First university in the United States
First university in the United States is a status asserted by more than one U.S. university. Historically, when the Philippines was still a United States territory, the University of Santo Tomas was considered the oldest university under the American flag. Presently in the United States, there is no official definition of what entitles an institution to be considered a university versus a college, and the common understanding of university has evolved over time.
The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica tells the story of the gradual emergence of U.S. "universities" thus:
The issue is further confused by the fact that at time of founding of many of the institutions in question, the United States didn't exist as a sovereign nation. Moreover, questions of institutional continuity sometimes make it difficult to determine the true "age" of any institution. Furthermore, contesting of the status of first university should not be confused with the contesting of the status of oldest public university in the United States, which is a title claimed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Georgia, and the College of William & Mary.
Claimants and potential claimants
Several universities claim to be the first university in the United States:- Harvard University, founded in 1636, claims to be "the oldest institution of higher education in the United States". The claim of being "the first university" has been made on its behalf by others. An early official mention of Harvard as "the University" is found in the Massachusetts Constitution, first submitted on October 28, 1779, by James Bowdoin, Samuel Adams, and John Adams.
- The University of Pennsylvania, established in 1740, considers itself to be America's first university, a title it claims on its website and in other published materials. The university has published a book about being the first university in America, and its website contains numerous instances of the phrase "America's First University".
- The College of William and Mary's website states, "The College of William and Mary was the first college to become a university."
- Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876 and claims to be "America's first research university".
Claims of being "the first university in the United States"
Institutional age
does not claim to be the first college, but it does claim to be the first university in America. "In the Anglo-American model, a college, by definition, is a faculty whose subject specialization is in a single academic field. This is usually arts and sciences, but may also be one of the professions: law, medicine, theology, etc. A university, by contrast, is the co-existence, under a single institutional umbrella, of more than one faculty. With the founding of the first medical school in America, Penn became America's first university. No other American institution of higher learning was named "University" before Penn."Harvard University calls itself "the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States" and this claim is rarely challenged. It is possible to disagree what year should be taken as Harvard's "real" founding date. However, Harvard has operated since 1650 under the same corporation, the "President and Fellows of Harvard College"; it thus has an unbroken institutional history dating back to the mid seventeenth century.
William & Mary calls itself "America's second-oldest college", acknowledging Harvard's claim but adding that William & Mary itself is the nation's oldest college in its "antecedents," the College of Henricopolis or University of Henrico established by the Virginia Company near Richmond, Virginia. This institution received a royal charter in 1618 and operated a school for several years before being destroyed with the town during the Indian Massacre of 1622, but it never offered college-level instruction. The following year, King James I dissolved the Virginia Company, converting the Colony of Virginia to a crown colony. William and Mary was founded under a new charter in 1693.
Official designation as a "university"
University of Pennsylvania
The founding date of the University of Pennsylvania is associated with more subjectivity and institutional debate than the more straightforward dates used by the eight other colonial era colleges. Harvard University uses as its founding date 1636, the year in which the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony formally voted to budget funds for the creation of a college in Newtowne, later called Cambridge. The seven remaining colonial era colleges consider their founding dates to be the year in which they were first granted charters and thus became legal corporations.Penn's claim as the first university in the United States is three-fold: the 1765 founding of the first medical school in America made Penn the first institution to offer both "undergraduate" and professional education; the 1779 charter made it the first American institution of higher learning to take the name of "University"; and existing colleges were established as seminaries. Harvard and Yale were officially affiliated with the Congregational Church. Although officially nonsectarian, Princeton was founded by Presbyterians. Similarly, though Penn was officially nonsectarian, it was established by a board composed of Church of England and Methodist members, with a curriculum consistent with those religions.
The first charter for an institution of higher learning in Philadelphia was granted in 1755 to the College of Philadelphia, a new undertaking of the Academy of Philadelphia, which had previously taught only secondary students. In 1779, a charter was granted to a separate institution called the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" which in 1791 was merged with the College of Philadelphia and issued a new charter as the "University of Pennsylvania".
