The
president and professors were appointed by the twelve trustees. They
were accountable to nobody else, and could be removed by nobody else.
They accepted their offices on this tenure. Yet the legislature has
appointed other persons, with power to remove these officers and to
deprive them of their livings; and those other persons have exercised
that power. No description of private property has been regarded as more
sacred than college livings. They are the estates and freeholds of a
most deserving class of men; of scholars who have consented to forego
the advantages of professional and public employments, and to devote
themselves to science and literature and the instruction of youth in the
quiet retreats of academic life. Whether to dispossess and oust them; to
deprive them of their office, and to turn them out of their livings; to
do this, not by the power of their legal visitors or governors, but by
acts of the legislature, and to do it without forfeiture and without
fault; whether all this be not in the highest degree an indefensible and
arbitrary proceeding, is a question of which there would seem to be but
one side fit for a lawyer or a scholar to espouse.
Of all the attempts of James the Second to overturn the law, and the
rights of his subjects, none was esteemed more arbitrary or tyrannical
than his attack on Magdalen College, Oxford; and yet that attempt was
nothing but to put out one president and put in another. The president
of that college, according to the charter and statutes, is to be chosen
by the fellows, who are the corporators.
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