In 1740, Jonathan Edwards penned his Conversion and Revival in New England, in which he proposed that colleges must remain “the schools of the prophets” or they will inescapably become the pulpit of Hell. The following is an excerpt:

...And I would say in general that it appears to me that care should be taken, one way or another, that those societies should be so regulated, that they should in fact be nurseries of piety. Otherwise they are fundamentally ruined and undone, as to their main design and most essential end. They ought to be so constituted that vice and idleness should have no living there. They are intolerable in societies whose main design is to train up youth in Christian knowledge and eminent piety to fit them to be pastors of the flock of the blessed Jesus.

I have heretofore had some acquaintance with the affairs of a college, and experience of what belonged to its tuition and government; and I cannot but think that it is practicable enough so to constitute such societies that there should be no being there, without being virtuous, serious and diligent.

It seems to me to be a reproach to the land that ever it should be with our colleges, that instead of being places of the greatest advantages for true piety, one can not send a child thither without great danger of being infected as to his morals; as it has certainly sometimes been with these societies. It is perfectly intolerable, and anything should be done, rather than it should be so. If we pretend to have any colleges at all, under any notion of training up youth for the ministry, there should be some way found out that should certainly prevent it being thus.

To have societies for bringing persons up to be ambassadors of Jesus Christ, and to lead souls to heaven, and to have them places of so much infection, is the greatest nonsense and absurdity imaginable.