18th century In 1740, a group of
Philadelphians organized to erect a great preaching hall for
George Whitefield, a traveling
Anglican evangelist, which was designed and constructed by
Edmund Woolley. It was the largest building in Philadelphia at the time, and thousands of people attended it to hear Whitefield preach. In the fall of 1749,
Benjamin Franklin, a
Founding Father and
polymath in Philadelphia, circulated a pamphlet, "
Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania," his vision for what he called a "Public Academy of Philadelphia". On June 16, 1755, the
College of Philadelphia was chartered, paving the way for the addition of undergraduate instruction. Penn identifies as the
fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, though this representation is challenged by
Princeton and
Columbia since the College of Philadelphia was not chartered or commence classes until 1755 and the first board of trustees was not convened until 1749, arguably making it the sixth or fifth-oldest. In the 1750s, roughly 40 percent of Penn students needed lodging since they came from areas in the
British North American colonies that were too far to commute, or were international students. Before the completion of the construction of the first dormitory in 1765, out of town students were typically placed with guardians in the homes of faculty or in suitable boarding houses. Jonathan and Philip Gayienquitioga, two brothers of the Mohawk Nation, were recruited by Benjamin Franklin to attend the Academy of Philadelphia, making them the first Native Americans at Penn when they enrolled in 1755. , the founder and first professor of medicine at
Penn's Medical School The 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both "undergraduate" and professional education.
Moses Levy, the first Jewish student, enrolled in 1769. In 1765, the campus was expanded by opening of the newly completed dormitory run by Benjamin Franklin's collaborator on the study of electricity using
electrostatic machines and related technology and Penn professor and chief master
Ebenezer Kinnersley. Kinnersley was designated steward of the students in the dormitory and he and his wife were given disciplinary powers over the students and supervised the cleanliness of the students with respect to personal hygiene and washing of the students' dirty clothing. Even after its construction, however, many students sought living quarters elsewhere, where they would have more personal freedom, resulting in a loss of funds to the university. In the fall of 1775, Penn's trustees voted to advertise to lease the dormitory to a private family who would board the pupils at lesser cost to Penn. In another attempt to control the off-campus activities of the students, the trustees agreed not to admit any out-of-town student unless he was lodged in a place which they and the faculty considered proper. briefly establishing Penn's campus as one of the early
capitals of the United States. In 1779, not trusting then provost
William Smith's
Loyalist tendencies, the revolutionary State Legislature created a university, and in 1785 the legislature changed name to
University of the State of Pennsylvania. The result was a schism, with Smith continuing to operate an attenuated version of the College of Philadelphia. The 1779 charter represented the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of "University". In 1791, the legislature issued a new charter, merging the two institutions into a new University of Pennsylvania with twelve men from each institution serving on the new board of trustees. Among the classes given in 1807 at this building were those offered by
Benjamin Rush, a professor of chemistry, medical theory, and clinical practice who was also a signer of the
United States Declaration of Independence, member of the
Continental Congress, and
surgeon general of the
Continental Army. , a physician and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Classes were held in the mansion until 1829 when it was demolished. Architect
William Strickland designed twin buildings on the same site, College Hall and Medical Hall (both 1829–1830), which formed the core of the Ninth Street Campus. and
Chestnut Streets, featuring Medical Hall (on left) and College Hall (on right), both built between 1829 and 1830 Joseph M. Urquiola, School of Medicine class of 1829, was the first Latino, and Auxencio Maria Pena, School of Medicine class of 1836, was the first
South American to graduate from Penn. In 1849, following formation of Penn's Eta chapter of
Delta Phi by five founders and 15 initiates, Penn students began to establish residential fraternity houses. Since Penn only had limited housing near campus and since students, especially those at the medical school, came from all over the country, the students elected to fend for themselves rather than live in housing owned by Penn trustees. A number chose housing by pledging and living in Penn's first fraternities, which included