Despite the three charter dates of 1755, 1779 and 1791, the university used for more than a century the founding date of 1749, the year in which founder Benjamin Franklin first convened a board of trustees to organize the new institution. In 1899, the university's board of trustees voted to change the founding date by nine years to 1740, the year in which a group of Philadelphia citizens established a trust for a charity school requested by traveling evangelist George Whitefield. A frame of a building was erected, but the citizens discovered that they lacked the funds to furnish the interior chapel or open the charity school.
The unfinished edifice lay vacant for roughly a decade until Franklin's nascent Academy of Philadelphia was looking for space to begin operations and purchased the still unused building in 1750. The Academy of Philadelphia operated a charity school for a few years and this brief period was the basis for the trustees' claims of institutional continuity to the earlier date, as the Academy had assumed the trust of the charity school for local orphans planned but not begun by the original fundraisers of the building.
Parenthetically, the University of Pennsylvania calls itself the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, comparing the legal charter dates of Princeton University and Columbia University with the 1740 date in which the trust had been established and fundraising had begun for the building it would ultimately purchase in 1750.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Princeton University and Columbia University do not follow the same train of thought in their own institutional histories. Princeton and Columbia consider themselves the fourth and fifth oldest institutions of higher learning in the country, respectively, comparing the three collegiate charter dates of 1746, 1754 and 1755.
This seemingly minor difference of opinion assumes greater importance in the world of academia. Formal academic processions such as those at graduation ceremonies place visiting dignitaries and other officials in the order of their institution's founding dates, explaining why universities have sometimes used strained rationales to claim and defend dates as early as possible. The University of Pennsylvania changed its founding date in 1899, four years after elite universities in the United States agreed that academic processions would follow this age-based hierarchy. The revision in founding date was the result of a three-year campaign initiated by the university's "Alumni Register" magazine to make it older than Princeton for these processions.
The argument used is that it is the common legal practice to date the founding of an institution from the date of founding for the oldest trust it administers. In this case, the oldest trust that the University of Pennsylvania administers was established in 1740. Historian Edward Potts Cheyney states that, "it might be considered a lawyer's date; it is a familiar legal practice in considering the date of any institution to seek out the oldest trust it administers." He also points out that Harvard's founding date is merely the year in which the Massachusetts General Court resolved to establish a fund in a year's time for a "School or College". As well, Princeton claims its founding date as 1746—the date of its first charter. However, the exact words of the charter are unknown, the number and names of the trustees in the charter are unknown, and no known copy is extant. Though it is a common practice to use the dates of charter as the official date, the majority of the American Colonial Colleges do not have clear-cut dates of foundation.
In brief, in 1779 the College of Philadelphia was directed by provost William Smith. One might have expected it to evolve into the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" but this did not occur. "Since the Revolutionary state legislature felt that the board of trustees led by Provost Smith contained too many suspected loyalist sympathizers, they created a new board of trustees." Thus, the University of the State of Pennsylvania was created de novo. A schism occurred, with an attenuated College of Philadelphia continuing under Dr. Smith's direction. In 1791 Pennsylvania adopted a new state constitution which merged the College of Philadelphia and the University of the State of Pennsylvania into the "University of Pennsylvania," with a board of trustees made up of twelve men from each of the two parent institutions. "It is this institution and this board of trustees that has continued to this day."
William and Mary
On December 4, 1779, just seven days after the founding of the "University of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania", an event occurred which William and Mary describes thus:William and Mary has a published list of its first graduates available through its library.
Harvard
The Constitution of Massachusetts, submitted by James Bowdoin, Samuel Adams, and John Adams to the full Convention on October 28, 1779 and ratified on June 15, 1780, contains this language:The word "university" is used a total of five times in reference to Harvard in the Massachusetts Constitution.
In George Washington's honorary Doctor of Laws degree, conferred by Harvard on April 30, 1776, the text of the degree refers to Harvard twice as "our University".