John Clarke Young (August 12, 1803 – June 23, 1857) was an American educator and pastor who was the fourth president of Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

[2] His uncle, the seven-term U.S. House Clerk Matthew St. Clair Clarke,[3] offered to mentor him in a law-based profession,[1] but he declined and decided to follow his father into the ministry.

He spent two years after graduation in New York, teaching algebra at the classical school he attended for the first and serving as an assistant to the professor of mathematics at Columbia for the second.

[4][6] After he received a license to preach from the Presbytery of New York on March 7, 1827,[7] Young's career in the ministry began following his graduation from Princeton.

[2][9] At the recommendation of Archibald Alexander,[2] principal of Princeton Theological Seminary, the college's trustees offered Young the position in a unanimous vote.

[2][10] Young inherited a college described by a Centre historian as "small and poor";[11] it was one which had graduated just 24 or 25 students over the course of its eleven-year history.

[13] He served on the college faculty as a professor of logic and moral philosophy,[14] and taught belles-lettres and political economy when those positions were unfilled.

[15] The curriculum during Young's tenure consisted of classics, mathematics, natural science and history, "taught within a Christian framework".

[14] The college catalogue from 1866 notes that each day of classes began with the "worship of God" and that religious instruction and sermons, held on the first Monday of each week, were required for all students.

[24] Around this time he was offered the presidency at Transylvania University due to his successes in Danville, though he ultimately opted to stay at Centre.

[30][31] On May 23, he and the other delegates from the Synod of Kentucky petitioned the General Assembly for $60,000 (equivalent to $2,197,440 in 2023) to be put towards land and trusts to build a "Seminary of the first class" in "the West", with a plot of "ten or more acres" in Danville being named as a specific location.

Upon arriving at Centre in 1854, future college president William L. Breckinridge said in a letter to his father, "Dr. Young looks badly – the rest look well".

[38] At the time of his death, Young was working on The Efficacy of Prayer, a treatise described by The Evangelical Repository as "worthy of the subject and the author".

[35] Young was a proponent of the gradual emancipation of slaves and gave several speeches advocating for it as a more moderate and reasonable alternative to immediate abolitionism;[35] he also debated this subject at speaking engagements in Danville, Harrodsburg, and Garrard County with persons including the Presbyterian lawyer George Blackburn Kincaid and president James Shannon of Bacon College.

[12] This building was destroyed in a fire several days before its scheduled demolition,[45] and was replaced by a new Young Hall, which was dedicated on March 21, 1970.

During the course of his term, which lasted nearly 27 years, the college's endowment grew to over $100,000 (equivalent to $3,270,000 in 2023),[2] representing more than a five-fold increase,[13] and the enrollment exceeded 250 students.