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.

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