The Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University:

commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named after its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur, abolitionist, and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest—of which half financed the establishment of The Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States at the time.Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution's first president on February 22, 1876,led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research.

Johns Hopkins is organized into ten divisions on campuses in Maryland and Washington, D.C. with international centers in Italy, China, and Singapore. The two undergraduate divisions, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood. The medical school, the nursing school, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health are located on the Medical Institutions campus in East Baltimore. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the education school, the Carey Business School, and various other facilities.

The first research university in the Western Hemisphere and one of the founding members of the American Association of Universities, Johns Hopkins has been ranked among the world’s top universities throughout its history. It has topped rankings of U.S. academic institutions by National Science Foundation in terms of total scientific, medical, and engineering research and development for 31 consecutive years.Johns Hopkins is also among the top 20 in the tables of ARWU, QS, THE and U.S. News (Global),and ranked 12th in the U.S. News' national ranking for 2014. Over the course of almost 140 years, 36 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins (the first was U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who received his Ph.D. in history and political science from the university). Founded in 1883, the Blue Jays men’s lacrosse team has captured 44 national titles and joined the Big Ten Conference as an affiliate member in 2014.

HISTORY

On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins, a Quaker entrepreneur and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (approximately $137802778 with inflation) to fund a hospital and university in Baltimore, Maryland. At that time this fortune, generated primarily from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States.

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."

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.