lege of New Jersey (later Princeton) because five members of Princeton's first Board of Trustees we

d a provision that henceforth academic processions would place visiting dignitaries and other officials in the order of their institution's founding dates. The following year, Penn's "The Alumni Register" magazine, published by the General Alumni Society, began a campaign to retroactively revise the university's founding date to 1740, in order to become older than Princeton, which had been chartered in 1746. Three years later in 1899, Penn's board of trustees acceded to this alumni initiative and officially changed its founding date from 1749 to 1740, affecting its rank in academic processions as well as the informal bragging rights that come with the age-based hierarchy in academia generally. See Building Penn's Brand for more details on why Penn did this. Princeton University implicitly challenges this rationale, [3] also considering itself to be the nation's fourth oldest institution of higher learning. [4] To further complicate the comparison, a University of Edinburgh-educated Presbyterian minister named William Tennent and his son Gilbert Tennent operated a "Log College" in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from 1726 until 1746; some have suggested a connection between it and the College of New Jersey (later Princeton) because five members of Princeton's first Board of Trustees were affiliated with the Log College, including Gilbert Tennent, William Tennent, Jr., and Samuel Finley, the latter of whom later became President of Princeton. (All twelve members of Princeton's first Board of Trustees were leaders from the "New Side" or "New Light" wing of the Presbyterian Church in the New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania area.[5]) This antecedent relationship, if considered a formal lineage with institutional continuity, would justify pushing Princeton's founding date back to 1726, earlier than Penn's 1740. However, Princeton has not done so, and a Princeton historian says that "the facts do not warrant" such an interpretation. [6] Columbia University also implicitly challenges Penn's use of either 1740 or 1749, as it claims to be the fifth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (after Harvard, William & Mary, Yale and Princeton), based upon its charter date of 1754 and Penn's charter date of 1755. [7] Academic histories of American higher education generally list Penn as fifth or sixth, after Princeton and immediately before or after Columbia. [8] [9] [10] Even Penn's own account of its early history agrees that the Academy of Philadelphia did not add an institution of higher learning until 1755, but university officials continue to make it their practice to assert their fourth-oldest place in academic processions. Other American universities which began as colonial era secondary schools such as St. John's College in 1696 and the University of Delaware in 1743 choose to march based upon the date they became institutions of higher learning. According to sometime Penn History Professor Edgar Potts Cheyney, the University did indeed consider its founding date to be 1749 for almost a century. However, it was changed with good reason, and primarily due to a publication about the University issued by the U.S. Commissioner of Education. The year 1740 is the date of the establishment of the first educational trust that the University had taken upon itself. Cheyney states further that, "it might be considered a lawyer's date; it is a familiar legal practice in considering the date of any institution to seek out the oldest trust it administers." He also points out that Harvard's founding date is *also* the year i