First university in the United States
Encyclopedia
First university in the United States is a status asserted by more than one U.S. university
. In the U.S. there is no official definition of what entitles an institution to be considered a university versus a college, and the common understanding of "university" has evolved over time.
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
tells the story of the gradual emergence of U.S. "universities" thus:
The issue is further confused by the fact that at time of founding of many of the institutions in question, the U.S. didn't exist as a country. Moreover, questions of institutional continuity sometimes make it difficult to determine the true "age" of any institution.
's website states "The Johns Hopkins University is the first research university in the United States." The distinctively American model of the research university came into being in the 19th century when the German model
of the elite scientific research institute offering specialized graduate training was “grafted” onto the traditional American undergraduate liberal arts college. Following the lead of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, fifteen American institutions came to define the American research university: some of them private, such as Harvard
, Columbia
, Cornell
, Penn
, Princeton
, and Yale
; others, state and land grant universities, such as the University of Michigan
, the University of Wisconsin
, the University of Illinois, and the University of California
; still others, new universities made possible by private bequests, such as Stanford
, Caltech
, MIT
, and the University of Chicago
. These institutions produced the vast majority of US Ph.D.s in the 20th century, so nearly everyone who has attended a college or university in the nation has been taught by faculty who are their graduates.
It is possible to disagree what year should be taken as Harvard's "real" founding date (Harvard uses the earliest possible one, 1636, when the institution was chartered by the Massachusetts Bay Colony
). However, Harvard has operated since 1650 under the same corporation, the "President and Fellows of Harvard College
"; it thus has an unbroken institutional history dating back to the mid seventeenth century (an official Harvard web page for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences http://www.deas.harvard.edu/aboutus/ claims, "Founded in 1636, Harvard is America's oldest university").
As an historical curiosity, a College of Henricopolis or University of Henrico, near Richmond, Virginia
, was chartered in 1618 and construction begun, but the buildings were destroyed with the town during the Indian Massacre of 1622
and not re-erected. At times, the College of William and Mary itself claimed to be the nation's first college "in its antecedents" and technically this is true: the foundational concept of the institution was laid decades before Harvard's founding.
The first charter for an institution of higher learning in Philadelphia was granted in 1755 to the College of Philadelphia, a new undertaking of the Academy of Philadelphia, which had previously taught only secondary students. In 1779, a charter was granted to a separate institution called the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" http://www.upenn.edu/secretary/trustees/statutestrustee.html) which in 1791 was merged with the College of Philadelphia and issued a new charter as the "University of Pennsylvania."
Despite the three charter dates of 1755, 1779 and 1791, the University used for more than a century the founding date of 1749, the year in which founder Benjamin Franklin first convened a board of trustees to organize the new institution. In 1899, the University's board of trustees voted to change the founding date by nine years to 1740, the year in which a group of Philadelphia citizens had begun to raise funds for a grand preaching hall dedicated to traveling evangelist George Whitefield. The hall would include space allocated to a charity school for local orphans, a practice Whitefield suggested in many cities as he toured up and the down the East Coast. The frame of the building was erected, but the citizens discovered that they lacked the funds to furnish the interior chapel or open the charity school.
The unfinished edifice lay vacant for roughly a decade until Franklin's nascent Academy of Philadelphia was looking for space to begin operations and purchased the still unused building in 1750. The Academy of Philadelphia operated a charity school for a few years and this brief period was the basis for the trustees' claims of institutional continuity to the earlier date, as the Academy had assumed the trust of the charity school for local orphans planned but not begun by the original fundraisers of the building.
Parenthetically, the University of Pennsylvania calls itself the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, comparing the legal charter dates of Princeton University (1746) and Columbia University (1754) with the 1740 date in which fundraising had begun for the building it would ultimately purchase in 1750. Secondary instruction began at the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751 and undergraduate education began at the College of Philadelphia in 1756.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Princeton University and Columbia University do not follow the same train of thought in their own institutional histories. Princeton and Columbia consider themselves the fourth and fifth oldest institutions of higher learning in the country, respectively, comparing the three collegiate charter dates of 1746, 1754 and 1755.
