HOPKINS, MARK (1802–1887), American educationist, great-nephew of the theologian Samuel Hopkins, was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on the 4th of February 1802. He graduated in 1824 at Williams College, where he was a tutor in 1825–1827, and where in 1830, after having graduated in the previous year at the Berkshire Medical College at Pittsfield, he became professor of Moral Philosophy and Rhetoric. In 1833 he was licensed to preach in Congregational churches. He was president of Williams College from 1836 until 1872. He was one of the ablest and most successful of the old type of college president. His volume of lectures on Evidences of Christianity (1846) was long a favourite text-book. Of his other writings, the chief were Lectures on Moral Science (1862), The Law of Love and Love as a Law (1869), An Outline Study of Man (1873), The Scriptural Idea of Man (1883), and Teachings and Counsels (1884). Dr Hopkins took a lifelong interest in Christian missions, and from 1857 until his death was president of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (the American Congregational Mission Board). He died at Williamstown, on the 17th of June 1887. His son, Henry Hopkins (1837–1908), was also from 1903 till his death president of Williams College.
See Franklin Carter’s Mark Hopkins (Boston, 1892), in the “American Religious Leaders” series, and Leverett W. Spring’s Mark Hopkins, Teacher (New York, 1888), being No. 4, vol. i., of the “Monographs of the Industrial Educational Association.”
Mark Hopkins’s brother, Albert Hopkins (1807–1872), was long associated with him at Williams College, where he graduated in 1826 and was successively a tutor (1827–1829), professor of mathematics and natural philosophy (1829–1838), professor of natural philosophy and astronomy (1838–1868) and professor of astronomy (1868–1872). In 1835 he organized and conducted a Natural History Expedition to Nova Scotia, said to have been the first expedition of the kind sent out from any American college, and in 1837, at his suggestion and under his direction, was built at Williams College an astronomical observatory, said to have been the first in the United States built at a college exclusively for purposes of instruction. He died at Williamstown on the 24th of May 1872.
See Albert C. Sewall’s Life of Professor Albert Hopkins (1879).