When Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, most institutions of higher education in the United States were still focused on teaching and training the elite. The new combination of original research, doctoral studies, and teaching created a different kind of institution—and later provided the foundation for the United States' rise to scientific power.
This article is part of the "America in Test Tube" series to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States, which deals with the relationship between science, state, industry, and democracy.
For the first chapter: 250 years of promise – American science and the democratic idea | [for all episodes of the series]
In the first episode of the “America in Test Tube” series, we saw that the belief in knowledge, education, and progress has accompanied the United States since the days of the Founding Fathers. However, there is a great distance between a general appreciation of science and the establishment of a system capable of systematically producing new knowledge. The young United States established colleges and universities, but for nearly a century it did not stand at the forefront of global research.
The turning point began in 1876, when Johns Hopkins University opened in Baltimore. The new institution drew inspiration from German research universities, but did not simply copy them. It combined the tradition of advanced research and study from Europe with the American college, and later with competitive public funding, private philanthropy, and a system of professional schools. From this combination grew American Research University.
Not just transferring knowledge – but creating it
Universities existed in the United States long before Johns Hopkins. Harvard was founded in 1636, Yale in 1701, and Princeton in 1746. Public universities were also established in the early years of the republic. Scientific research was conducted at some of these institutions, and 1876 should not be seen as the zero point of American academic science.
However, research was not yet the central principle around which the university was organized. Many of the colleges focused on undergraduate studies, moral education, classical studies, and the training of clergy, law, and administration. The lecturer was seen primarily as someone who transmitted an existing body of knowledge to his students, and not necessarily as a researcher whose role was to expand the boundaries of knowledge.
In 19th-century Germany, a different model had already developed. The university was designed not only to teach what was already known, but also to explore questions that had not yet been answered. Laboratories, small seminars, the training of research students, and original doctoral dissertations became central components of academic life. Advanced students did not just listen to lectures; they joined a community of scholars and learned how to produce knowledge, examine evidence, and present findings for criticism.
The combination of teaching and research seems obvious today, but in the United States of the mid-19th century, it was a revolutionary idea.
Seven million dollars and one general directive
Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore businessman and philanthropist, bequeathed seven million dollars to establish a university and hospital. According to an article published by university president Ronald Daniels in a special issue of ScienceAt the time, it was the largest philanthropic donation in United States history.
Hopkins left no detailed academic program. Responsibility for the design of the institution fell largely to its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. Rather than establishing another American college of the existing type, Gilman sought to build an institution in which independent research, scholarly training, and teaching would coexist.
In his 1876 commencement address, Gilman described a university that would encourage research and promote outstanding scholars, with the assumption that their achievements would contribute not only to their field of expertise but also to the society in which they live. Johns Hopkins now describes itself as the first research university in the United States, and Gilman's address is a document that placed scientific discovery, academic freedom, and service to society at the center of its mission. ([Johns Hopkins University][1])
The innovation was not the invention of research, but the organization of the university around it. Active researchers taught students; advanced students were trained through participation in research; academic departments were built around emerging areas of knowledge; and journals allowed professional communities to publish, critique, and accumulate knowledge.
The University as a Habitat for Disciplines
In the years since its founding, Johns Hopkins has opened new doctoral programs and established journals that have influenced the definition of research fields themselves. It helped introduce the research seminar to the United States—a setting in which a small group of students and a senior researcher discuss sources, methods, and findings together rather than a one-way lecture.
The model also extended to medicine. The university and the hospital built alongside it promoted laboratory medicine and the idea of a university hospital, where patient care, physician training, and medical research all took place in one setting. Johns Hopkins later helped lay the foundations of modern public health and developed fields such as epidemiology, genetics, neuroscience, and experimental medicine.
The impact did not stop in Baltimore. Graduates of the research programs moved to other institutions, established departments and doctoral programs, and spread the model. Old universities changed their structures, and new institutions embraced the combination of undergraduate studies, researcher training, and advanced research.
Thus, a network of research universities was created, rather than just one exceptional institution.
The difference between a building and a scientific community
A research university is not just a collection of expensive laboratories. Its value stems from the community that is built within it: researchers from various fields, research students, libraries, technicians, workshops, journals, seminars, and networks of collaboration.
The difference became crucial during World War II. When the US government sought to mobilize science for the war effort, and Neve Bush, who headed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, did not concentrate all researchers in one government facility. Thousands of scientists largely remained at their universities, working from the intellectual communities, laboratories, and infrastructures that had already been built there.
Thus, the country benefited not only from the expertise of a single scientist, but also from the environment that helped him think, argue, train additional researchers, and integrate knowledge from different fields. The success of the university network during the war convinced Bush and others that it should be preserved and expanded in peacetime as well.
The full story of the transition to government funding will be the focus of the next installment in the series. But already here, the connection that defined American science in the second half of the 20th century was formed: universities provided the researchers and the intellectual environment, and the government provided a large portion of the resources.
Public money – but not the distribution of political instructions
The system that developed after World War II was based on some bold ideas.