Delta Phi,
Zeta Psi,
Phi Kappa Sigma, and
Delta Psi. These first fraternities were located within walking distance of 9th and
Chestnut Street since the campus was located from 1800 to 1872 on the west side of Ninth Street, from Market Street on the north to
Chestnut Street on the south. Zeta Psi Fraternity was located at the southeast corner of 10th Street and Chestnut Street, Delta Phi was located on the south side of 11th Street near Chestnut Street, and Delta Psi was located on the north side of Chestnut Street, west of 10th Street. from a pocket guide to the
Centennial Exhibition in 1876 After being located in downtown Philadelphia for more than a century, the campus was moved across the
Schuylkill River to property purchased from the
Blockley Almshouse in West Philadelphia in 1872, where it has since remained in an area now known as
University City. The new campus and its associated fraternities centered on the intersection of Woodland Avenue, 36th Street, and
Locust Street. Among the first fraternities to build near the new campus were Phi Delta Theta in 1883 and
Psi Upsilon in 1891. By 1891, there were at least 17 fraternities at the university. Penn hosted the nation's first university teaching hospital in 1874; the
Wharton School, the world's first collegiate business school, in 1881; the first American student union building,
Houston Hall, in 1896; and the only
school of veterinary medicine in the United States that originated directly from its medical school, in 1884. Tosui Imadate (今立吐酔) was the first person of Asian descent to graduate from Penn (College Class of 1879). William Adger, James Brister, and
Nathan Francis Mossell in 1879 were the first
African Americans to enroll at Penn. Adger was the first African American to graduate from the college at Penn (1883), and when Brister graduated from the
School of Dental Medicine (Penn Dental) (class of 1881), he was the first African American to earn a degree at Penn.
Lewis Baxter Moore, brother in law of two other Penn alumni who broke the color barrier by being among the first of their race to graduate from Penn degree granting programs,
Nathan Francis Mossell (medicine) and
Aaron Albert Mossell II (law), was the first African American to earn a PhD in 1896. The first women enrolled at Penn were two graduate students at Penn's Towne Scientific School, medical doctors Gertrude Klein Pierce, MD, Anna Lockhart Flanigen, MD, who were admitted in October 1876 as "special students" to study chemistry. In 1878 they were awarded certificates of proficiency in chemistry (finishing second and third in their class) and continued their postgraduate studies in organic chemistry with professor (later provost)
Edgar Fahs Smith. In 1880,
Mary Alice Bennett and Anna H. Johnson were the first women to enroll in a Penn degree-granting program. Bennett was the first woman to receive a degree from Penn, which was a PhD. looking North to Memorial Tower From its founding until construction of the
Quadrangle Dormitories, which started construction in 1895, the university largely lacked university-owned housing with the exception of a significant part of the 18th century. A significant portion of the undergraduate population commuted from
Delaware Valley locations, and a large number of students resided in the Philadelphia area. The medical school, then with roughly half the students, was a significant exception to this trend as it attracted a more geographically diverse population of students. George Henderson, president of the class of 1889, wrote in his monograph distributed to his classmates at their 20th reunion that Penn's strong growth in acreage and number of buildings it constructed over the prior two decades (along with a near-quadrupling in the size of the student body) was accommodated by building
The Quad. Henderson argued that building The Quad was influential in attracting students, and he appealed for it to be expanded:
20th century During the first decades of the 20th century, Penn made strides and took an active interest in attracting diverse students from around the globe. Two examples of such action occurred in 1910. Penn's first director of publicity, created a recruiting brochure, translated into Spanish, with approximately 10,000 copies circulated throughout Latin America. That same year, the Penn-affiliated organization, the Cosmopolitan Club, started an annual tradition of hosting an opening "smoker," which attracted students from 40 nations who were formally welcomed to the university by then-vice provost