(This seemingly minor difference of opinion assumes greater importance in the world of academia. Formal academic processions such as those at graduation ceremonies place visiting dignitaries and other officials in the order of their institution's founding dates, explaining why universities have sometimes used strained rationales to claim and defend dates as early as possible. The University of Pennsylvania changed its founding date in 1899, four years after elite universities in the United States agreed that academic processions would follow this age-based hierarchy. The revision in founding date was the result of a three-year campaign initiated by the University's "Alumni Register" magazine to make it older than Princeton for these processions.)
Even the University of Pennsylvania's own account of its early history agrees that no undergraduate operations existed prior to the 1755 charter granted to the College of Philadelphia. (Officials from the University make it their practice to assert their fourth-oldest place in academic processions, while other American universities which began as secondary schools such as St. John's College in 1696 and the University of Delaware in 1743 choose to march based upon the date they became institutions of higher learning.)
The history of the University of Pennsylvania as the successor organization to the College of Philadelphia and the University of the State of Pennysylvania is detailed by Penn's archives department.
In brief, in 1779 the College of Philadelphia was directed by provost William Smith
. One might have expected it to evolve into the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" but this did not occur. "Since the Revolutionary state legislature felt that the board of trustees led by Provost Smith contained too many suspected loyalist sympathizers, they created a new board of trustees." Thus, the University of the State of Pennsylvania was created de novo. A schism occurred, with an attenuated College of Philadelphia continuing under Dr. Smith's direction. In 1791 Pennsylvania adopted a new state constitution which merged the College of Philadelphia and the University of the State of Pennsylvania into the "University of Pennsylvania," with a board of trustees made up of twelve men from each of the two parent institutions. "It is this institution and this board of trustees that has continued to this day."
(For historical reasons, The College of William and Mary, as Dartmouth College
and Boston College
, has continued to use "college" rather than "university" in its official name.)
William and Mary has a published list of its first graduates (by Swem) available through its library.
(It is not clear from context, either above or in the paragraphs that follow, that the constitution meant to draw any semantic distinction between "college" and "university." )
?
There are two definitions of a university used between the three schools mentioned above. The definition that Penn uses, given by Mark Frazier Lloyd, Director of the University Archives, is "the co-existence, under a single institutional umbrella, of more than one faculty." http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/genlhistory/firstuniv.html The other definition was given by Stacy B. Gould, University Archivist for the College of William and Mary. She stated, "a course of graduate studies was the requisite for the status of university."
One modern dictionary (American Heritage, 4th edition) defines "university:"
Webster's 1913 dictionary says:
1a. A related question: To be a university, must an institution have "university" in its name?
Boston College
, Dartmouth College
, and the College of William and Mary
continue to name themselves as "colleges" for historical reasons, but each of these institutions is, in fact, a university.
2. What does it mean to be the "oldest" university?
The statement "X is the oldest Y," generally refers the length of time that X has existed. (e.g. if Max is the oldest doctor, the reference is to Max's age. If Max is 50 years old, but only a doctor for 7 years, and Cindy is 43 years old and has been a doctor for 15 years, then Max is the older doctor.)
In this instance, the "oldest" university is the one with the earliest date of founding.
Complications arise in the case of institutions, however, because in tangled corporate histories it is not always clear when old and new institutions should be regarded as the same. This arises in the case of Penn: is it correct to say that the College of Philadelphia changed its name to the University of the State of Pennsylvania? Or is it more correct to say that the latter was actually a completely new institution, which later merged with the College of Philadelphia to form the University of Pennsylvania?
3. What does it mean to be the "first" university?
The statement "X is the first Y," generally refers to the date on which X became a Y. (In the above example, Cindy was the first doctor of the two.) By this definition, the "first" university is the one which actually became a university before any of the others, regardless of when it was founded.
To complicate matters, a school which was termed a university in the 18th century would not meet the current criteria for such an institution. As an analog, no doctor who practiced medicine in the 18th century, even having attended medical school at the time and having received a formal education in the field would qualify to receive an M.D. under today's standards, and thus would not be considered a doctor. But it would be incorrect to state that there weren't any doctors in the 18th century. Similarly, it would be incorrect to state that there were no universities in the 18th century.
William and Mary traces its university status to 1779, "the first year of our law school
and simultaneously our medicine and chemistry chair was still filled."
