Published October 28, 2026 | Episode 482
Introduction
At his death on December 24, 1873, the Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins left $7 million—the largest philanthropic gift in American history to that point—to establish a university and a hospital bearing his name.
The result was the first American research university, together with a teaching hospital that would pioneer major innovations in the practice and teaching of medicine. From the beginning, Johns Hopkins pursued a distinctive and often eccentric course, moving from early dominance and innovation to decline and then renewal, all amidst recurring debates over what direction the university should take.
Those debates concerned questions that remain unsettled. Should a university emphasize advanced research or undergraduate education? Should research be pursued wherever an investigator’s curiosity leads, or directed toward practical ends? How much influence should donors, foundations, corporations, and governments possess? And what happens when an institution created to be different becomes the model everyone else follows?
Hopkins’s history is therefore more than its own. It is also the story of the creation of the American research university and its development into one of the most powerful—and increasingly uneasy—set of American institutions of the twenty-first century.
And, in the interests of full disclosure, the host of this podcast is a member of the Johns Hopkins Class of 1991.
About the Guest
Andrew Jewett is a teaching professor at Johns Hopkins University. His work examines the history of science, universities, intellectual life, and debates over scientific authority in American society. His new book, Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years, written with contributions by Jonathan Strassfeld, follows the university from its origins in post–Civil War Baltimore through its emergence as an international center of research, medicine, public health, engineering, and graduate education.
For Further Investigation
Andrew Jewett with Jonathan Strassfeld, Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).
Andrew Jewett, Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
—, Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2020).
The Johns Hopkins University Archives, which preserves administrative records, faculty papers, student publications, oral histories, photographs, and other materials documenting the university’s history.
The University Archives’ collection of more than 20,000 historical Johns Hopkins photographs.
The Johns Hopkins Biographical Archive, which brings archival evidence to bear on the life of Johns Hopkins and the history of his family.
Related Episodes
How College Works: Daniel Chambliss on how students actually experience college—and why relationships often matter more than prestige.
The Amateur Hour: Jonathan Zimmerman on the long, frustrating, futile, and often funny history of teaching in American colleges.
Higher Ed: A Guide for the Perplexed: The complete Historically Thinking series on how colleges and universities work.
Tags
Andrew Jewett; Jonathan Strassfeld; Johns Hopkins University; Higher Education; Research Universities; History of Science; History of Medicine; Baltimore; Philanthropy; Daniel Coit Gilman; Graduate Education; Academic Research; Historically Thinkings
