THE OCEANOGRAPHY CLASSROOM | Doing More With Less

At his inauguration as founding president of The Johns Hopkins University, Daniel Coit Gilman outlined the central role of a new type of American university. "The academy should make for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less suffering in the hospital, less fraud in business…and less folly in politics." Gilman had resigned his post as second president of the University of California to accept the Hopkins presidency in 1876. The aim of the modern research university, said Gilman, was to "extend, even by minute accretions, the realm of knowledge." His work at the University of California was hamstrung by a recalcitrant state legislature—funding and control issues took precedence over the need to build a great institution combining undergraduate and graduate colleges, the German model adopted at Hopkins.