Chapters of Change: The blossom of Penn’s professional schools in the 19th century

Penn Forward launched last fall as a University-wide strategic initiative to plan for the next 10 years at Penn and beyond—a significant step to address a transformational moment for higher education and adapt to a society changing faster than ever. “Rather than being resigned to a future that happens to us,” wrote Penn President J. Larry Jameson in January, “we will take a hand in shaping it.”

This kind of bold confrontation with change is part of Penn’s history. True to its values statement, from the 18th century to the 21st Penn has embraced being “imperfect but self-improving" and “relentlessly focused on enhancing social good.”

Through the limited series “Chapters of Change,” Penn Today takes a historical look at key moments when the University adapted to meet society’s needs. When it, as it has today, also looked forward.

Responding to a changing nation

Classes opened Jan. 7, 1751, with more than 100 students, launching Penn’s first century.

As the College of Philadelphia, Penn also encompassed what was known as the Academy, which operated English, Latin, and science and mathematics curriculums. The College, at the time, accommodated the need for higher education in the American colonies as the population of European-educated settlers began to fade.

And despite the College’s growth and operations for almost 100 years, prior to 1850, says Assistant University Archivist J.M. Duffin, Penn was best known as the nation’s first medical school—and arguably is its original professional school.

By its second century, the nation had expanded considerably. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration spurred economic growth, making more forms of education desirable. Incrementally, the University grew closer to its multi-school form of today, most significantly in the 1850s, according to University Archives. For the first time, the law profession—which trained new lawyers primarily through apprenticeship—began to formalize. While lectures in law can be traced to 1790 with Founding Father and Penn trustee James Wilson, it was not until April 1850 that a faculty for the Law School formed under Dean George Sharwood, when law would be taught out of College Hall at Ninth and Market streets by actively practicing lawyers.

Henceforth, momentum for professional studies swelled.

‘A responsiveness suggested to those from without’

This second half of the 19th century saw, as Penn historian Edward Potts Cheyney writes in “History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740-1940,” a university approaching education with an eye for society’s needs—“a more ready responsiveness to those suggested from without,” he wrote.

School of Engineering and Applied Science

By 1851, the University’s first professor of chemistry was hired, jumpstarting natural sciences at Penn and ushering in the School of Mines, Arts, and Manufactures soon after in 1852. That department—what would later become the School of Engineering and Applied Science—would undergo several structural shifts in the decades that followed, accommodating continued regional interest in agriculture and burgeoning national interest in the mechanical arts as railroads transformed transportation and trade.

School of Arts & Sciences

In 1854, trustee Bishop Potter proposed in a letter—breaking from tradition—a precursor to Penn’s graduate studies: a space for college graduates with “a strong bent toward specific studies” to further their knowledge. This was not an obvious pivot at the time and sought to differentiate the University.

“There is nothing to distinguish our institution from one hundred and thirty or forty others, save that we teach better than most of them, a comparison of which few will know, fewer still acknowledge and very few appreciate,” he wrote.

The Graduate School, later the School of Arts & Sciences, inaugurated as the Department of Philosophy and was influenced by the civic education of German universities. It formed in 1882 after campus moved from Center City to West Philadelphia, also serving as Penn’s first school to admit women from its founding. The change showcased a university open to experimentation in service to society.

Weitzman School of Design

The Weitzman School of Design’s roots stretch to architecture classes held in 1869 before being formalized as part of the Towne Scientific School, an early iteration of Penn Engineering. The Department of Architecture was created in response to new inspiration from architects traveling abroad to Europe, as well as a post-Civil War uptick in construction. Established in 1890, it was greenlit by Provost Pepper, who had been instrumental in the founding of other professional schools of the era. Dean Warren P. Laird focused the curriculum on professional practice modeled on Beaux Arts.

School of Dental Medicine

To follow was the School of Dental Medicine, born in 1878 as the Department of Dentistry with a recognition of dentistry’s close relationship to medicine and that there was immense value to co-existing—literally, given its initial headquarters alongside chemistry in Medical Hall—with Penn’s expertise in chemistry and pathology. In 1892, Thomas W. Evans, the Philadelphia-native dentist to the royal courts of Europe, left his estate to establish a dental school that would be "second to none," later resulting in the Evans Building that was dedicated in 1915.

Penn’s dental graduates were so widespread globally, writes Cheyney, that the “American Dentist” written on doorplates around the world was “more than likely to be a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.”

School of Veterinary Medicine

So new was the profession of veterinary medicine, that faculty of Penn’s veterinary school—founded in 1884—published a collection of essays in 1897, “The Veterinary Profession,” explaining the valuable role of veterinarians in society. Penn faculty were on the forefront of defending the profession as not bound by the relevance of the horse to transportation, but rather a significant means to maintain the health of livestock and understand transmissible disease that ravaged the nation. Such an approach lives on today in the form of the Institute for Infectious & Zoonotic Diseases.

The Wharton way: Knowledge for good

Bridging the advent of Penn’s initial professional schools with those of the 20th century is the 1881 creation of the Wharton School through a donation from Joseph Wharton, an entrepreneur who earned his fortune and status largely through businesses in zinc and nickel.

Committed to an education that was useful in private enterprise and public affairs, Wharton’s founding letter proposed that students be led into “careers of unselfish legislation and administration. … An opportunity for good seems here to exist, and fairly comparable with that so largely and profitably availed of by the technical and scientific Schools.”

The Wharton School, the first higher education business school, emerged at a time of “economic disruption and, with it, social disorder,” says the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History Emeritus Walter Licht,  As a result, he says, the school emerged in the backdrop of the rise of so-called “social sciences” that investigated health, housing, poverty, and education. The Graduate School of Education and School of Social Policy & Practice, Licht notes, were founded in the 20th century based on an ethos that came from Wharton’s initial approach of favoring research inquiry over professional training—further setting the stage for a 20th century of research investment.

Franklin’s influence lives on

The University’s commitment to professional schools, in many ways—particularly with the Wharton School, observes Duffin —reflected the founding vision of Benjamin Franklin, providing an education that could lead “to mercantile and civic success and usefulness.”

Duffin notes that Penn was ahead of peers in recognizing workplace educational needs. He cites an example of Wharton, in the early decades of the 20th century, developing evening schools in places like Scranton and Wilkes-Barre for businesses that needed accountants.

Such flexibility is broadly emblematic of, he says, the University’s willingness “to develop programs that worked for the needs of the world.”

In his travels in the 1790s, painter Gilbert Stuart once observed that, though he considered Philadelphia the “Athens of America,” it still needed more institutions of higher education. By the late 1800s, a century later, the University of Pennsylvania had not only transformed itself, but begun to fulfill the needs articulated by Stuart in a society that—like today—was transforming.