalist theologian, and his reputation rested not only on administration or writing but on the force of his classroom teaching and personal influence on students.
Much of his lasting fame comes from a saying associated with President James A. Garfield, who had been his student: the ideal college was imagined as Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other. Whether remembered as a teacher, preacher, or college president, he came to represent the idea that education is at heart a lively exchange between minds.