54 
Denison University Presidents 
DENISON UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS. 
Professor W. H. Johnson 
It could hardly have occurred to the founders of Denison, 
in 1831, to look elsewhere than to the East for its first executive. 
No western institution had as yet acquired the age and facili- 
ties necessary to the production of a graduate fitted for such 
a position. As the founders were Baptists, actuated by a desire 
to have better educated men for the ministry and to have their 
own sons educated under religious influences, they turned nat- 
urally to Brown University and selected the Rev. John Pratt, 
who had received the A.B. degree from Brown in 1827. Mr. 
Pratt was but thirty-one years of age when he took the position. 
He was a vigorous worker under extremely trying conditions, 
and but for his persistence the attempt might easily have failed 
before it had won a suthcient hold upon the Baptist people of 
Ohio to secure the aid of a permanent endowment. But the 
work of the presidency did not apparently suit him and in 1837 
he gave it up, retaining a position in the faculty as Professor 
of Greek and Latin. In this capacity he served for twenty-two 
years, winning with his pupils the reputation of an exception- 
ally well prepared, thorough and energetic teacher. 
It had been necessary to begin at the very bottom, with a 
preparatory school, and the first class of college students did not 
reach the point of graduation until three years after President 
Pratt had resigned his executive duties. The second choice also 
fell upon a graduate of Brown, the Rev. Jonathan Going, who 
had taken his bachelor’s degree in 1809, the master’s degree from 
the University of Vermont in 1812, and had been honored with 
the degree of Doctor of Divinity by Waterville College (now 
Colby) in 1832. With the first graduating class at the end of 
its freshman year when Dr. Going took the presidency, and with 
a Brown man as his predecessor and still present in the profes- 
sorship of Greek and Latin, it was inevitable that the ideals of 
the college and the content of its course of study should follow 
closely the example which Brown had set. President Going held 
the position only seven years, being removed by death in 1844. 
