Francis Landey Patton (January 22, 1843 – November 25, 1932) was a Bermudan-American educator, Presbyterian minister, academic administrator, and theologian, and served as the twelfth president of Princeton University.

[1] Patton was opposed to the spread of liberal Christianity in his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America.

[1] In 1881, he left Chicago and became Stuart professor "of the relation of philosophy and science to the Christian religion" (a chair founded for him) at Princeton Theological Seminary.

His appointment was criticized by some alumni, who noted that Patton was not an American citizen, while some feared he would harangue students with John Knox-style sermons.

He won over a large number of the alumni with a speech given in New York in 1888, in which he remarked "I am not prepared to say that it is better to have gone and loafed than never to have gone at all, but I do believe in the genius loci; and I sympathize with Sir Joshua Reynolds when he says, 'that there is around every seminary of learning, an atmosphere of floating knowledge where every one can imbibe something peculiar to his own original conceptions.'"

In his inaugural lecture, Briggs praised higher criticism, a component of liberal Christianity, and argued that the Scriptures as a whole are riddled with errors and that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy taught at Princeton Theological Seminary "is a ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children."

Patton was outraged by this lecture and moved that the General Assembly, which had the authority to veto all appointments of professors of theology at Presbyterian seminaries, should exercise this power and remove Briggs from the Union faculty.

The faculty of Union Theological Seminary voted to withdraw from the denomination rather than remove Briggs from his chair in order to defend the institution's academic freedom.