This DeVane lecture at Yale, part of the public course Purposes of College Education, looks at Yale's founding and its entanglement with the American Revolution as a case study in what college education has been for. The lecture traces changing conceptions of Yale's mission across the 325 years since its founding, drawing on the university's founding documents and the broader course framework built around Plato's Republic and thinkers like Aristotle, Mill, and Gandhi. The speaker connects the colonial-era college's aims, forming character, preparing citizens, binding a community, to the revolutionary moment in which Yale took shape, asking what the school's early purpose can tell us about why college exists at all. It sits within a lecture series marking Yale's anniversary and addressed to the public rather than a specialized seminar audience.