Penn claims to have become a university in 1765, when its medical school was created. Penn was designated a university by the legislature of Pennsylvania (the first such U.S. institution of higher learning, beating William and Mary by only one week,) fourteen years later, in 1779, although the institution did not receive its current name of "University of Pennsylvania" until 1791.
It is slightly more difficult to determine the first university, although Harvard may be disregarded as, by its own admission, it did not become a university until 1780, after both Pennsylvania and William and Mary. Pennsylvania and William and Mary use different definitions of "university", as mentioned above. By Penn's de facto definition, Penn is the first of the two to become a university (1765). Using W&M's de jure definition, W&M is the first.
One possible alternate definition of university is an institution that grants the Ph.D. This would make Yale the first University, as it granted the first Ph.D.
in North America
in 1861. James Morris Whiton, PhD (Yale, 1861), wrote a dissertation that was only six pages long. However, Columbia organized a medical faculty in 1767, and claims to be the first institution in the North American Colonies to confer the degree of Doctor of Medicine
. The first Bachelor of Medicine degrees were earned by Robert Tucker and Samuel Kissarn in May 1769, and those of Doctor of Medicine in May 1770 and May 1771 for the same men, respectively. Yale also claims to have America's first "graduate school," founded in 1847, but the same source acknowledges that Harvard's first "graduate program" began 16 years earlier in 1831. And each of these is different from William & Mary's claim of "graduate studies." Georgetown University
began a graduate program in 1820 which conferred its first degree in 1821. This developed into their Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
, making it the first graduate school in the United States.
Some classifications break institutions down even further. The widely-accepted Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's classification (as of 2000) differentiates between "doctorate-granting institutions" and "Masters colleges and universities", each of which is broken down into even smaller distinctions. http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i49/49a03501.htm) Note that Carnegie does not require an institution to grant the Ph.D. in order to be considered a university. Nor does US News and World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/about/cornkdfs_brief.php
Johns Hopkins University
stands out as a strong candidate for "first," as it is universally credited for bringing the German model of higher education (with a very strong emphasis on graduate studies and faculty research) to the United States. In fact, JHU does bill itself as "the first research university in the United States." http://www.jhu.edu/
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
. In the U.S. there is no official definition of what entitles an institution to be considered a university versus a college, and the common understanding of "university" has evolved over time.
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
Encyclopædia Britannica
The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
tells the story of the gradual emergence of U.S. "universities" thus:
The issue is further confused by the fact that at time of founding of many of the institutions in question, the U.S. didn't exist as a country. Moreover, questions of institutional continuity sometimes make it difficult to determine the true "age" of any institution.
Claimants and potential claimants
(In alphabetical order by full institutional name)- The College of William and Mary's website states, "The College of William and Mary was the first college to become a university (1779)."
- Educational historian Frederick Rudolph once said Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
was "the first American university". However, Rudolph did not mean that Cornell was the first university in America, but rather that it was in the vanguard of sweeping changes brought about by the Land GrantMorrill Land-Grant Colleges ActThe Morrill Land-Grant Acts are United States statutes that allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges, including the Morrill Act of 1862 and the Morrill Act of 1890 -Passage of original bill:...
movement which created a characteristically AmericanUnited StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
style of institution: coeducational, nonsectarianNonsectarianNonsectarian, in its most literal sense, refers to a lack of sectarianism. The term is also more narrowly used to describe secular private educational institutions or other organizations either not affiliated with or not restricted to a particular religious denomination though the organization...
, egalitarian, and with a curriculumCurriculumSee also Syllabus.In formal education, a curriculum is the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university. As an idea, curriculum stems from the Latin word for race course, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow to become mature adults...
not focused on the LatinLatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and GreekAncient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
classics. - Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, founded in 1636, claims itself to be (v.i.) "the oldest institution of higher education in the United States". The claim of being "the first university" has been made on its behalf by others. - The University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
makes claim on their website of being "America's First University". The university has published a book about being the first university in America, and their website contains numerous instances of the phrase "America's First University."
