Johns Hopkins University

• 1. Introduction

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  Johns Hopkins University opened its doors in Baltimore in 1876 with a radical proposition: that research and teaching were not opposites but a single, inseparable act. That idea, imported from Germany and shaped by a Quaker merchant's deathbed gift, would transform how Americans understood a university. What did it mean to build an institution around the discovery of new knowledge rather than the transmission of old? Who were the people that made it work, and at what cost? And why, a century and a half later, does Hopkins still sit at the center of so many of the country's largest arguments, from pandemic data to federal funding to police on campus?

• 2. A Merchant's Bequest

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  Johns Hopkins died in 1873, a childless bachelor who had made his fortune largely through the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. His will directed $7 million toward two institutions: a hospital and a university in the city where he had lived. At the time, that sum represented the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States, and the endowment was the largest in America.

  The name itself carries a quietly unusual origin. The philanthropist's first name came from the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who had married a man named Gerard Hopkins. Their son was named Johns Hopkins, and that name passed down through generations until it landed on the man who would give it to a university.

  Hopkins's relationship to slavery has been the subject of genuine historical dispute. Research commissioned by the university in 2020, led by historian Martha S. Jones, cited census records from 1840 and 1850 as evidence that people recorded as enslaved were associated with his household. Later scholarship pushed back, pointing to the limitations of census data and the absence of corroborating tax or probate records that would directly link Hopkins to slaveholding.

  The railroad stocks that were supposed to generate the endowment's operating income became nearly worthless shortly after his death. That collapse meant the university could not build on the Clifton estate Hopkins had envisioned. It opened instead in rented space in Downtown Baltimore, a practical constraint that delayed his original plans by decades.

• 3. Gilman's Experiment

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  Daniel Coit Gilman, a Yale-educated scholar who had led the University of California at Berkeley before coming to Baltimore, was inaugurated as the first president of Johns Hopkins on the 22nd of February, 1876. He had spent time visiting the University of Freiburg and other German universities in preparation, and he arrived with a clear intellectual model: merge original research with advanced teaching, rather than treat them as competing demands.

  Gilman dismissed the premise that great teachers and great researchers could not be the same people. "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 prove it, he recruited internationally. The faculty he assembled in those early years included the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, the biologist H. Newell Martin, the physicist Henry Augustus Rowland (who would become the first president of the American Physical Society), classical scholars Basil Gildersleeve and Charles D. Morris, economist Richard T. Ely, and chemist Ira Remsen.

  Gilman's emphasis fell on graduate education and faculty research. Hopkins quickly became the national model for doctoral programs and hosted a constellation of scholarly journals and associations. The Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, is still the oldest American university press in continuous operation.

  The completion of Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889 and the medical school in 1893 pulled world-class clinical faculty to Baltimore. William Osler, William Halsted, Howard Kelly, and William Welch each joined during this period, and together they helped define what academic medicine in America would look like. The school of medicine was the country's first to admit women on equal terms with men and to require a bachelor's degree for entry, both conditions driven by Mary E. Garrett, who had raised the funds to endow the school at Gilman's direct request.

• 4. From Downtown to Homewood

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  By the early 20th century, the university had outgrown its rented quarters in Downtown Baltimore. Developing the Clifton estate that Hopkins had originally stipulated in his will proved too expensive, and 30 acres of it had to be sold to the city as public park. A group of prominent Baltimoreans found a solution by acquiring the Homewood Estate in north Baltimore. On the 22nd of February, 1902, that land was formally transferred to the university.

  The estate had originally been the gift of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, to his son Charles Carroll Jr. The 1801 Homewood House still stands on campus and serves as a museum. Its Federal-style brick and marble became the architectural template for the campus that grew around it, a deliberate departure from the Collegiate Gothic look of older American universities.

  The flagship academic building, Gilman Hall, was completed in 1915. The School of Engineering moved to Homewood in the fall of 1914, and the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences followed in 1916. The land cleared for the campus also contributed to the creation of the public Wyman Park and the Baltimore Museum of Art, shaping the surrounding neighborhood in ways that persist today.

  A campus legend grew up around Gilman Hall almost immediately. A seal embedded in the foyer floor carries the tradition that any enrolled student who steps on it will never graduate. The seal has since been fenced off.

