First university in the United States
The first university in the United States is a status asserted by more than one university in the United States. Harvard University, founded in 1636, is the oldest operating university in the United States. From 1898 to 1946, however, when the Philippines were a U.S. territory, the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, established in 1611, was considered the oldest university under the American flag.
There is no consensus national definition of what entitles an institution to be considered a university versus a college. Differing definitions are used at the state level, and the common understanding of university has evolved over time. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica describes the gradual emergence of U.S. universities as follows:
The issue is further confused by the fact that at time of founding of many of the institutions in question, the United States did not exist as a sovereign nation. Questions of institutional continuity sometimes make it difficult to determine the true age of any institution. The status of first university, which includes private universities, is distinct from the claim of oldest public university in the United States, 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, which makes a disputed claim to have been established in 1740, considers itself to be America's first university, a title it claims on its website and in other published materials, due to its medical school being established separate from college in 1765 and receiving a revised charter in 1779 naming it a "University in Philadelphia". 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 & 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 first university in the United States
Institutional age
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. Harvard uses the earliest possible one, 1636, the year in which the Massachusetts General Court resolved to establish a fund in a year's time for a "School or College" to be started, which occurred in 1637 when the Massachusetts Bay Colony issued Harvard a charter. However, Harvard has operated since 1650 under the same corporation, the "President and Fellows of Harvard College"; as such, it has an unbroken institutional history dating back to the mid seventeenth century.The University of Pennsylvania claims to be the first university in America, drawing a distinction between this and the first college: "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."
The College of William & Mary calls itself "the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the country", acknowledging Harvard's claim but adding that: "Harvard may have opened first, but William & Mary was already planned. Original 1619 plans for W&M called for a campus at Henrico." This refers to the College of Henricopolis or University of Henrico established by the Virginia Company near Richmond, Virginia. With respect to the title of first university in America, it makes the claim on its website that "in 1781, by uniting the faculties of law, medicine, and the arts, William & Mary became America's first true university." Elsewhere on the website, it also claims to be the "First institution of higher education to have a law school, which made us the first college in the country to become a university ".
Official designation as a university
Harvard University
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. It is not clear from context, either above or in the paragraphs that follow, that the constitution meant to draw any semantic distinction between "college" and "university."
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".
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania claims that the 1779 charter from the Pennsylvania state legislature, establishing the university in Philadelphia and passing of a 1785 law naming the "University of the State of Pennsylvania" allows Penn to assert that "No other American institution of higher learning was named "University " before Penn was so named."The newly–designated university was intended to continue the College of Philadelphia, established by Benjamin Franklin and chartered in 1755 alongside an academy chartered in 1753. However, the Pennsylvania legislature in 1779 suspected the provost of the College of Philadelphia, William Smith, and the existing board of trustees of loyalist sympathies. They therefore created a new board for the university, taking over the old college and academy. Following protests by Smith and the trustees of the college, the legislature reinstated the college's 1753 and 1755 charters in 1789 and the college regained possession of its buildings, with the university moving to the Philosophical Society Hall. This arrangement lasted two years before, following the adoption of a new constitution by the state, a new charter in 1791 merged the College of Philadelphia and the University of the State of Pennsylvania, forming the University of Pennsylvania.
William & Mary
On December 4, 1779, just seven days after the founding of the "University of the State of Pennsylvania", an event occurred which the College of William & Mary describes thus:For historical reasons, the College of William & Mary, like Dartmouth College and Boston College, has continued to use "college" rather than "university" in its official name.
In 2020, William & Mary law professor Thomas McSweeney along with two undergraduate students published an article in the William & Mary Law Review pointing out that the Latin text of the university's 1693 royal charter referred to the institution as a studium generale, translated in the English text by the relatively insignificant "place of universal study". They argue that by creating the institution as a studium generale, which was the technical term used for a university in the middle ages, William & Mary was granted the status of a university in its 1693 charter. The same phrase was noted by Jurgen Herbst in 1982, who said: "The charter used the Latin term studium generale to suggest possible growth into a full-fledged university". Edward Eggleston in 1900 noted that: " is printed with Harwell, Blair and Clinton's account of Virginia, and the copy of the latter in the Library of Congress is annotated by some critic, who notes slight variations on the sense of the English version of the charter from the Latin original. The phrase 'studium generale' has a sense hardly appreciated by those who copied it from the ancient charter for William & Mary."