Timothy Dwight V, returning to America in…
1858 CE
Timothy Dwight V, returning to America in July 1858, had become professor of sacred literature at Yale at the opening of the next college year.
Dwight had entered Yale in 1845, and during his undergraduate course had received prizes in mathematics and Latin, and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Skull & Bones.
As the Clark Scholar, he had spent the period from 1849 to 1851 in graduate work at Yale, in the fall of the latter year entering the Theological Department, where he had studied for two years.
He had served as a tutor in the College from 1851 to 1855, and had then gone abroad to continue his studies at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin.
Another Yalie, Andrew Dickson White, had been a classmate of Daniel Coit Gilman, who will later serve as first president of Johns Hopkins University; Gilman had served as librarian of Yale College from 1856.
The two are members of Skull and Bones also, and will remain close friends.
White was also a member of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, serving as editor of the fraternity publication, The Tomahawk.
After graduating from Yale in 1853, White had spent three years studying in Europe before returning to the United States as a professor of history and English literature at the University of Michigan.
Gilman had graduated from Yale in 1852 with a degree in geography and, after serving as attaché of the United States legation at St. Petersburg, Russia from 1853 to 1855, had returned to Yale and has been active in planning and raising funds for the founding of Sheffield Scientific School.
According to sources that may be spurious, the three men had established the Yale Trust in 1856 to finance the Skull & Bones society at Yale University.