The story
Founded by Daniel Coit Gilman in 1876.1
Philanthropic beginnings and foundation
On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins, a Quaker businessman and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (equivalent to $166 million in 2024) 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.
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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 30 acres (12 ha) 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 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, 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."
In late 2019, the university's Coronavirus Research Center began tracking worldwide cases of the COVID-19 pandemic by compiling data from hundreds of sources around the world. This led to the university becoming one of the most cited sources for data about the pandemic.
In November 2025, following the $1.8 billion gift from alumnus Michael Bloomberg in 2018, the university announced tuition-free plans, for current students in the spring 2026 semester and for new enrollees in the 2026-27 year who were from families earning less than $200,000, in support of making education available to all students based on merit and not means, and citing U.S. Census data showing that around 85% of American households would be eligible. For students from families earning under $100,000, additional aid would cover tuition, fees and living expenses, thus requiring no support from their families.
Johns Hopkins Police Department
In 2019, Johns Hopkins sought and received permission from the Maryland General Assembly to create a private police force to patrol in and around the three Baltimore campuses. The proposal generated opposition from students, faculty, and surrounding community associations. A resolution expressing concerns and raising questions about accountability and oversight of the proposed police department was unanimously passed by the Homewood Faculty Assembly. Protests culminated in a month-long sit-in and building occupation at Garland Hall, the university's administrative building, which ended after Baltimore Police surrounded the building and arrested the participants in May 2019.
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, thousands of faculty, staff, students, and community members petitioned the university to reconsider the department. In June 2020, university president Ronald J. Daniels announced a pause of at least two years in the development and implementation of the department.
As part of the agreement with the university on authorizing the police force, the Maryland General Assembly required the creation of a civilian accountability board and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Baltimore Police Department. A draft MOU was released for public comment in September 2022 amidst continued protest and criticism regarding the university's engagement with the community. The finalized MOU, issued in December 2022, grants the Johns Hopkins Police Department primary jurisdiction over university-controlled property and adjacent public areas. Officer recruitment and training began in spring 2024, with active patrols commencing in summer 2024.
Second Trump Administration
Beginning in January 2025, federal funding cuts by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) caused Johns Hopkins to lose $800 million in grants and forced the university to lay off thousands of employees and cancel research projects. In September, the university reported a total decline in research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by approximately 40% compared to the previous year and the termination of more than 80 existing grants, reducing the value of the university's research portfolio by $500 million. In response to these challenges, the university imposed a hiring freeze on new staff members, limited discretionary spending, and indefinitely paused wage increases for employees. After the Trump administration announced it would impose a cap of 15% on indirect or "overhead" research costs, which would reduce the university's research funding by $300 million annually, Johns Hopkins joined 40 other universities in a successful lawsuit seeking to reverse the change.
In February 2025, Leo Terrell, the head of the Trump administration's Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, announced that he would investigate Johns Hopkins University as part of the Department of Justice's broader investigation into antisemitism on college campuses. In July 2025, America First Legal founder, the Trump adviser and white nationalist Stephen Miller, requested that the assistant attorney general Harmeet K Dhillon and the justice department investigate "illegal" diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and "a discriminatory DEI regime as a core institutional mandate" in the university.
African-Americans
Hopkins was a prominent abolitionist who supported Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. After his death, reports said his conviction and Quaker beliefs were decisive factors in enrolling Hopkins's first African-American student, Kelly Miller, a graduate student in physics, astronomy and mathematics. As time passed, the university adopted a "separate but equal" stance more like other Baltimore institutions.
The first black undergraduate entered the school in 1945 and graduate students followed in 1967. James Nabwangu, a British-trained Kenyan, was the first black graduate of the medical school. African-American instructor and laboratory supervisor Vivien Thomas was instrumental in developing and conducting the first successful blue baby operation in 1944. Despite such cases, racial diversity did not become commonplace at Johns Hopkins institutions until the 1960s and 1970s.
Women
Hopkins's most well-known battle for women's rights was the one led by daughters of trustees of the university; Mary E. Garrett, M. Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth King, and Julia Rogers. They donated and raised the funds needed to open the medical school, and required Hopkins's officials to agree to their stipulation that women would be admitted. The nursing school opened in 1889 and accepted women and men as students. Other graduate schools were later opened to women by president Ira Remsen in 1907. Christine Ladd-Franklin was the first woman to earn a PhD at Hopkins, in mathematics in 1882. The trustees denied her the degree for decades and refused to change the policy about admitting women. In 1893, Florence Bascomb became the university's first female PhD. The decision to admit women at undergraduate level was not considered until the late 1960s and was eventually adopted in October 1969. As of 2009–2010, the undergraduate population was 47% female and 53% male. In 2020, the undergraduate population of Hopkins was 53% female.
Freedom of speech
On September 5, 2013, cryptographer and Johns Hopkins university professor Matthew Green posted a blog entitled, "On the NSA", in which he contributed to the ongoing debate regarding the role of NIST and NSA in formulating U.S. cryptography standards. On September 9, 2013, Green received a take-down request for the "On the NSA" blog from interim Dean Andrew Douglas from the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering. The request cited concerns that the blog had links to sensitive material. The blog linked to already published news articles from The Guardian, The New York Times, and ProPublica.org. Douglas subsequently issued a personal on-line apology to Green. The event raised concern over the future of academic freedom of speech within the cryptologic research community.
From Wikipedia’s article on Johns Hopkins University, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3