The name "Johns Hopkins" can apply to many things: a university, a health system, a hospital, a man, and, as of this fall, a nearly 1,000-page book about the institution's history. Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years, written by teaching professor Andrew Jewett with lecturer Jonathan Strassfeld, sets out to tell the definitive story of America's first research university, from the man who founded it to its modern-day influence.
Image caption: Andrew Jewett
Image credit: JM Fragomeni
"Many institutional histories stop quite a bit short of the present," Jewett says. "But I don't think you can really understand the Hopkins of 2026 by telling a story that trails off around 2000 or even 2010."
In preparation for the book's Oct. 27 release, Jewett sat down with the Hub to discuss how decades of discovery and debate transformed Johns Hopkins into one of the world's most prestigious universities.
Johns Hopkins University was founded thanks to a gift from 19th century merchant Johns Hopkins. What vision did he have for the university?
It's truly fascinating to look back on that time. Mr. Hopkins knew quite a bit about medical institutions, and he laid out detailed plans for the hospital. It's a separate corporation with a separate body of trustees, although many of the actual members overlapped with the university board. But he said very little about what the university should look like. He left it almost entirely up to the trustees, and so they argued about what shape the university should take.
There was a group led by one of the trustees, John Work Garrett, who was the head of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. They wanted and they believed that Mr. Hopkins had wanted a kind of trade school to train workers for outfits like the B&O Railroad, which was a massive force in Baltimore's economy.
And then there was another faction led by George William Brown who wanted an institution that offered advanced graduate training and advanced research in the mold of the German universities. They were the ones who eventually won out. That's what, of course, Johns Hopkins University became.
In what areas has the university changed the most since its founding?
Some of the most striking changes have come fairly recently, since the late 1980s. There's a way in which you could imagine the story divided into three big sections instead of the book's five, though they'd be too long and not the same length. What are now Parts I and II describe first how Hopkins establishes a new form of higher education, the research university, then how it watches while other institutions, often with many more resources, adopt that model and surpass Hopkins in various ways, to the point where Hopkins is seen as being in significant decline by the 1920s and 1930s. There's some talk that it might have to close during the Depression years.
That really changes with World War II. Parts III and IV, if we put those together, describe how Hopkins became a major recipient of federal funding during and after the war and built out research capacities in various relevant areas, but still suffered from endemic budgetary problems overall.
And then, during the most recent period since the late 1980s have come a whole series of changes. For example, the university gained a much stronger financial base through private giving: growth in the endowment, capital campaigns, alumni gifts, and obviously the impact of Michael Bloomberg. This is a very different institution than it was in the late 1980s.
You know, I used to be an undergraduate here at Hopkins, so I'm also wondering how the student experience changed over time.
It's changed very substantially. This is one of the most important changes of recent years. Through most of its history, Hopkins was focused very consciously on graduate students and on research. Certain kinds of undergraduates benefited enormously from the ethos at Hopkins. They could find mentors among world-class faculty almost immediately upon arriving, and work with them very closely, in a much more intimate environment than was available at most other universities—certainly since World War II. But for many undergraduates, it was a fairly alienating place. Undergraduate students were more or less expected to be like, and were treated like, early graduate students.
That has been one of the major changes since the late 1980s. The last three presidents have all attended much more closely to undergraduate education and have urged the faculty and administrators to move in that direction, to the point where I think that the change is really well-established and Hopkins is much more like other universities in terms of the undergraduate experience here.
Your book also examines JHU's history with the city of Baltimore. How has Hopkins as an institution made an impact on its home city?
This is another major change. When I arrived in the city, not having lived here before, I was struck by the centrality of Hopkins to life in Baltimore, both in a practical sense, but also a broader cultural, even psychological, way. It has long had a tremendous impact on the city by becoming a major employer, even if it had done nothing else.
During the early period, Hopkins was formally segregated, and to a significant degree afterward it still shut out the city's Black residents—graduates of local schools in impoverished neighborhoods. But at many moments, faculty and administrators engaged with Baltimore in other ways—conducting locally based research, for example, and working with the city government on policy questions.
There was a time after World War II, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s, when faculty and administrators thought less about the city. A lot of the focus was international in those years. But today that Baltimore-Hopkins relationship is front and center again. This is a pattern you see around the country in all kinds of post-industrial cities. Universities, especially those with medical centers, have become anchor institutions, where their actions have major economic and political effects and they are embedded in urban politics. Many of Hopkins' efforts provoke a lot of criticism as well as praise, but faculty and administrators are now thinking very consciously about that impact.
Cuts to federal research funding are currently making it more difficult for the university to pursue its mission. Are there any difficult moments from the university's past that could offer insights into this current challenge?
It's funny, I didn't set out to tell a story in which money was central, but financing turned out to be a dominant and persistent theme through the study. It was a problem right from the start, in that the university's gift from Mr. Hopkins consisted of railroad stocks and in many years it turned out they paid little or no dividends. The shares didn't have the value that they were expected to have. Beyond that, even at the best of times, the kinds of education and research that Hopkins undertakes were and are very expensive, so there's always been this pressing question of how to pay for them.
Some elements of this current crisis are new, but a lot of them have important precedents in the past, though usually on a different scale. I think the closest comparison is to a moment in the late 1960s when federal agencies suddenly shifted much of their focus from supporting faculty research at top institutions to improving student access across the system by funding less prestigious colleges. Budget cuts for research continued through the 1970s and into the early 1980s. There was, at the same time, growing pressure for studies to have immediate economic payoffs. At Hopkins, this led to the only removal of a president in the university's history: Lincoln Gordon, in early 1971, who had run up a massive budget deficit in a very short time.
His permanent successor, Stephen Muller, struggled to keep the university going under very, very difficult conditions, all made worse by spiraling inflation. I think it's instructive that Muller's administration didn't close down programs in that early 1970s period. Many other universities did. The focus remained on making do with less rather than cutting off pieces of the institution. And in fact, Muller eventually expanded Hopkins in a few key areas: the Peabody affiliation in the late 1970s, the Space Telescope Science Institute at the end of that decade, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in the mid-1980s. It was a very, very contentious time and very difficult to keep the university going financially, but they made it through.
The story of Johns Hopkins is one of tremendous resilience, but overall I think it also reveals the contingency, even the fragility, of the university-based research system that emerged around World War II. Institutions like Hopkins obviously can and should be improved in various ways, but they also need to be defended. They're central to so many aspects of our lives, even if we never set foot in them as students, teachers, staff, or administrators. ... We should all be thinking about how to support them as well as how they might operate more effectively. I hope this book is going to inform and improve that public conversation by showing how events unfolded across many decades at one institution.
Pre-order Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years on the Johns Hopkins University Press website.