• 5. Research Without Ceiling

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  In fiscal year 2020, Johns Hopkins spent nearly $3.1 billion on research, a figure that made it the leading research university in the United States for over 40 consecutive years. That dominance did not arrive overnight. In FY 2002, Hopkins became the first university to cross the $1 billion threshold in total research spending, and by FY 2008 the figure had grown to $1.68 billion.

  Much of that spending flows through the Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, which has served as a major government defense contractor since 1942. APL has designed, built, and flown spacecraft to the asteroid Eros and to the planets Mercury and Pluto. It has also developed more than 100 biomedical devices, many of them in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

  In 2000, Hopkins received $95.4 million in NASA research grants, making it that year's leading recipient of NASA research and development funding. Between 1999 and 2009, the university produced 54,022 papers and attracted nearly 1,222,166 citations, ranking third globally in total citations across 22 fields.

  A $250 million gift from Michael Bloomberg in 2013 established the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships, a program designed to recruit fifty researchers from around the world into joint appointments across the university's nine divisions. As of the most recent count, thirty-two Bloomberg Distinguished Professors hold appointments, among them three Nobel Laureates. As of March 2025-34 Nobel Prize winners in total have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins as students, faculty, or researchers. The most recent are Gregg Semenza and William G. Kaelin.

• 6. Civil Rights and Access

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  Johns Hopkins Hopkins was known as a prominent abolitionist and supporter of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. After his death, reports linked his convictions to the enrollment of Kelly Miller, a graduate student in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, as the university's first African-American student. Despite that beginning, the institution later adopted policies closer to Baltimore's prevailing "separate but equal" norms. The first Black undergraduate entered the school in 1945. Black graduate students were not admitted until 1967.

  In 1944, African-American laboratory supervisor Vivien Thomas played an instrumental role in developing and carrying out the first successful blue baby operation, a surgical procedure to correct a heart defect that killed infants who had too little oxygen in their blood. That story was later told in the 2004 HBO film Something the Lord Made.

  The battle over admitting women to the medical school was fought and won by a coalition of women connected to the university's own trustees: Mary E. Garrett, M. Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth King, and Julia Rogers. They raised the funds needed to open the school and extracted a commitment from university officials that women would be admitted on the same terms as men. Christine Ladd-Franklin had earned what should have been a Hopkins PhD in mathematics in 1882, but the trustees refused to grant it. Florence Bascomb received the university's first formally awarded female PhD in 1893. Undergraduate coeducation was not adopted until October 1969.

  On the 18th of November, 2018, alumnus Michael Bloomberg announced a gift of $1.8 billion to the university, the largest private donation in modern history to an institution of higher education, bringing his total contributions to more than $3.3 billion. The gift enabled Hopkins to practice need-blind admission and cover the full financial need of every admitted student. In November 2025, the university announced that students from families earning under $200,000 would pay no tuition, with those under $100,000 also having fees and living expenses covered.

• 7. Campus Conflict and Federal Pressure

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  In 2019, Johns Hopkins sought and received permission from the Maryland General Assembly to establish its own private police force to patrol the three Baltimore campuses. The proposal drew swift opposition from students, faculty, and surrounding community associations. The Homewood Faculty Assembly unanimously passed a resolution raising concerns about accountability. Protests escalated into a month-long sit-in and occupation of Garland Hall, the university's administrative building, which ended when Baltimore Police surrounded the building and arrested participants in May 2019.

  Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, thousands of people connected to the university signed petitions calling for the department to be abandoned. University president Ronald J. Daniels announced in June 2020 that development of the department would be paused for at least two years. The Maryland General Assembly had also required, as part of its authorization, a civilian accountability board and a memorandum of understanding with the Baltimore Police Department. A draft of that MOU was released for public comment in September 2022. The finalized version, issued in December 2022, gives the Johns Hopkins Police Department primary jurisdiction over university-controlled property and adjacent public areas. Officer recruitment began in spring 2024, and active patrols started in summer 2024.

  Beginning in January 2025, federal funding cuts targeting the U.S. Agency for International Development cost Johns Hopkins $800 million in grants and led to the layoff of thousands of employees. By September 2025, the university reported a roughly 40% decline in National Institutes of Health grants compared to the previous year and the termination of more than 80 existing grants, reducing its research portfolio by $500 million. When the Trump administration announced a cap of 15% on indirect research costs, a change that would have reduced the university's annual research funding by $300 million, Johns Hopkins joined 40 other universities in a lawsuit that successfully challenged the move.