Philip Lindsley

Philip Lindsley was born in Basking Ridge, New Jersey on December 21, 1786.[1][2][3][4] He was educated in private academies and graduated from the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University.[1]

He started teaching Latin and Greek at Princeton University in 1808.[1][3] By 1813, he became Professor of Languages, Librarian, Inspector (Dean), and secretary of the Board of Trustees.[1] He then served as its Vice President from 1817 to 1822, and as its Acting President from 1822 to 1824.[1][2][5] However, he declined its presidency, as well as the presidencies of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.[5][6]

In December 1824, he moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to take up the presidency of Cumberland College.[1][5][6] Among his first acts as president was to request that its name be changed to the University of Nashville, a change that took effect about a year after his arrival.[5][6] He hired respected scholars as faculty in fields including classics, foreign languages, mathematics, and geology.[1] At the same time, he actively recruited students.[1] He also suggested starting a medical school.[5]

He resigned his position in 1850, when the university suspended operations as a result of the cholera epidemic which led to low enrollment and to financial difficulties.[5] His son, John Berrien Lindsley, became the university's president when it reopened in 1855.[5]

After leaving the University of Nashville, he taught Ecclesiastical Polity and Biblical Archaeology at New Albany Theological Seminary in New Albany, Indiana (now the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago).[1][2]

His ideas and ambitions regarding education had a lasting impact.[1] He promoted the Nashville city slogan "Athens of the South", a sobriquet coined by Leroy J. Halsey (1812-1896) that reflected his goal of making the University of Nashville into a nationally recognized institution.[1][3] He was an advocate for better education at all levels, becoming one of the first academics to urge the formal training of school teachers in normal schools.[1] He saw education as, "a great equalizer, a special right for the poor."[7] Additionally, in an essay entitled Thoughts on Slavery, he wrote, "Our slaves must be emancipated."[7] In the 1830s he published a pamphlet that argued that all children should be offered a broad academic education, including Greek, Latin, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, geography, and English.[1]

He married Margaret Lawrence Lindsley, the daughter of Nathaniel Lawrence, who was New York Attorney General from 1792 to 1795.[1][2] The couple had three sons:

• Adrian Van Sinderen Lindsley (1814–1885), who served as a member of the Tennessee Senate.[1][8][9]
• Nathaniel Lawrence Lindsley (1816–1868).[9][10]
• John Berrien Lindsley (1822–1897).[1][2][9] He married Sarah McGavock Lindsley (1830–1903).

Margaret Lindsley died in 1845. In 1849, Lindsley married Mary Ann Myers, widow of Elias Myers, the founder of New Albany Theological Seminary.[1]

He died in Nashville on May 25, 1855.[2][4]