At the present time, a person applying for admission to a college in the University of Cambridge, Eng., is examined by the Dean and the Head Lecturer.  “The Dean is the presiding officer in chapel, and the only one whose presence there is indispensable.  He oversees the markers’ lists, pulls up the absentees, and receives their excuses.  This office is no sinecure in a large college.”  At Oxford “the discipline of a college is administered by its head, and by an officer usually called Dean, though, in some colleges, known by other names.”—­Bristed’s Five Years in an Eng.  Univ., Ed. 2d, pp. 12, 16. Literary World, Vol.  XII. p. 223.

In the older American colleges, whipping and cuffing were inflicted by a tutor, professor, or president; the latter, however, usually employed an agent for this purpose.

See under CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.

2.  In the United States, a registrar of the faculty in some colleges, and especially in medical institutions.—­Webster.

A dean may also be appointed by the Faculty of each Professional School, if deemed expedient by the Corporation.—­Laws Univ. at Cam., Mass., 1848, p. 8.

3.  The head or president of a college.

You rarely find yourself in a shop, or other place of public resort, with a Christ-Church-man, but he takes occasion, if young and frivolous, to talk loudly of the Dean, as an indirect expression of his own connection with this splendid college; the title of Dean being exclusively attached to the headship of Christ Church.—­De Quincey’s Life and Manners, p. 245.

DEAN OF CONVOCATION.  At Trinity College, Hartford, this officer presides in the House of Convocation, and is elected by the same, biennially.—­Calendar Trin.  Coll., 1850, p. 7.

DEAN’S BOUNTY.  In 1730, the Rev. Dr. George Berkeley, then Dean of Derry, in Ireland, came to America, and resided a year or two at Newport, Rhode Island, “where,” says Clap, in his History of Yale College, “he purchased a country seat, with about ninety-six acres of land.”  On his return to London, in 1733, he sent a deed of his farm in Rhode Island to Yale College, in which it was ordered, “that the rents of the farm should be appropriated to the maintenance of the three best scholars in Greek and Latin, who should reside at College at least nine months in a year, in each of the three years between their first and second degrees.”  President Clap further remarks, that “this premium has been a great incitement to a laudable ambition to excel in the knowledge of the classics.”  It was commonly known as the Dean’s bounty.—­Clap’s Hist. of Yale Coll., pp. 37, 38.

The Dean afterwards conveyed to it [Yale College], by a deed transmitted to Dr. Johnson, his Rhode Island farm, for the establishment of that Dean’s bounty, to which sound classical learning in Connecticut has been much indebted.—­Hist.  Sketch of Columbia Coll., p. 19.