He was instrumental in founding the first chair of Greek, which was filled by his friend Rudolph Agricola, and he also established the university library and a college for students of civil law.
He was a teacher at Swanzey, New Hampshire, and at the Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, in 1845-1847, and attempted the philological method of teaching English "like Latin and Greek," later described in his Method of Philological Study of the English Language (1865); at Amherst in 1847-1849; at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1852-1855; and in 1855 became a tutor at Lafayette College, where he became adjunct professor of belles-lettres and English literature in 1856, and professor of English language and comparative philology - the first chair of the kind established - in 1857.
Pierre had come just at dinnertime and was sitting awkwardly in the middle of the drawing room on the first chair he had come across, blocking the way for everyone.
