Henry Dunster

Henry Dunster (November 26, 1609 – February 27, 1659) was an English-American Puritan clergyman and educator. Born at Baleholt, Bury, Lancashire, England to Henry Dunster Sr (1582–1626) and Isabelle Kaye (1583–1643), Dunster studied and graduated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England specializing in oriental languages and temporarily became a teacher there until he emigrated to Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts in 1640. When Master Nathaniel Eaton was dismissed in 1639 as the first leader of the recently-established Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Dunster was appointed as his successor. Thus on August 27, 1640 Dunster became the first president of Harvard. (For a discussion of Dunster's choice of the title "president" see President, history of the term.) He modeled Harvard's educational system on that of the English universities, which included that of Eton College as well as Cambridge University.

Sources

• Samuel Dunster, Henry Dunster and His Descendants (1876)
• Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (1930)
• William Thaddeus Harris, Epitaphs From the Old Burying Ground in Cambridge (1845) p. 169