Edgar Fahs Smith (who the following year would start a ten-year tenure as provost) who spoke about how Penn wanted to "bring together students of different countries and break down misunderstandings existing between them." By 1912, Stevenson focused almost all his efforts on the foreign students at Penn who needed help finding housing resulting in the Christian Association buying 3905 Spruce Street located adjacent to Penn's West Philadelphia campus. By January 1, 1918, 3905 Spruce Street officially opened under the sponsorship of the Christian Association as a Home for Foreign Students, which came to be known as the International Students' House with Reverend Stevenson as its first director. The success of efforts to reach out to the international students was reported in 1921 when the official Penn publicity department reported
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander who had earned a degree at
Penn's School of Education in 1918 and master's in economics from Penn in 1919, was awarded the Francis Sergeant Pepper fellowship enabling her in 1921 to became the first
African-American woman in the United States to earn a
PhD from an American university. She was also the first African-American woman admitted to and graduated from the
University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1927 and earned the right to be an editor of
University of Pennsylvania Law Review Until 1930, Penn's top academic and business professional was its Provost. In 1930, Penn's Board combined the two positions and created the office of President and elected
Thomas Sovereign Gates, a Philadelphia banker who had served as director of a number of companies including
Pennsylvania Railroad (which at time was largest company in world) and the
Baldwin Locomotive Company, and had served for ten years as a Penn Trustee and as chairman of Penn's endowment fund. From 1930 to 1966, there were 54 documented
Rowbottom riots, a student tradition of rioting which included everything from car smashing to panty raids. After 1966, there were five more instances of "Rowbottoms," the latest occurring in 1980. As an example, into the late 1940s, two-thirds of Penn women students were commuters.
George William McClelland, a professor of English at Penn who (received his bachelors, masters and Ph.D. all from Penn in 1903, 1912 and 1916 respectively) served from 1944 to 1948 as Penn's second President, and the most notable achievement during his tenure was the creation in 1946 of
ENIAC, the world's first all-electronic digital computer. , the Penn president, in a December 19, 1950, meeting with President of India
Rajendra Prasad Former Minnesota governor and perennial presidential candidate
Harold Stassen served as third president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1948 to 1953. Penn's board of trustees elected Stassen to fill the office of the president, left vacant by the unexpected resignation of Penn's second President, George McClelland. Stassen was selected, in part due to his reputation as a successful fundraiser (as Penn was in the middle of a long simmering financial crisis). Stassen did indeed help raise funds and cut costs, focusing financial resources into a few prestigious departments and fulfilling McClelland's campus expansion plan, as well as reforming intercollegiate athletics in order to conform to the requirements of the new Ivy League. Stassen focused on Penn's football team by contesting the NCAA prohibition over televising football games (to stop the slide in gate attendance) by entering into a $200,000 contract with ABC, but Stassen eventually backed down when the NCAA threatened to expel Penn. After
World War II, the university began a capital spending program to overhaul its campus, including its student housing. A large number of students migrating to universities under the
G.I. Bill, and the ensuing increase in Penn's student population highlighted that Penn had outgrown previous expansions, which ended during the
Great Depression era. But in addition to a significant student population from the
Delaware Valley, the university continued to attract international students from at least 50 countries and from all 50 states as early as of the second decade of the 1920s. In 1965, Penn students learned that the university was sponsoring research projects for the United States'
chemical and biological weapons program. According to
Herman and Rutman, the revelation that "CB Projects Spicerack and Summit were directly connected with U.S. military activities in Southeast Asia," caused students to petition Penn's fourth president
Gaylord Harnwell (1954 to 1971) to halt the program, citing the project as being "immoral, inhuman, illegal, and unbefitting of an academic institution." The first openly LGBTQ+ organization funded by Penn was formed in 1972 by
Kiyoshi Kuromiya, a Benjamin Franklin Scholar and Penn alumnus from the college's class of 1966, when he created the Gay Coffee Hour, which met every week on campus and was also open to non-students and served as an alternative space to
gay bars for gay people of all ages.
