The story
Founded by Benjamin Franklin, James Logan, John Inglis, Philip Syng, Phineas Bond, Tench Francis, Sr., Thomas Lawrence, William Allen, William Shippen and William Shippen on Nov 14, 1740.1
18th century
In 1740, a group of Philadelphians organized to build a preaching hall for the traveling Anglican evangelist George Whitefield. Designed and constructed by Edmund Woolley, it was the largest building in Philadelphia at the time and drew thousands of attendees. In the fall of 1749, Benjamin Franklin circulated a pamphlet, "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania," outlining his vision for a "Public Academy of Philadelphia". On June 16, 1755, the College of Philadelphia was chartered, adding undergraduate instruction. Penn identifies as the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, a claim contested by Princeton and Columbia because the College of Philadelphia was not chartered until 1755 and its first board of trustees did not convene until 1749.
In the 1750s, roughly 40 percent of Penn students needed lodging since they came from areas in the British North American colonies that were too far to commute, or were international students. Before the completion of the first dormitory in 1765, out-of-town students were typically placed with faculty or in boarding houses. Jonathan and Philip Gayienquitioga, two brothers of the Mohawk Nation, were recruited by Franklin to attend the Academy of Philadelphia in 1755, making them the first Native Americans at Penn.
The 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both undergraduate and professional education. Moses Levy, the first Jewish student, enrolled in 1769. The first dormitory opened in 1765 under Penn professor Ebenezer Kinnersley, who collaborated with Franklin on studies of electricity. Kinnersley served as steward of the dormitory, with disciplinary authority over the students. Many students still sought housing elsewhere for greater personal freedom, and in 1775 the trustees voted to lease the dormitory to a private family who would board students at lower cost.
When the British were forced out of Philadelphia during the Philadelphia campaign during the American Revolutionary War, College Hall, the college's only building at the time, served as the temporary meeting site of the Second Continental Congress from July 7 to 20, 1778, briefly making Penn's campus one of the early capitals of the United States. In 1779, distrusting Provost William Smith's Loyalist sympathies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a new institution, renamed the University of the State of Pennsylvania in 1785. This was the first American institution of higher learning to take the name "University". Smith continued operating an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia, and in 1791 the legislature issued a new charter merging the two institutions into the University of Pennsylvania, with twelve men from each institution serving on the new board of trustees.
19th century
In 1802, the university moved to the unused Presidential Mansion at Ninth and Market Streets, a building both George Washington and John Adams had declined to occupy when Philadelphia was the nation's capital. Among the faculty in 1807 was Benjamin Rush, a professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice who was also a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, and surgeon general of the Continental Army.
Classes were held in the mansion until 1829, when it was demolished. Architect William Strickland designed twin buildings on the same site, College Hall and Medical Hall (both 1829–1830), which formed the core of the Ninth Street Campus. In 1849, with the founding of Penn's Eta chapter of Delta Phi, Penn students began establishing residential fraternity houses. Because Penn had limited housing near campus and students came from across the country, many chose fraternity housing rather than university-owned residences. Early fraternities included Delta Phi, Zeta Psi, Phi Kappa Sigma, and Delta Psi, all located within walking distance of the Ninth Street campus.
After more than a century in downtown Philadelphia, the campus moved across the Schuylkill River to property purchased from the Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, in an area now known as University City. The new campus and its associated fraternities centered on the intersection of Woodland Avenue, 36th Street, and Locust Street. By 1891, the university had at least 17 fraternities. Penn opened the nation's first university teaching hospital in 1874; the Wharton School, the world's first collegiate business school, in 1881; the first American student union building, Houston Hall, in 1896; and the only school of veterinary medicine in the United States to originate directly from a medical school, in 1884.
In 1879, William Adger, James Brister, and Nathan Francis Mossell became the first African Americans to enroll at Penn. Adger was the first to graduate from the college (1883), while Brister, who graduated from the School of Dental Medicine in 1881, was the first to earn a degree at Penn. Lewis Baxter Moore became the first African American to earn a PhD at Penn in 1896; his doctorate was in classics. The first women enrolled at Penn were Gertrude Klein Pierce and Anna Lockhart Flanigen, both physicians, admitted in October 1876 as "special students" at the Towne Scientific School to study chemistry. In 1878 they received certificates of proficiency in chemistry and continued postgraduate studies in organic chemistry with professor (later provost) Edgar Fahs Smith. In 1880, Mary Alice Bennett and Anna H. Johnson were the first women to enroll in a Penn degree-granting program; Bennett was the first woman to receive a degree from Penn, a PhD.
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From its founding through the late 19th century, Penn largely lacked university-owned housing, and a significant portion of the undergraduate population commuted from the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The medical school, with roughly half the students, was an exception, attracting a more geographically diverse population. Construction of the Quadrangle Dormitories began in 1895, accommodating Penn's growth in acreage, buildings, and student population.
20th century
During the early 20th century, Penn worked to attract students from around the globe. In 1910, Penn's first director of publicity created a recruiting brochure translated into Spanish, with approximately 10,000 copies circulated throughout Latin America. That same year, the Penn-affiliated Cosmopolitan Club began an annual "smoker" that drew students from 40 nations.
