The Oneida Institute (/oʊˈnaɪdə/ oh-NYE-də) was a short-lived Presbyterian school in Whitesboro, New York, United States, that was a national leader in the emerging abolitionist movement. Existing from 1827 to 1843, the school was radical and the first that accepted both Black and White students in the United States. According to Earnest Elmo Calkins, Oneida was "the seed of Lane Seminary, Western Reserve College, Oberlin and Knox colleges."

The Oneida Institute was founded in 1827 by George Washington Gale as the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry. His former teacher (in the Addison County Grammar School, Middlebury, Vermont, 1807–1808) John Frost, now a Presbyterian minister in Whitesboro with Harriet Lavinia (Gold) Frost his wife — daughter of Thomas Ruggles Gold, — who was the primary partner in setting up the institute, bringing her considerable wealth to the enterprise. They raised $20,000, a significant part of which was from the philanthropist and abolitionist brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan; Arthur had helped various "western" institutions, to the extent of tens of thousands of dollars, "but his favorite among them was Oneida Institute". (In the early 19th century, Utica was western, the gateway to western New York.) With this they bought 115 acres of land and began construction of the buildings. The institute occupied "more than 100 acres (40 ha) bordered by Main Street and the Mohawk River and by Ellis and Ablett Avenues in Whitesboro village."

The first student movement in the country, the Lane Rebels, began at Oneida. A contingent of about 24, with an acknowledged leader (Theodore Dwight Weld), left Oneida for Lane and then, more publicly, soon left Lane for Oberlin. Oneida's first president, Gale, founded Knox Manual Labor Institute, later Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. Oneida hired its second president, Beriah Green, from Oberlin's competitor in northeast Ohio, Western Reserve College. All of these institutions and people are very much linked to the explosively emerging topic of the abolition of slavery.

The institute opened in May 1827 with 2 instructors, Gale and Pelatiah Rawson (sometimes spelled Peletiah), the latter a Hamilton College graduate and engineer that had worked on the just-completed Erie Canal. There were initially 20 students, including most of the 7 that had been working in exchange for instruction on Gale's farm in Western, New York, a pilot project. Theodore Weld, who would become the leader of the students, was among them, as was evangelist and future Oberlin president Charles Grandison Finney. Enrollment soon grew to 100, and by 1830, 500 applicants were turned away for lack of space. It was chartered in 1829 as the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry. Through Frost, it was "intimately connected" with the Presbyterian church of Whitesboro.

Oneida was the first and leading American example of the manual labor college, which Gale thought he had originated, although there were earlier examples, and Weld had proposed a manual labor program unsuccessfully to Hamilton College. Gale's goal was to supplement study with the physical and spiritual or psychological benefits of exercise; for the time this was an innovative and informed position. By "unit[ing] classical education with agricultural, horticultural, and mechanical labor," Gale was also trying to make education more affordable. "Students worked on the farm, or in the carpenter, trunk and harness-making shops"; a printing shop was added later. The first year, floods destroyed the crops, but the second year, students

produced fifty cords of wood, thirty barrels of cider, seven hundred bushels of corn, four hundred of potatoes, one hundred of oats, twenty-five of beans, thirty tons of hay, and eighty bushels of onions—the whole valued at $1000 [equivalent to $29,528 in 2024].

"Religious fervor was kept at a white heat. Studies were interrupted to hold protracted revival meetings." Gale replaced the study of Latin and Classical Greek with Hebrew and Biblical Greek. This change, especially regarding Latin, was vigorously opposed by the Presbyterian Presbytery, with financial consequences. According to a modern scholar, studying at Oneida at this time "required substantial emotional stability."

The charismatic, influential Christian revivalist Charles Finney had been a student of Gale prior to Oneida, and Gale sought at Oneida to train students "as emissaries of the new revivalism". "The result was a large crop of crusaders and reformers, who were later turned loose to fulminate against drink, slavery, Sabbath breaking, [and] irreligion, some of whom became famous in their proseletyzing fields."