Vartan Gregorian, who joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1972 as Tarzian Professor of Armenian and
Caucasian History and Professor of South Asian history, became the founding dean of Penn's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1974 (through 1978), and served as the 23rd
provost of Penn from January 1979 to October 1980, was widely considered to be the most probable candidate to become the 6th
president of the University of Pennsylvania Penn gained notoriety in 1993 for the
water buffalo incident in which a student who told a group of mostly black female students to "shut up, you water buffalo" was charged with violating the university's racial harassment policy. Penn appointed a woman as president when it elected Dr.
Claire M. Fagin, who served from July 1, 1993, to June 30, 1994, becoming one of the first women to serve in the capacity of a university president with an
Ivy League university and Penn, presenting U.S. Senator
Rick Santorum the "Champion of Science" award
Judith Rodin, from 1994 through 2004, served as the first permanent female president of an
Ivy League university. During her presidency, Penn tripled its fundraising and the size of its endowment, engineered an internationally heralded community renewal program, attracted the most selective classes in the university's history (climbing from 16th to fourth in the leading national rankings), rapidly grew its academic core, and dramatically enhanced the quality of life on campus and in surrounding community by encouraging revitalization in
U City and
West Philly through (a) public safety, (b) establishment of
Wharton School alliances for small businesses (c) development of buildings and streetscapes that turned outward to U City and West Philly communities, and (d) establishment of a university-led partnership school, the
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander University of Pennsylvania Partnership School (aka "Penn Alexander School").
21st century In 2004,
Amy Gutmann succeeded Judith Rodin as the
8th president of the University of Pennsylvania, serving until 2022, the longest-serving president in Penn's history. In 2022, some asked for the tenure of Amy Wax,
a University of Pennsylvania law school professor to be revoked after she said the country is "better off with fewer Asians." In March 2023, Penn announced a first in the United States LGBTQ+ scholar in residence after a $2-million gift. In October 2023, Penn hosted a Palestinian Writers Conference on campus which was attended by several hundred students, scholars and members of the media. The conference was sponsored by student groups at the university though not by the university itself. Segments of the student body, alumni and the media expressed extreme hostility to the event, in some cases viewing the conference as an affront to their own perspectives in the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict. While the conference was viewed as a success by its organizers, it contributed to heightened tensions on campus between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli groups as well as advocates of free speech vs. people concerned with certain forms of expression. After the
2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, tensions across university campuses rose across the United States. Certain schools, including Penn, Harvard University and MIT were cited repeatedly in the media for particularly vocal student protests against Israeli military strikes against the civilian populations in Gaza as well as Hamas' violent attack on villages and military outposts just north of the Gaza/Israeli barrier wall. These protests led to increased concerns about antisemitism on college campuses. These concerns in turn led to Congressional hearings convening by several conservative Republican congressmen focused on the fears of rising antisemitism in the US. in spring 2024 In a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on December 6, when prompted for a "Yes/No" response to a hypothetical situation about protesters "calls for the genocide of Jewish people," Magill responses to the hypothetical scenario was viewed as equivocating as she stated it depended on context, and the university's codes of conduct and its guidelines for free speech and campus behavior. Magill's response was deemed by certain politicians, external stakeholders and members of the media as tolerant of antisemitism. Significant media pressure, vocal concerns voiced by a number of trustees and threats to suspend donations to the university by several large pro-Israel donors continued to mount. On December 9, the university's president
Liz Magill and the chairman of its board of trustees,
Scott L. Bok, resigned from their respective positions. Magill remained a tenured member of the Penn Law faculty. Bok later published a letter addressed to the university community detailing his perspective on the situation and his recommendations for university governance going forward. During 2024, pro-Palestinian students participated in
2024 pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses, starting the
2024 University of Pennsylvania pro-Palestine campus encampment. ==Campus==