First "research" university in the United States
The Johns Hopkins UniversityJohns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
's website states "The Johns Hopkins University is the first research university in the United States." The distinctively American model of the research university came into being in the 19th century when the German model
German model
The term German model is most often used in economics to describe post-World War II West Germany's means of using innovative industrial relations, vocational training, and closer relationships between the financial and industrial sectors to cultivate economic prosperity.- Industrial relations...
of the elite scientific research institute offering specialized graduate training was “grafted” onto the traditional American undergraduate liberal arts college. Following the lead of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, fifteen American institutions came to define the American research university: some of them private, such as Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, Columbia
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, Cornell
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, Penn
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, and Yale
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
; others, state and land grant universities, such as the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, the University of Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
, the University of Illinois, and the University of California
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
; still others, new universities made possible by private bequests, such as Stanford
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
, Caltech
California Institute of Technology
The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...
, MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
, and the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
. These institutions produced the vast majority of US Ph.D.s in the 20th century, so nearly everyone who has attended a college or university in the nation has been taught by faculty who are their graduates.
Institutional age
Harvard University calls itself "the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States" and this claim is rarely challenged. William & Mary calls itself "America's second-oldest college", acknowledging Harvard's claim but adding that William & Mary itself is the nation's oldest college in its "antecedents".It is possible to disagree what year should be taken as Harvard's "real" founding date (Harvard uses the earliest possible one, 1636, when the institution was chartered by the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was an English settlement on the east coast of North America in the 17th century, in New England, situated around the present-day cities of Salem and Boston. The territory administered by the colony included much of present-day central New England, including portions...
). However, Harvard has operated since 1650 under the same corporation, the "President and Fellows of Harvard College
President and Fellows of Harvard College
The President and Fellows of Harvard College is the more fundamental of Harvard University's two governing boards...
"; it thus has an unbroken institutional history dating back to the mid seventeenth century (an official Harvard web page for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences http://www.deas.harvard.edu/aboutus/ claims, "Founded in 1636, Harvard is America's oldest university").
As an historical curiosity, a College of Henricopolis or University of Henrico, near Richmond, Virginia
Richmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
, was chartered in 1618 and construction begun, but the buildings were destroyed with the town during the Indian Massacre of 1622
Indian massacre of 1622
The Indian Massacre of 1622 occurred in the Colony of Virginia, in what now belongs to the United States of America, on Friday, March 22, 1622...
and not re-erected. At times, the College of William and Mary itself claimed to be the nation's first college "in its antecedents" and technically this is true: the foundational concept of the institution was laid decades before Harvard's founding.
University of Pennsylvania
The founding date of the University of Pennsylvania is associated with more subjectivity and institutional debate than the more straight-forward dates used by the eight other colonial era colleges. Harvard University uses as its founding date 1636, the year in which the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony formally voted to budget funds for the creation of a college in Newtowne, later called Cambridge. The seven remaining colonial era colleges consider their founding dates to be the year in which they were first granted charters and thus became legal corporations.The first charter for an institution of higher learning in Philadelphia was granted in 1755 to the College of Philadelphia, a new undertaking of the Academy of Philadelphia, which had previously taught only secondary students. In 1779, a charter was granted to a separate institution called the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" http://www.upenn.edu/secretary/trustees/statutestrustee.html) which in 1791 was merged with the College of Philadelphia and issued a new charter as the "University of Pennsylvania."
Despite the three charter dates of 1755, 1779 and 1791, the University used for more than a century the founding date of 1749, the year in which founder Benjamin Franklin first convened a board of trustees to organize the new institution. In 1899, the University's board of trustees voted to change the founding date by nine years to 1740, the year in which a group of Philadelphia citizens had begun to raise funds for a grand preaching hall dedicated to traveling evangelist George Whitefield. The hall would include space allocated to a charity school for local orphans, a practice Whitefield suggested in many cities as he toured up and the down the East Coast. The frame of the building was erected, but the citizens discovered that they lacked the funds to furnish the interior chapel or open the charity school.
The unfinished edifice lay vacant for roughly a decade until Franklin's nascent Academy of Philadelphia was looking for space to begin operations and purchased the still unused building in 1750. The Academy of Philadelphia operated a charity school for a few years and this brief period was the basis for the trustees' claims of institutional continuity to the earlier date, as the Academy had assumed the trust of the charity school for local orphans planned but not begun by the original fundraisers of the building.
