ABSTRACT
College of Philadelphia Provost William Smith attained a position of influence and eminence in colonial Philadelphia matched by few university leaders. The most creative and progressive educator in eighteenth-century North America was the immigrant Scot, William Smith, Provost of the College of Philadelphia from 1755 to 1779. Concurrent with William Smith's rise in New York, Benjamin Franklin was working to establish an academy in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Academy was already offering instruction on a collegiate level in 1754, when William Smith began teaching, a year before it was chartered as a college. The College, Academy, and Charitable School of Philadelphia—to use its formal title—was a thriving, multi-tiered institution, sometimes described as a collection of schools. The curriculum of the College of Philadelphia was designed to furnish the culture and ideology of a governing upper class, including but not limited to the families of the college trustees.
