Lecture five of Yale's Purposes of College Education course, part of the DeVane Lecture series open to the public, examines the founding of Yale College in the context of the university's 325th anniversary. The speaker reads key founding documents from Yale's early history and traces how the college's conception of education evolved over the centuries, connecting this institutional history to the course's broader argument, built around Plato's Republic and thinkers like Aristotle, Mill, and Gandhi, about what a college education is for. Themes include the formation of personal character, preparation for citizenship, and participation in an intellectual community. The lecture treats Yale's own founding charter and early statutes as source material for a philosophical question rather than as institutional trivia, asking what the university's founders thought they were building and how that purpose has shifted since.