Johns Hopkins University

Philanthropic beginnings and foundation Further information: Humboldtian model of higher education and Johns Hopkins Johns Hopkins , the university's namesake whose philanthropic gift in 1873 established the university, Johns Hopkins Hospital , and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine The university model of Heidelberg University in Heidelberg , Germany, was replicated in the founding of Johns Hopkins University On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins , a Quaker entrepreneur and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (equivalent to $ 166 million in 2024 ) [ 11 ] to fund a hospital and university in Baltimore . [ 25 ] At the time, this donation, generated primarily from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad , [ 26 ] was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States, [ 12 ] and endowment was then the largest in America. [ 13 ] Until 2020, Hopkins was assumed to be a fervent abolitionist , until research done by the school into his United States Census records revealed he claimed to own at least five household slaves in the 1840 and 1850 decennial censuses. [ 27 ] [ 28 ] The first name of philanthropist Johns Hopkins comes from the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who married Gerard Hopkins. [ 26 ] They named their son Johns Hopkins, who named his own son Samuel Hopkins. Samuel named one of his sons for his father, and that son became the university's benefactor. Milton Eisenhower , a former university president, once spoke at a convention in Pittsburgh where the master of ceremonies introduced him as "President of John Hopkins". Eisenhower retorted that he was "glad to be here in Pitt burgh". [ 29 ] The original board opted for an entirely novel university model dedicated to the discovery of knowledge at an advanced level, extending that of contemporary Germany. [ 30 ] Building on the Humboldtian model of higher education , the German education model of Wilhelm von Humboldt , it became dedicated to research.

It was especially Heidelberg University and its long academic research history on which the new institution tried to model itself. [ 30 ] [ failed verification ] Johns Hopkins thereby became the model of the modern research university in the United States. Its success eventually shifted higher education in the United States from a focus on teaching revealed and/or applied knowledge to the scientific discovery of new knowledge. [ 31 ] Wikisource has the text of a 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article about the Early History .

Further information: Daniel Coit Gilman , Johns Hopkins Hospital , Johns Hopkins School of Medicine , and Johns Hopkins University Press Daniel Coit Gilman , the first president of Johns Hopkins University The trustees worked alongside four notable university presidents, Charles William Eliot of Harvard University , Andrew D. White of Cornell University , Noah Porter of Yale College , and James B. Angell of University of Michigan . They each supported Daniel Coit Gilman to lead the new university and he became the university's first president. [ 32 ] Gilman, a Yale -educated scholar, had been serving as president of the University of California, Berkeley prior to this appointment. [ 32 ] In preparation for the university's founding, Daniel Coit Gilman visited University of Freiburg and other German universities. Gilman launched what many at the time considered an audacious and unprecedented academic experiment to merge teaching and research. He dismissed the idea that the two were mutually exclusive: "The best teachers are usually those who are free, competent and willing to make original researches in the library and the laboratory," he stated. [ 33 ] Hopkins Hall on the original Downtown Baltimore campus, c. 1885 To implement his plan, Gilman recruited internationally known researchers including the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester ; the biologist H. Newell Martin ; the physicist Henry Augustus Rowland , the first president of the American Physical Society , the classical scholars Basil Gildersleeve , and Charles D. Morris; [ 34 ] the economist Richard T. Ely ; and the chemist Ira Remsen , who became the second president of the university in 1901. [ 35 ] Gilman focused on the expansion of graduate education and support of faculty research. The new university fused advanced scholarship with such professional schools as medicine and engineering.

Hopkins became the national trendsetter in doctoral programs and the host for numerous scholarly journals and associations. [ 36 ] The Johns Hopkins University Press , founded in 1878, is the oldest American university press in continuous operation. [ 37 ] Johns Hopkins Hospital , c. 1880s–1890s With the completion of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889 and the medical school in 1893, the university's research-focused mode of instruction soon began attracting world-renowned faculty members who would become major figures in the emerging field of academic medicine, including William Osler , William Halsted , Howard Kelly , and William Welch . [ 38 ] During this period the university further made history by becoming the first medical school to admit women on an equal basis with men and to require a Bachelor's degree , based on the efforts of Mary E. Garrett , who had endowed the school at Gilman's request. [ 39 ] The school of medicine was America's first coeducational, graduate-level medical school, and became a prototype for academic medicine that emphasized bedside learning, research projects, and laboratory training. In his will and in his instructions to the trustees of the university and the hospital, Hopkins requested that both institutions be built upon the vast grounds of his Baltimore estate, Clifton. When Gilman assumed the presidency, he decided that it would be best to use the university's endowment for recruiting faculty and students, deciding to, as it has been paraphrased, "build men, not buildings." [ 40 ] In his will Hopkins stipulated that none of his endowment should be used for construction; only interest on the principal could be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, stocks in The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad , which would have generated most of the interest, became virtually worthless soon after Hopkins's death. The university's first home was thus in Downtown Baltimore, delaying plans to site the university in Clifton. [ 25 ]