History[edit]
The philanthropist and the founding[edit]
See also: Johns Hopkins' Philanthropy and Legacy
On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins, a Quaker entrepreneur and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (between $140 million to $1.6 billion in 2011 dollars, by varying estimates) to fund a hospital and university in Baltimore, Maryland.[15] At that time this fortune, generated primarily from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,[16] was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States.[6]
The first name of philanthropist Johns Hopkins is the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who married Gerard Hopkins. They named their son Johns Hopkins, who named his own son Samuel Hopkins. Samuel named one of his sons after his father and that son would be 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 Pittburgh."[17]
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. 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. The founders intended the university to be national in scope to strengthen ties across a divided country in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The university's inaugural date was symbolic: 1876 was the nation's centennial year and February 22 was George Washington's birthday.
 | Wikisource has the text of a1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article about the Early History. |
Early years and Daniel Coit Gilman[edit]
The trustees worked alongside three notable university presidents - Charles W. Eliot of Harvard, Andrew D. White of Cornell, and James B. Angell of Michigan – who each vouched for Daniel Coit Gilman to lead the new University as its first president. Gilman, a Yale-educated scholar, had been serving as president of the University of California prior to this appointment. In preparation for the university's founding, Gilman visitedUniversity of Freiburg and other German universities. Johns Hopkins would become the first American university committed to research by the German education model of Alexander von Humboldt.[18]
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. To implement his plan, Gilman recruited internationally known luminaries such as the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester; the biologist H. Newell Martin; the physicist Henry A. Rowland (the first president of the American Physical Society), the classical scholars Basil Gildersleeve and Charles D. Morris;[19] the economist Richard T. Ely; and the chemist Ira Remsen, who became the second president of the university in 1901.
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. The Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, is the oldest American university press in continuous operation.
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. During this period Hopkins made more history by becoming the first medical school to admit women on an equal basis with men and to require a Bachelors degree, based on the efforts of Mary E. Garrett, who had endowed the school at Gilman's request. 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 "build men, not buildings." 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. This decision became the only major criticism of Gilman's presidency.
Move to Homewood and early 20th century history[edit]
In the early 20th century the university outgrew its buildings and the trustees began to search for a new home. Developing Clifton for the university was too costly, and so the estate was sold as a public park. A solution was achieved by a team of prominent locals who acquired the estate in north Baltimore known as Homewood. On February 22, 1902, this land was formally transferred to the university. The flagship building, Gilman Hall, was completed in 1915. The School of Engineering relocated in Fall of 1914 and the School of Arts and Sciences followed in 1916. These decades saw the ceding of lands by the university for the public Wyman Park and Wyman Park Dell and the Baltimore Museum of Art, coalescing in the contemporary area of 140 acres (57 ha).
Prior to becoming the main Johns Hopkins campus, the Homewood estate had initially been the gift of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a Maryland planter and signer of the Declaration of Independence, to his son Charles Carroll Jr. The original structure, the 1801 Homewood House, still stands and serves as an on-campus museum. The brick and marble Federal style of Homewood House became the architectural inspiration for much of the university campus. This fact explains the distinctively local flavour of the campus as compared to the Collegiate Gothic style of other historic American universities.
In 1909, the university was among the first to start adult continuing education programs and in 1916 it founded the US' first school of public health.
Since the 1910s, Johns Hopkins University has famously been a "fertile cradle" to Arthur Lovejoy's history of ideas.[20]
| Name | Term |
|---|---|
| Daniel Coit Gilman | May 1875 – August 1901 |
| Ira Remsen | September 1901 – January 1913 |
| Frank Goodnow | October 1914 – June 1929 |
| Joseph Sweetman Ames | July 1929 – June 1935 |
| Isaiah Bowman | July 1935 – December 1948 |
| Detlev Bronk | January 1949 – August 1953 |
| Lowell Reed | September 1953 – June 1956 |
| Milton S. Eisenhower | July 1956 – June 1967 |
| Lincoln Gordon | July 1967 – March 1971 |
| Milton S. Eisenhower | March 1971 – January 1972 |
| Steven Muller | February 1972 – June 1990 |
| William C. Richardson | July 1990 – July 1995 |
| Daniel Nathans | June 1995 – August 1996 |
| William R. Brody | August 1996 – February 2009 |
| Ronald J. Daniels | March 2009–Present |
The post-war era[edit]
Since 1942, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has served as a major governmental defense contractor. In tandem with on-campus research, Johns Hopkins has every year since 1979 had the highest federal research funding of any American university.
Programs in international studies and the performing arts were established in 1950 and 1977 when the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore became divisions of the university.
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