Philanthropic beginnings and foundation , the university's namesake whose philanthropic gift in 1873 established the university,
Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in
Heidelberg, Germany, was replicated in the founding of Johns Hopkins University On his death in 1873,
Johns Hopkins, a
Quaker businessman and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (equivalent to $ in ) to fund a hospital and university in
Baltimore. At the time, this donation, generated primarily from the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, Subsequent scholarship has questioned this interpretation, noting the limitations of census data, particularly the ambiguity of the 1850 slave schedule, and the absence of corroborating documentation such as tax or probate records linking Hopkins directly to slaveholding. The first name of philanthropist Johns Hopkins comes from the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who married Gerard Hopkins. Johns Hopkins thereby became the model of the modern research university in the United States. Its success eventually shifted higher education in the United States from a focus on teaching revealed and/or applied knowledge to the scientific discovery of new knowledge.
19th century , the first president of Johns Hopkins University The trustees worked alongside four notable university presidents,
Charles William Eliot of
Harvard University,
Andrew D. White of
Cornell University,
Noah Porter of
Yale College, and
James B. Angell of
University of Michigan. They each supported
Daniel Coit Gilman to lead the new university and he became the university's first president. Gilman, a
Yale-educated scholar, had been serving as president of the
University of California, Berkeley prior to this appointment. campus, To implement his plan, Gilman recruited internationally known researchers including the mathematician
James Joseph Sylvester; the biologist
H. Newell Martin; the physicist
Henry Augustus Rowland, the first president of the
American Physical Society, the
classical scholars Basil Gildersleeve, and Charles D. Morris; Gilman focused on the expansion of graduate education and support of faculty research. The new university fused advanced scholarship with such professional schools as medicine and engineering. Hopkins became the national trendsetter in
doctoral programs and the host for numerous scholarly journals and associations. The
Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, is the oldest American
university press in continuous operation. , With the completion of
Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889 and the
medical school in 1893, the university's research-focused mode of instruction soon began attracting world-renowned faculty members who would become major figures in the emerging field of academic medicine, including
William Osler,
William Halsted,
Howard Kelly, and
William Welch. During this period the university further made history by becoming the first medical school to admit women on an equal basis with men and to require a
bachelor's degree, based on the efforts of
Mary E. Garrett, who had endowed the school at Gilman's request. The
school of medicine was America's first coeducational, graduate-level medical school, and became a prototype for academic medicine that emphasized bedside learning, research projects, and laboratory training. In his will and in his instructions to the trustees of the university and the hospital, Hopkins requested that both institutions be built upon the vast grounds of his Baltimore estate, Clifton. When Gilman assumed the presidency, he decided that it would be best to use the university's endowment for recruiting faculty and students, deciding to, as it has been paraphrased, "build men, not buildings." In his will Hopkins stipulated that none of his endowment should be used for construction; only interest on the principal could be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, stocks in The
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which would have generated most of the interest, became virtually worthless soon after Hopkins's death. The university's first home was thus in Downtown Baltimore, delaying plans to site the university in Clifton. The brick and marble
Federal style of Homewood House became the architectural inspiration for much of the university campus versus the
Collegiate Gothic style of other historic American universities. Since the 1910s, Johns Hopkins University has famously been a "fertile cradle" to
Arthur Lovejoy's
history of ideas. Professional schools of international affairs and music were established in 1950 and 1977, respectively, when the
School of Advanced International Studies in
Washington, D.C., and the
Peabody Institute in Baltimore were incorporated into the university.
21st century The early decades of the 21st century saw expansion across the university's institutions in both physical and population sizes. Notably, a planned 88-acre expansion to the medical campus began in 2013. Bloomberg's $1.8 billion gift allows the school to practice
need-blind admission and meet the full financial need of admitted students. In January 2019, the university announced an agreement to purchase the
Newseum, located at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, in the heart of
Washington, D.C., with plans to locate all of its Washington, D.C.–based graduate programs there. In an interview with
The Atlantic, the president of Johns Hopkins stated that, "the purchase is an opportunity to position the university, literally, to better contribute its expertise to national- and international-policy discussions." In late 2019, the university's Coronavirus Research Center began tracking worldwide cases of the
COVID-19 pandemic by compiling data from hundreds of sources around the world. This led to the university becoming one of the most cited sources for data about the pandemic.