Parenthetically, the University of Pennsylvania calls itself the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, comparing the legal charter dates of Princeton University (1746) and Columbia University (1754) with the 1740 date in which fundraising had begun for the building it would ultimately purchase in 1750. Secondary instruction began at the Academy of Philadelphia in 1751 and undergraduate education began at the College of Philadelphia in 1756.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Princeton University and Columbia University do not follow the same train of thought in their own institutional histories. Princeton and Columbia consider themselves the fourth and fifth oldest institutions of higher learning in the country, respectively, comparing the three collegiate charter dates of 1746, 1754 and 1755.
(This seemingly minor difference of opinion assumes greater importance in the world of academia. Formal academic processions such as those at graduation ceremonies place visiting dignitaries and other officials in the order of their institution's founding dates, explaining why universities have sometimes used strained rationales to claim and defend dates as early as possible. The University of Pennsylvania changed its founding date in 1899, four years after elite universities in the United States agreed that academic processions would follow this age-based hierarchy. The revision in founding date was the result of a three-year campaign initiated by the University's "Alumni Register" magazine to make it older than Princeton for these processions.)
Even the University of Pennsylvania's own account of its early history agrees that no undergraduate operations existed prior to the 1755 charter granted to the College of Philadelphia. (Officials from the University make it their practice to assert their fourth-oldest place in academic processions, while other American universities which began as secondary schools such as St. John's College in 1696 and the University of Delaware in 1743 choose to march based upon the date they became institutions of higher learning.)
The history of the University of Pennsylvania as the successor organization to the College of Philadelphia and the University of the State of Pennysylvania is detailed by Penn's archives department.
In brief, in 1779 the College of Philadelphia was directed by provost William Smith
William Smith (Anglican priest)
William Smith was the first provost of the University of Pennsylvania.thumb|300px|right|Dr William Smith's residence as it appeared circa 1919-Biography:...
. One might have expected it to evolve into the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" but this did not occur. "Since the Revolutionary state legislature felt that the board of trustees led by Provost Smith contained too many suspected loyalist sympathizers, they created a new board of trustees." Thus, the University of the State of Pennsylvania was created de novo. A schism occurred, with an attenuated College of Philadelphia continuing under Dr. Smith's direction. In 1791 Pennsylvania adopted a new state constitution which merged the College of Philadelphia and the University of the State of Pennsylvania into the "University of Pennsylvania," with a board of trustees made up of twelve men from each of the two parent institutions. "It is this institution and this board of trustees that has continued to this day."
William and Mary
On December 4, 1779, just seven days after the founding of the "University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania", an event occurred which William and Mary describes thus:(For historical reasons, The College of William and Mary, as Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
and Boston College
Boston College
Boston College is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early...
, has continued to use "college" rather than "university" in its official name.)
William and Mary has a published list of its first graduates (by Swem) available through its library.
Harvard
On March 2, 1780 a "A CONSTITUTION OR FRAME OF GOVERNMENT, Agreed upon by the Delegates of the People of the STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS-BAY" was issued, containing this language:- Chapter V. The University at Cambridge, and Encouragement of Literature, etc.
-
- Section I. The University.
-
-
- Art. I.--Whereas our wise and pious ancestors, so early as the year one thousand six hundred and thirty six, laid the foundation of Harvard-College, in which University many persons of great eminence have, by the blessing of GOD, been initiated in those arts and sciences, which qualified them for public employments, both in Church and State: And whereas the encouragement of Arts and Sciences, and all good literature, tends to the honor of God, the advantage of the christian religion, and the great benefit of this, and the other United States of America--It is declared, That the PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD-COLLEGE, in their corporate capacity, and their successors in that capacity, their officers and servants, shall have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy, all the powers, authorities, rights, liberties, privileges, immunities and franchises, which they now have, or are entitled to have, hold, use, exercise and enjoy: And the same are hereby ratified and confirmed unto them, the said President and Fellows of Harvard-College, and to their successors, and to their officers and servants, respectively, forever.
-
(It is not clear from context, either above or in the paragraphs that follow, that the constitution meant to draw any semantic distinction between "college" and "university." )
Establishment of quartary-education schools, issuance of any kind of "doctoral" degree
- King's College (now Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
) organized a medical faculty in 1767, and in 1769 became the first institution in the North American Colonies to confer the degree of Doctor of Medicine, according to the College of Physicians and SurgeonsColumbia University College of Physicians and SurgeonsColumbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, often known as P&S, is a graduate school of Columbia University that is located on the health sciences campus in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan...