The first was that basic research is largely a public good. A private company might avoid investing in a fundamental scientific question that has no immediate commercial product, even if the answer might serve the economy, health, or security in the future. The federal government therefore assumed a central responsibility for funding such research.
The second idea was that the money would not be distributed simply as a fixed grant to a small number of universities. Researchers would submit proposals for specific projects, and funding would be awarded competitively based on the quality of the idea, its feasibility, and its importance.
The third idea was to distance the selection of studies as much as possible from the direct dictate of politicians and bureaucrats. Experts in the fields of research – the peers of the proposers – would judge the scientific quality. Peer review is not immune to bias, conservatism or errors, but it is designed to replace political allegiance with professional judgment.
According to Daniels, the focus on researchers and competitive projects, and not just on transferring budgets to institutions, was one of the characteristics that distinguished the American model from the dominant European model at the time.
The funding that led to additional funding
The government was not the only player. The existence of a competitive federal funding source encouraged additional investments.
Universities invested in buildings, equipment, and laboratories to attract researchers who could win grants. Philanthropic foundations funded early, risky ideas, hoping that early successes would allow researchers to compete for larger grants. States in the United States invested in campuses and innovation systems to attract skilled workers and companies. Corporations partnered with academic laboratories, and researchers founded companies based on their discoveries.
At Johns Hopkins itself, the years before World War II were marked by financial crises that sometimes threatened the stability of the institution. Competitive federal grants provided a more stable foundation, but they did not guarantee automatic funding: researchers had to repeatedly win support based on the quality and originality of their ideas.
It was a source of power, but also of dependence. A university that built laboratories, recruited staff, and developed research areas through government grants became vulnerable to a sudden change in budget policy.
A successful model – but not perfect
In his article, Daniels presents the government-university partnership as a remarkable success. He cites estimates that government-funded non-defense research since World War II has yielded a 150 to 300 percent return to the American economy. During that period, the United States had more Nobel Prize winners in science than any other country, and most of them were from research universities.
The words should also be read with an awareness of the identity of the author: Ronald Daniels is the president of Johns Hopkins University and a leader in the fight to protect federal research funding. His article is not a neutral observation from the outside, but a reasoned defense by the head of an institution of the system in which he operates. This fact does not invalidate the data or the argument, but it does require an examination of the model's weaknesses.
American universities are not equally open to all segments of society. Competition for grants can reward institutions that have already accumulated resources, reputations, and infrastructure. Young researchers sometimes have difficulty getting their first grant. Peer review systems can favor conventional approaches over unconventional ideas, and the pressure to publish and raise money can undermine quality, reproducibility, and willingness to take scientific risks.
Daniels also acknowledges the need to address questions about the pace of innovation, the credibility of research, opportunities for young researchers, and openness to criticism and controversy. His argument is not that the system is perfect, but that fixing it requires precise work—not the demolition of the principles on which it was built.
It is easier to destroy than to build.
The American research university was not born in a single moment. It grew from a European model, from private philanthropy, from the establishment of doctoral programs and journals, from the development of research professions, from mobilization for World War II, and from a public funding system that was built in its aftermath.
In the 250th year of the United States, research institutions are once again at the center of political conflict. Slowing funding, cuts, and proposals to replace judgment based on scientific quality with political priorities threaten not only individual projects but the relationships built over decades between the state, universities, and researchers.
We can and should criticize universities, demand transparency from them, expand access to them, and fix incentives that encourage bureaucracy or conservatism. But there is a difference between fixing an institution and dismantling the infrastructure that allows it to operate.
The model that began in Baltimore in 1876 transformed the university from a place where the knowledge of the past is studied to an institution that attempts to create the knowledge of the future. This move not only made the United States a scientific powerhouse – but without it, the American government would not have had the network of researchers, laboratories, and research students on which to build the great system that was born in World War II.
This is the second article in the “America in Test Tube” series. The next chapter will deal with the war that built the American research funding system and the mechanisms created in the 1940s that accompany science to this day.
For the original publication: Opening the original publication
More on the subject on the science website
- 250 years of the United States: This is how the world's greatest scientific power was built — about the combination of research universities, the absorption of scientists, public funding, peer review, and freedom of research, which raised the United States to the top of world science.
- A Drop of Brain – On Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom — Discussion of the difference between university teaching and research and the economic and social importance of independent basic research.
- Who will finance the next big idea? — On the need for public funding and institutions capable of transferring discoveries from basic research to useful developments, following the weakening of corporate research laboratories.
- What does Trump want from universities? — On the use of the threat of denying research funding to impose political demands on American universities and the tension between government funding and academic independence.
- US science agencies under attack: grants are being cut, political appointments are changing priorities — About the damage to National Science Foundation scholarships, the training of the next generation of researchers, and the federal mechanisms on which research universities rely.
- Taub Center: The state of higher education in Israel continues to deteriorate — An Israeli point of comparison on the establishment of world-class research universities, the importance of academic staff, and the cumulative damage of years of budgetary erosion.
