Clark University

Founding and early history On January 17, 1887, successful American businessman Jonas Gilman Clark announced his intention to found and endow a university in the city of Worcester, filing a petition in the Massachusetts Legislature requesting a charter for Clark University. [ 12 ] An Act of Incorporation was duly enacted by the legislature and signed by the governor on March 31 of that same year. Clark University was to incorporate the best features of universities in continental Europe and America, particularly Cornell University and Johns Hopkins . [ 13 ] Clark was a friend of Leland Stanford and was inspired by the plans for Stanford University , as well as Cornell and Johns Hopkins. Clark founded the university with an endowment of one million dollars, and later added another million dollars because he feared the university might someday face a lack of funds. [ 14 ] Opening on October 2, 1889, Clark was the first all-graduate university in the United States, with departments in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. [ 15 ] Faculty of the "Psychological" department in 1893 includes Franz Boas (seated, second from left) and president G. Stanley Hall (seated, middle). Edmund Sanford is seated to the right of Hall. G. Stanley Hall was appointed the first president of Clark University in 1888. He had been a professor of psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University , which had been founded just a few years prior and was quickly becoming a model of the modern research university . Hall spent seven months in Europe visiting other universities and recruiting faculty. He became the founder of the American Psychological Association and earned the first PhD in psychology in the United States at Harvard. Clark has played a prominent role in the development of psychology as a distinguished discipline in the United States ever since.

Franz Boas , founder of American cultural anthropology and adviser for the first PhD in anthropology which was granted at Clark in 1891, [ 16 ] taught at Clark from 1888 until 1892 when he resigned in a dispute with President Hall over academic freedom and joined the faculty of Columbia University . Albert A. Michelson , the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics , best known for his involvement in the Michelson–Morley experiment , which measured the speed of light, was a professor from 1889 to 1892 before becoming head of the physics department at the University of Chicago . The use of many of these buildings has changed since this postcard was printed around the middle of the 20th century Jonas G. Clark died in 1900, leaving gifts to the university and campus library, but reserving half of his estate for the foundation of an undergraduate college. This had been strongly opposed by President Hall in years past, but Clark College opened in 1902, managed independently of Clark University. Clark College and Clark University had different presidents until Hall's retirement in 1920. Clark University began admitting women after Clark's death, and the first female PhD in psychology was awarded in 1908. Early PhD students in psychology were ethnically diverse, with several early graduates being Japanese. In 1920, Francis Sumner became the first African American to earn a PhD in psychology. [ 17 ] Clark University, along with Stanford and Johns Hopkins, was one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities , an organization of universities with the most prestigious profiles in research and graduate education, and was one of only three New England universities, along with Harvard and Yale , to be a founding member. [ 18 ] Clark withdrew its membership in 1999, citing a conflict with its mission. [ 19 ]

Group photo 1909 in front of Clark University. Front row: Sigmund Freud , G. Stanley Hall , Carl Jung ; back row: Abraham A. Brill , Ernest Jones , Sándor Ferenczi . In order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Clark's opening, President Hall invited a number of leading thinkers to the university. [ 20 ] Among them was Sigmund Freud who, accompanied by Carl Jung , delivered his five famous "Clark Lectures" there over the course of five days in September 1909, introducing psychoanalysis to an American audience. [ 21 ] This was Freud's only visit to the United States. Clark granted Freud an honorary degree, which hangs in the Sigmund Freud House in Vienna, Austria. It was one of the few official distinctions Freud received during his lifetime. [ 22 ]

In the 1920s Robert Goddard , a pioneer of rocketry, considered one of the founders of space and missile technology, was chairman of the Physics Department. [ 23 ] The Robert H. Goddard Library is named for him. The Graduate School of Management (GSOM) was founded in 1982. In 1997, Clark announced the first PhD program in Holocaust Studies in the United States. This after the university convinced Debórah Dwork to leave Yale University and become Clark's first professor of Holocaust studies in the prior year. [ 24 ]