. - Penn founded the first medical school in America in 1765, according to Penn's Directory of University Archives, Mark Frazier Lloyd http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/genlhistory/firstuniv.html.
- YaleYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
's website http://world.yale.edu/about/ refers to the establishment of "the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences" in 1847.
Issuance of Ph. D. degree
- YaleYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
's website http://world.yale.edu/about/ states that in 1861, Yale "awarded the first Ph.D. in the United States."
University of Pennsylvania's argument
The University of Pennsylvania uses "America's First University" as a slogan and has an official, succinct statement of the argument supporting this claim:"Penn does not claim to be America's first college, but it is America's first University. In the Anglo-American model, a college, by definition, is a faculty whose subject specialization is in a single academic field. This is usually arts and sciences (often referred to as "liberal arts"), but may also be one of the professions: law, medicine, theology, etc. A university, by contrast, is the co-existence, under a single institutional umbrella, of more than one faculty. Penn founded the first medical school in America. In that year, therefore, Penn became "America's first university." If you wish to take the position that "first university" means first institution of higher learning with the name "university," Penn also qualifies as first. In 1779, the Pennsylvania state legislature conferred a new corporate charter upon the College of Philadelphia, renaming it the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" (in 1791 still another new charter granted Penn its current name). No other American institution of higher learning was named "University" before Penn. So whether you take the "de facto" position (1765) or the "de jure" position (1779), Penn is indeed "America's first university." http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/genlhistory/firstuniv.html
-
- —Mark Frazier Lloyd, director of the University of Pennsylvania's archives http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/genlhistory/firstuniv.html
Definitions and criteria that have been used to support claims of being "the first university in the United States"
Definition of terms
1. What is a universityUniversity
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
?
There are two definitions of a university used between the three schools mentioned above. The definition that Penn uses, given by Mark Frazier Lloyd, Director of the University Archives, is "the co-existence, under a single institutional umbrella, of more than one faculty." http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/genlhistory/firstuniv.html The other definition was given by Stacy B. Gould, University Archivist for the College of William and Mary. She stated, "a course of graduate studies was the requisite for the status of university."
One modern dictionary (American Heritage, 4th edition) defines "university:"
- An institution for higher learning with teaching and research facilities constituting a graduate school and professional schools that award master's degrees and doctorates and an undergraduate division that awards bachelor's degrees. http://www.bartleby.com/61/92/U0089200.html
Webster's 1913 dictionary says:
- An institution organized and incorporated for the purpose of imparting instruction, examining students, and otherwise promoting education in the higher branches of literature, science, art, etc., empowered to confer degrees in the several arts and faculties, as in theology, law, medicine, music, etc. A university may exist without having any college connected with it, or it may consist of but one college, or it may comprise an assemblage of colleges established in any place, with professors for instructing students in the sciences and other branches of learning. http://machaut.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/WEBSTER.sh?WORD=university
1a. A related question: To be a university, must an institution have "university" in its name?
Boston College
Boston College
Boston College is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early...
, Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...
, and the College of William and Mary
College of William and Mary
The College of William & Mary in Virginia is a public research university located in Williamsburg, Virginia, United States...
continue to name themselves as "colleges" for historical reasons, but each of these institutions is, in fact, a university.
2. What does it mean to be the "oldest" university?
The statement "X is the oldest Y," generally refers the length of time that X has existed. (e.g. if Max is the oldest doctor, the reference is to Max's age. If Max is 50 years old, but only a doctor for 7 years, and Cindy is 43 years old and has been a doctor for 15 years, then Max is the older doctor.)
In this instance, the "oldest" university is the one with the earliest date of founding.
Complications arise in the case of institutions, however, because in tangled corporate histories it is not always clear when old and new institutions should be regarded as the same. This arises in the case of Penn: is it correct to say that the College of Philadelphia changed its name to the University of the State of Pennsylvania? Or is it more correct to say that the latter was actually a completely new institution, which later merged with the College of Philadelphia to form the University of Pennsylvania?
3. What does it mean to be the "first" university?
The statement "X is the first Y," generally refers to the date on which X became a Y. (In the above example, Cindy was the first doctor of the two.) By this definition, the "first" university is the one which actually became a university before any of the others, regardless of when it was founded.
