Myles Cooper

Myles Cooper
Portrait of Myles Cooper by John Singleton Copley
2nd President of King's College
In office 1763–1775
Preceded by	Samuel Johnson
Succeeded by	Benjamin Moore (acting)
Personal details
Born	1735 (1735) England
Died	1 May 1785(1785-05-01) (aged 49–50) Edinburgh, Scotland

Myles Cooper (1735 – May 1, 1785) was a figure in colonial New York. An Anglican priest, he served as the President of King's College (predecessor of today's Columbia University) from 1763 to 1775, and was a public opponent of the American Revolution.

Cooper was educated at The Queen's College, Oxford where he later served as chaplain. Ordained as a priest in the Church of England in 1761, he attracted the influence of several high clergymen, including Thomas Secker, Archbishop of Canterbury, who recommended him for service in the American colonies. Cooper was thereby sent to New York in 1762 to assist Samuel Johnson, president of King's College, which was an Anglican establishment. Cooper was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy, and a year later he had assumed the college presidency.

Cooper was chosen to replace his predecessor in the position of College President primarily because the Governors of the institution believed he would be far easier to control. Indeed, Cooper was not entirely engaged in the educational mission of King's, possessing a larger cache of alcoholic beverages than books, and more frequently engaging in the urban life of New York.

Still, the college prospered under Cooper's tenure, creating, among other things, the second medical college in the Americas, in 1767. Judge Thomas Jones wrote that "under his tuition was produced a number of young men superior in learning and ability to any that America had ever before seen," and George Washington, whose stepson John Parke Custis attended King's, wrote of Cooper that he was "a gentleman capable of instructing him [Custis] in every branch of knowledge."

While in the American colonies Cooper floated several grandiose schemes that were never realized:

Cooper was reportedly more enamored with the Southern colonies than New York, and frequently took to "rambles" there. Desiring to resettle there, he proposed to his ecclesiastical superiors, in both 1768 and 1774, that two Anglican sees be established in North America, and that he be appointed bishop of the more southernly one.