Johns Hopkins University (JHU), often abbreviated as Hopkins, is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Incorporated in 1867 and opened in 1876 based on the European research institution model, Johns Hopkins is considered to be the first research university in the U.S.
The university was named for its first benefactor, the American businessman and Quaker philanthropist Johns Hopkins. Hopkins's $7 million bequest (equivalent to $ in ) to establish the university and the affiliated Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore was the largest philanthropic gift in U.S. history up to that time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as Johns Hopkins's first president on February 22, 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research. In 1900, Johns Hopkins became a founding member of the Association of American Universities. The School of Medicine, established in 1893, has achieved international recognition for its pioneering biomedical research.
The university consists of ten academic divisions mostly divided among four campuses in Baltimore, with some graduate campuses in Italy, China, and Washington, D.C. The university's two undergraduate divisions, the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus adjacent to Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood. The School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and Bloomberg School of Public Health are located on the medical campus in East Baltimore, alongside Johns Hopkins Hospital. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood, Applied Physics Laboratory in Howard County, School of Advanced International Studies, School of Education, and Carey Business School.
Founded in 1883, the Johns Hopkins Blue Jays men's lacrosse team, which is an affiliate member in the Big Ten Conference, has won 44 national titles. The university's other sports teams compete in Division III of the NCAA, where they are members of the Centennial Conference.
History Philanthropic beginnings and foundation
On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins, a Quaker businessman and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (equivalent to $ in ) to fund a hospital and university in Baltimore.
At the time, this donation, generated primarily from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States, and endowment was then the largest in America.
Hopkins’s relationship to slavery has been the subject of historical debate. In 2020, research commissioned by the university, and led by historian Martha S. Jones, cited 1840 and 1850 census records as evidence that individuals recorded as enslaved were his property and associated with his household. Subsequent scholarship has questioned this interpretation, noting the limitations of census data, particularly the ambiguity of the 1850 slave schedule, and the absence of corroborating documentation such as tax or probate records linking Hopkins directly to slaveholding.
The first name of philanthropist Johns Hopkins comes from the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who married Gerard Hopkins. They named last their son Johns Hopkins, who named his 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 Pittburgh".
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. 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. 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.
19th century
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. Gilman, a Yale-educated scholar, had been serving as president of the University of California, Berkeley prior to this appointment. 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.
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; 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 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. 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." 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.
20th century
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 of the estate had to be sold to the city as public park. A solution was achieved by a team of prominent locals who acquired the estate in north Baltimore known as the Homewood Estate. 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 Zanvyl Krieger 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 .
Prior to becoming the main Johns Hopkins campus, the Homewood estate had initially been the gift of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, a 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 versus 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 nation's first school of public health.
Since the 1910s, Johns Hopkins University has famously been a "fertile cradle" to Arthur Lovejoy's history of ideas.
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.
Professional schools of international affairs and music were established in 1950 and 1977, respectively, when the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore were incorporated into the university.
21st century
The early decades of the 21st century saw expansion across the university's institutions in both physical and population sizes. Notably, a planned 88-acre expansion to the medical campus began in 2013. Completed construction on the Homewood campus has included a new biomedical engineering building in the Johns Hopkins University Department of Biomedical Engineering, a new library, a new biology wing, an extensive renovation of the flagship Gilman Hall, and the reconstruction of the main university entrance.
These years also brought about the rapid development of the university's professional schools of education and business. From 1999 until 2007, these disciplines had been joined within the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education (SPSBE), itself a reshuffling of several earlier ventures. The 2007 split, combined with new funding and leadership initiatives, has led to the simultaneous emergence of the Johns Hopkins School of Education and the Carey Business School.On November 18, 2018, it was announced that Michael Bloomberg would make a donation to his alma mater of $1.8 billion, marking the largest private donation in modern history to an institution of higher education and bringing Bloomberg's total contribution to the school in excess of $3.3 billion. Bloomberg's $1.8 billion gift allows the school to practice need-blind admission and meet the full financial need of admitted students.
In January 2019, the university announced an agreement to purchase the Newseum, located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, in the heart of Washington, D.C., with plans to locate all of its Washington, D.C.–based graduate programs there. In an interview with The Atlantic, the president of Johns Hopkins stated that, "the purchase is an opportunity to position the university, literally, to better contribute its expertise to national- and international-policy discussions."