The University Of Virginia

The University of Virginia               (UVA or U.Va.), often referred to as simply Virginia, is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. UVA is known for its historic foundations, student-run honor code, and secret societies.

Its initial Board of Visitors included U.S. Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Monroe was the sitting President of the United States at the time of the founding; Jefferson and Madison were the first two rectors. UVA was established in 1819, with its Academical Village and original courses of study conceived and designed entirely by Jefferson. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site in 1987, an honor shared with nearby Monticello.

The first university of the restored American South elected to the Association of American Universities in 1904, UVA is classified as Very High Research Activity in the Carnegie Classification. The university is affiliated with 7 Nobel Laureates, and has produced 7 NASA astronauts, 7 Marshall Scholars, 4 Churchill Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, and 50 Rhodes Scholars, the most of any state-affiliated institution in the U.S. Supported in part by the Commonwealth, it receives far more funding from private sources than public, and its students come from all 50 states and 147 countries. It also operates a small liberal arts branch campus in the far southwestern corner of the state.

Since 1953, Virginia's athletic teams have competed in the Atlantic Coast Conference of Division I of the NCAA and are known as the Virginia Cavaliers. Virginia won its 7th men's soccer national title in December 2014, bringing its collective total to 24 National Championships, and 63 ACC Championships since 2002 (as of 2014), the most of any conference member during that time.US News and World Report ranks Virginia 2nd among all national public universities, tied with University of California-Los Angeles.


HISTORY

In 1802, while serving as President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson wrote to artist Charles Willson Peale that his concept of the new university would be "on the most extensive and liberal scale that our circumstances would call for and our faculties meet," and that it might even attract talented students from "other states to come, and drink of the cup of knowledge". Virginia was already home to the College of William and Mary, but Jefferson lost all confidence in his alma mater, partly because of its religious nature – it required all its students to recite a catechism – and its stifling of the sciences. Jefferson had flourished under William & Mary professors William Small and George Wythe decades earlier, but the college was in a period of great decline and his concern became so dire by 1800 that he expressed to British chemist Joseph Priestley, "we have in that State, a college just well enough endowed to draw out the miserable existence to which a miserable constitution has doomed it."These words would eventually ring true when William and Mary fell bankrupt after the Civil War and shut down completely in 1881, later being revived as a small teacher's college.

Farmland just outside Charlottesville was purchased from James Monroe by the Board of Visitors as Central College in 1817. The school laid its first building's cornerstone in late 1817, and the Commonwealth of Virginia chartered the new university on January 25, 1819. John Hartwell Cocke collaborated with James Madison, Monroe, and Joseph Carrington Cabell to fulfill Jefferson's dream to establish the university. Cocke and Jefferson were appointed to the building committee to supervise the construction. The university's first classes met on March 7, 1825.

The Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University:

commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named after its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur, abolitionist, and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest—of which half financed the establishment of The Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States at the time.Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution's first president on February 22, 1876,led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research.

Johns Hopkins is organized into ten divisions on campuses in Maryland and Washington, D.C. with international centers in Italy, China, and Singapore. The two undergraduate divisions, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood. The medical school, the nursing school, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health are located on the Medical Institutions campus in East Baltimore. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute, the Applied Physics Laboratory, the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the education school, the Carey Business School, and various other facilities.

The first research university in the Western Hemisphere and one of the founding members of the American Association of Universities, Johns Hopkins has been ranked among the world’s top universities throughout its history. It has topped rankings of U.S. academic institutions by National Science Foundation in terms of total scientific, medical, and engineering research and development for 31 consecutive years.Johns Hopkins is also among the top 20 in the tables of ARWU, QS, THE and U.S. News (Global),and ranked 12th in the U.S. News' national ranking for 2014. Over the course of almost 140 years, 36 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins (the first was U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who received his Ph.D. in history and political science from the university). Founded in 1883, the Blue Jays men’s lacrosse team has captured 44 national titles and joined the Big Ten Conference as an affiliate member in 2014.

HISTORY

On his death in 1873, Johns Hopkins, a Quaker entrepreneur and childless bachelor, bequeathed $7 million (approximately $137802778 with inflation) to fund a hospital and university in Baltimore, Maryland. At that time this fortune, generated primarily from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States.

The first name of philanthropist Johns Hopkins is the surname of his great-grandmother, Margaret Johns, who married Gerard Hopkins. They named their son Johns Hopkins, who named his own son Samuel Hopkins. Samuel named one of his sons after his father and that son would be the university's benefactor. Milton Eisenhower, a former university president, once spoke at a convention in Pittsburgh where the Master of Ceremonies introduced him as "President of John Hopkins." Eisenhower retorted that he was "glad to be here in Pittburgh."

The original board opted for an entirely novel university model dedicated to the discovery of knowledge at an advanced level, extending that of contemporary Germany. Johns Hopkins thereby became the model of the modern research university in the United States. Its success eventually shifted higher education in the United States from a focus on teaching revealed and/or applied knowledge to the scientific discovery of new knowledge.