In 1911, because Philadelphia's segregation-era housing regulations made it difficult to house international students, the Christian Association at the University of Pennsylvania hired its first Foreign Mission Secretary, Reverend Alpheus Waldo Stevenson. The Christian Association purchased 3905 Spruce Street adjacent to campus, which officially opened on January 1, 1918, as the International Students' House. By 1921, Penn's enrollment had grown to 12,000 students, including 253 from at least fifty foreign countries and territories. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, who earned a degree at Penn's School of Education in 1918 and a master's in economics in 1919, was awarded the Francis Sergeant Pepper fellowship and in 1921 became the first African-American woman in the United States to earn a PhD from an American university. She was also the first African-American woman admitted to and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School (1927), and the first to serve as an editor of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Until 1930, Penn's chief academic and business officer was its Provost. In 1930, Penn's Board combined the two positions, creating the office of President, and elected Thomas Sovereign Gates, a Philadelphia banker who had served as a director of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Baldwin Locomotive Company, and as chairman of Penn's endowment fund. From 1930 to 1966, there were 54 documented Rowbottom riots, a student tradition that included car smashing and panty raids. After 1966, five additional Rowbottoms occurred, the last in 1980. By 1931, first-year students were required to live in the quadrangle unless they received permission to live with family. Even so, the undergraduate schools continued to have a large commuting population well into the post-World War II period; as late as the 1940s, two-thirds of Penn's women students were commuters.George William McClelland, who received his bachelor's, master's and PhD all from Penn, served from 1944 to 1948 as Penn's second president. During his tenure, the ENIAC, the world's first all-electronic digital computer, was completed at Penn in 1946. Former Minnesota governor and perennial presidential candidate Harold Stassen served as Penn's third president from 1948 to 1953. The trustees chose Stassen in part for his reputation as a fundraiser, as Penn was in a financial crisis. Stassen helped raise funds, cut costs, focused resources on selected departments, continued McClelland's campus expansion, and reformed intercollegiate athletics to conform to the new Ivy League. He contested the NCAA's prohibition on televising football games by entering a $200,000 contract with ABC, but backed down after the NCAA threatened to expel Penn.
After World War II, a surge of students enrolling under the G.I. Bill prompted the university to launch a capital spending program to overhaul its campus, including student housing. By 1961, 79 percent of male undergraduates and 57 percent of female undergraduates lived on campus. In 1965, Penn students learned that the university was sponsoring research projects for the United States' chemical and biological weapons program. Students petitioned Penn's fourth president, Gaylord Harnwell (1954–1971), to halt the program, calling it incompatible with an academic institution. Faculty voted on November 4, 1965, to re-examine the university agency responsible for the project. The first openly LGBTQ+ organization funded by Penn was formed in 1972 by Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and Penn alumnus (College Class of 1966), who created the Gay Coffee Hour. The group met weekly on campus, was open to non-students, and served as an alternative to gay bars for gay people of all ages.
Vartan Gregorian, who joined the Penn faculty in 1972 and served as the 23rd provost from January 1979 to October 1980, was widely considered the likely successor to become Penn's sixth president. The trustees instead chose Sheldon Hackney, who served as president from 1981 through 1993.
In 1983, members of the Animal Liberation Front broke into the Head Injury Clinical Research Laboratory at the School of Medicine and stole research tapes. The footage was edited by PETA into the film Unnecessary Fuss, and after media coverage and pressure from animal-rights activists, the project was shut down. Penn drew national attention in 1993 for the water buffalo incident, in which a student who told a group of mostly Black female students to "shut up, you water buffalo" was charged with violating the university's racial harassment policy.
Dr. Claire M. Fagin served as interim president from July 1, 1993, to June 30, 1994, becoming one of the first women to serve as president of an Ivy League university. Judith Rodin, who served from 1994 to 2004, was the first permanent female president of an Ivy League university. During her presidency, Penn's fundraising and endowment grew, the university launched a community renewal program, and admissions selectivity increased. Rodin's administration encouraged revitalization in University City and West Philadelphia through public safety initiatives, Wharton School alliances for small businesses, the development of buildings and streetscapes oriented toward the surrounding community, and the establishment of a university-led partnership school, the Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School.
21st century
In 2004, Amy Gutmann succeeded Judith Rodin as the eighth president of the University of Pennsylvania, serving until 2022, the longest tenure of any Penn president.
In 2022, some called for the tenure of Penn law professor Amy Wax to be revoked after she said the country is "better off with fewer Asians."
In March 2023, Penn announced the first LGBTQ+ scholar-in-residence in the United States, following a $2-million gift.
In October 2023, Penn hosted a Palestinian Writers Conference on campus, sponsored by student groups rather than by the university itself. The event drew criticism from some students, alumni, and members of the media, and contributed to heightened tensions on campus between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups.
After the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, tensions on U.S. university campuses rose. Penn, Harvard, and MIT were cited in the media for vocal student protests against Israeli military strikes in Gaza and for protests following the Hamas attack. Concerns about antisemitism on campus led to congressional hearings.
In a December 6 hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce, when asked for a "yes/no" response to a hypothetical about protesters "calls for the genocide of Jewish people," then-president Liz Magill said it depended on context and on the university's codes of conduct and free-speech guidelines. Critics described her response as equivocating and as tolerating antisemitism. Media pressure mounted, several trustees voiced concerns, and pro-Israel donors threatened to suspend donations.
On December 9, Magill and the chairman of the board of trustees, Scott L. Bok, resigned. Magill remained a tenured member of the Penn Law faculty.
In 2024, pro-Palestinian students participated in nationwide campus protests, including the 2024 University of Pennsylvania pro-Palestine campus encampment.
From Wikipedia’s article on University of Pennsylvania, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5