To complicate matters, a school which was termed a university in the 18th century would not meet the current criteria for such an institution. As an analog, no doctor who practiced medicine in the 18th century, even having attended medical school at the time and having received a formal education in the field would qualify to receive an M.D. under today's standards, and thus would not be considered a doctor. But it would be incorrect to state that there weren't any doctors in the 18th century. Similarly, it would be incorrect to state that there were no universities in the 18th century.
University status of specific institutions
Harvard dates its own university status to 1780: "The first medical instruction given to Harvard students in 1781 and the founding of the Medical School in 1782 made it a university in fact as well as name."William and Mary traces its university status to 1779, "the first year of our law school
Marshall-Wythe School of Law
William & Mary Law School, located in Williamsburg, Virginia, is the oldest law school in the United States. William & Mary Law School is a part of the College of William & Mary, the second oldest college in the United States. The Law School maintains an enrollment of about six hundred students...
and simultaneously our medicine and chemistry chair was still filled."
Penn claims to have become a university in 1765, when its medical school was created. Penn was designated a university by the legislature of Pennsylvania (the first such U.S. institution of higher learning, beating William and Mary by only one week,) fourteen years later, in 1779, although the institution did not receive its current name of "University of Pennsylvania" until 1791.
It is slightly more difficult to determine the first university, although Harvard may be disregarded as, by its own admission, it did not become a university until 1780, after both Pennsylvania and William and Mary. Pennsylvania and William and Mary use different definitions of "university", as mentioned above. By Penn's de facto definition, Penn is the first of the two to become a university (1765). Using W&M's de jure definition, W&M is the first.
Reasonable causes for disagreement and other potential candidates
The facts are given above so that the reader can be allowed to make his/her own decision. Disagreement may arise in particular if the reader disagrees with the definitions of "university," "graduate studies," "oldest," or "first."One possible alternate definition of university is an institution that grants the Ph.D. This would make Yale the first University, as it granted the first Ph.D.
Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
in 1861. James Morris Whiton, PhD (Yale, 1861), wrote a dissertation that was only six pages long. However, Columbia organized a medical faculty in 1767, and claims to be the first institution in the North American Colonies to confer the degree of Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine
Doctor of Medicine is a doctoral degree for physicians. The degree is granted by medical schools...
. The first Bachelor of Medicine degrees were earned by Robert Tucker and Samuel Kissarn in May 1769, and those of Doctor of Medicine in May 1770 and May 1771 for the same men, respectively. Yale also claims to have America's first "graduate school," founded in 1847, but the same source acknowledges that Harvard's first "graduate program" began 16 years earlier in 1831. And each of these is different from William & Mary's claim of "graduate studies." Georgetown University
Georgetown University
Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...
began a graduate program in 1820 which conferred its first degree in 1821. This developed into their Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Georgetown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is the oldest graduate school in the United States, and is one of four graduate schools at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., United States. The graduate program first was founded in 1820, when Georgetown College graduates expressed the desire for...
, making it the first graduate school in the United States.
Some classifications break institutions down even further. The widely-accepted Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's classification (as of 2000) differentiates between "doctorate-granting institutions" and "Masters colleges and universities", each of which is broken down into even smaller distinctions. http://chronicle.com/free/v46/i49/49a03501.htm) Note that Carnegie does not require an institution to grant the Ph.D. in order to be considered a university. Nor does US News and World Report in its annual ranking of colleges and universities. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/about/cornkdfs_brief.php
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
stands out as a strong candidate for "first," as it is universally credited for bringing the German model of higher education (with a very strong emphasis on graduate studies and faculty research) to the United States. In fact, JHU does bill itself as "the first research university in the United States." http://www.jhu.edu/
See also
- Colonial collegesColonial collegesThe Colonial Colleges are nine institutions of higher education chartered in the American Colonies before the United States of America became a sovereign nation after the American Revolution. These nine have long been considered together, notably in the survey of their origins in the 1907 The...
- List of oldest universities in continuous operation
- Oldest public university in the United StatesOldest public university in the United StatesThe title of oldest public university in the United States is claimed by three universities: the University of Georgia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the The College of William & Mary.- University of Georgia :...