Johns Hopkins Police Department In 2019, Johns Hopkins sought and received permission from the
Maryland General Assembly to create a private police force to patrol in and around the three Baltimore campuses. The proposal generated opposition from students, faculty, and surrounding community associations. A resolution expressing concerns and raising questions about accountability and oversight of the proposed police department was unanimously passed by the Homewood Faculty Assembly. Protests culminated in a month-long sit-in and building occupation at Garland Hall, the university's administrative building, which ended after Baltimore Police surrounded the building and arrested the participants in May 2019. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, thousands of faculty, staff, students, and community members petitioned the university to reconsider the department. In June 2020, university president Ronald J. Daniels announced a pause of at least two years in the development and implementation of the department. As part of the agreement with the university on authorizing the police force, the Maryland General Assembly required the creation of a civilian accountability board and a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Baltimore Police Department. A draft MOU was released for public comment in September 2022 amidst continued protest and criticism regarding the university's engagement with the community. The finalized MOU, issued in December 2022, grants the Johns Hopkins Police Department primary jurisdiction over university-controlled property and adjacent public areas. Officer recruitment and training began in spring 2024, with active patrols commencing in summer 2024.
Second Trump Administration Beginning in January 2025, federal funding cuts by the Trump administration's
Department of Government Efficiency targeting the
U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) caused Johns Hopkins to lose $800 million in grants and forced the university to lay off thousands of employees and cancel research projects. In September, the university reported a total decline in research grants awarded by the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) by approximately 40% compared to the previous year and the termination of more than 80 existing grants, reducing the value of the university's research portfolio by $500 million. In response to these challenges, the university imposed a hiring freeze on new staff members, limited discretionary spending, and indefinitely paused wage increases for employees. After the Trump administration announced it would impose a cap of 15% on indirect or "overhead" research costs, which would reduce the university's research funding by $300 million annually, Johns Hopkins joined 40 other universities in a successful lawsuit seeking to reverse the change. In February 2025,
Leo Terrell, the head of the Trump administration's
Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, announced that he would investigate Johns Hopkins University as part of the Department of Justice's broader investigation into
antisemitism on college campuses. In July 2025,
America First Legal founder, the Trump adviser and
white nationalist Stephen Miller, requested that the assistant attorney general
Harmeet K Dhillon and the justice department investigate "illegal" diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and "a discriminatory DEI regime as a core institutional mandate" in the university.
Civil rights African-Americans Hopkins was a prominent
abolitionist who supported
Abraham Lincoln during the
American Civil War. After his death, reports said his conviction was a decisive factor in enrolling Hopkins's first
African-American student,
Kelly Miller, a graduate student in physics, astronomy and mathematics. As time passed, the university adopted a "separate but equal" stance more like other Baltimore institutions. James Nabwangu, a British-trained Kenyan, was the first black graduate of the medical school. African-American instructor and laboratory supervisor
Vivien Thomas was instrumental in developing and conducting the first successful
blue baby operation in 1944. Despite such cases, racial diversity did not become commonplace at Johns Hopkins institutions until the 1960s and 1970s.
Women Hopkins's most well-known battle for women's rights was the one led by daughters of trustees of the university;
Mary E. Garrett,
M. Carey Thomas, Mamie Gwinn, Elizabeth King, and Julia Rogers. Other graduate schools were later opened to women by president
Ira Remsen in 1907.
Christine Ladd-Franklin was the first woman to earn a PhD at Hopkins, in mathematics in 1882. The trustees denied her the degree for decades and refused to change the policy about admitting women. In 1893, Florence Bascomb became the university's first female PhD.
Freedom of speech On September 5, 2013, cryptographer and Johns Hopkins university professor
Matthew Green posted a blog entitled, "On the NSA", in which he contributed to the ongoing debate regarding the role of
NIST and
NSA in formulating U.S.
cryptography standards. On September 9, 2013, Green received a take-down request for the "On the NSA" blog from interim Dean Andrew Douglas from the Johns Hopkins University
Whiting School of Engineering. The request cited concerns that the blog had links to sensitive material. The blog linked to already published news articles from
The Guardian,
The New York Times, and
ProPublica.org. Douglas subsequently issued a personal on-line apology to Green. The event raised concern over the future of academic freedom of speech within the cryptologic research community. ==Campuses and divisions==