Daniel Coit Gilman

Berlin was the education that mattered. Gilman, a Norwich, Connecticut manufacturer's son, took his Yale degree in geography in 1852, served as an attaché at the American legation in St. Petersburg, and then spent 1854 and 1855 in the German capital, where professors treated teaching and original research as one job. He came home to 17 years of institutional carpentry in New Haven — librarian of Yale College, fundraiser and organizer for the new Sheffield Scientific School, professor of geography. Passed over for the Yale presidency, he left in 1872 to head the University of California. A hostile legislature blocked him at every turn, and after three years he resigned.

Baltimore handed him a merchant's bequest and no institution. Gilman spent a year studying university organization and choosing a faculty before there were buildings, recruiting the mathematician Sylvester from England. He opened on February 22, 1876, built around graduate study and research rather than undergraduate teaching. In 1878 he started a publication agency on the argument that a university producing knowledge must print it, which issued the American Journal of Mathematics that year. The hospital followed in 1889 and the medical school in 1893, which admitted only applicants holding a bachelor's degree. No American medical school had required that.

The measure of Gilman is what left Baltimore. Woodrow Wilson took a Hopkins doctorate in 1886 and carried the model to Princeton. John Dewey took his in 1884, Frederick Jackson Turner in 1890, and G. Stanley Hall left a Hopkins chair to become the founding president of Clark University. Charles W. Eliot spent 40 years remaking an existing college. Gilman built one and then staffed the country with it, and historians of education generally date the American PhD as a genuine research degree to what he started. The dissent is as old as the model. Critics then and since have argued that a faculty paid to publish stops teaching undergraduates well, and Hopkins was slow with women. Christine Ladd-Franklin finished every requirement for a doctorate in 1882 and did not receive the degree until 1926.

He retired from Hopkins in 1901 at 70 and took another founding job the next year, becoming the first president of Andrew Carnegie's new institution in Washington, an endowment built to pay for research with no students attached at all. He held it until 1904. He also sat as a trustee of the Peabody and Slater funds, which paid for schooling in the South, the Slater Fund specifically for freedmen, and served on John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board. He died in Norwich, Connecticut, on October 13, 1908, in the town where he was born, 77 years old. Gilman Hall stands at Hopkins and another at Berkeley.

Daniel Coit Gilman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Johns Hopkins University other
  Opened around the graduate school and original research 1876
• Johns Hopkins University Press other
  Begun as the university publication agency, the oldest continuously running university press in the country 1878
• American Journal of Mathematics other
  The first journal the university issued 1878
• Johns Hopkins Hospital other
  Built to be joined to the university by a medical school 1889
• Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine other
  Required a bachelor's degree for admission and took women on the same terms as men 1893
• The Launching of a University and Other Papers other
  His own account of what he had done 1906

• 1852 aged ~21 Graduates from Yale College with a degree in geography A classmate and lifelong friend of Andrew Dickson White, later the first president of Cornell.
• 1854 aged ~23 Studies in Berlin and sees the German research university at work He had spent the two previous years as an attaché at the American legation in St. Petersburg.
• 1856 aged ~25 Becomes librarian of Yale College He stayed 17 years, raising money and organizing the new Sheffield Scientific School.
• November 7, 1872 aged 41 Delivers his inaugural address as president of the University of California Given at Oakland. The state legislature fought him for the next three years.
• 1875 aged ~44 Resigns in California and accepts the offer to build Johns Hopkins He spent the following year studying university organization and hiring a faculty.
• February 22, 1876 aged 44 Inaugurated first president of Johns Hopkins University The date is still kept at Hopkins as Commemoration Day.
• 1878 aged ~47 Starts the university publication agency and the American Journal of Mathematics The agency became the Johns Hopkins University Press.
• 1893 aged ~62 The medical school opens, admitting women on the same terms as men Mary Elizabeth Garrett gave more than 300,000 dollars and set the condition. Gilman had argued against her admission standards and lost.
• October 13, 1908 aged 77 Dies in Norwich, Connecticut, the town where he was born

• Charles W. Eliot 1834–1926
  Rebuilt Harvard into the first modern American research university and gave undergraduates the elective system. counterpart
• Andrew Carnegie 1835–1919
  Steel magnate who built one of the largest steel empires in history and later became a major philanthropist. appointed by
• William Osler 1849–1919
  Built bedside clinical teaching into American medical education as a founding Johns Hopkins professor. recruited
• Woodrow Wilson 1856–1924
  28th President who led the nation through World War I and championed the League of Nations. trained at Hopkins
• John Dewey 1859–1952
  Philosopher and educational reformer whose progressive ideas shaped modern American pedagogy. trained at Hopkins