It is fitting that the nation's current system of academic advising was born at the Johns Hopkins University, shortly after the university's inception. Hopkins, after all, from its creation, was a center of educational innovation, and its forward-thinking experimentalism was ingeniously tempered by due nods given to its European Old World predecessors. It was the first American university to supply seminar structure rather than just lectures; it was the first American institution of higher learning to turn a general liberal arts curriculum into actual undergraduate majors; and it was the first American university to grant doctoral degrees. Its founding father's reverence for the German and English university models and a rather distinctly American spirit of individualism and hunger for establishing firsts made Hopkins the ideal honing ground for a scholastic tradition that would endure for decades onwards at various institutions all over the world.

Johns Hopkins was officially established on February 22, 1876 (although receiving students in fall 1876), with both the scholarly and humanist goal in mind of “the encouragement of research ... and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell” (Gilman, 1950). The university had the blessing to pave its own way with ample funding from a private source with no specific agenda for the institution. Its initial sole benefactor was Johns Hopkins, a Baltimore businessman without any academic background whatsoever, who died in 1873 leaving no heirs. He, however, left in his 1867 will $7 million for the establishment of the university and Johns Hopkins Hospital. At the time, this was the largest philanthropic donation in United States history (the equivalent of approximately $88 million today.) This personal gift is surpassed only by alumnus Michael Bloomberg's total donation of $100 million during the 1990s. Hopkins's riches came mostly from his shares in Baltimore and Ohio railroad stock, but why Hopkins made such a grand donation is not altogether known. What is known is that he was a man of “good” politics. As a Quaker and an abolitionist, it has been speculated that Hopkins was interested in education when his own formal one was interrupted once his Quaker parents freed their slaves in 1807 and put Johns and his brother to work in the fields of their tobacco plantation. We can also assume he had a deep interest in bettering the future of the city in which he made the bulk of his fortune. But without any plans or visions for the school, the bettering would have to come from a truly academically invested single man's vision. So with the immediate appointment of Daniel Coit Gilman, a fairly established educator with progressive leanings, Hopkins was afforded a prosperous direction that not even its donor could have imagined.

According to Sandra Cook's (1999) “A Chronology of Academic Advising in America,” American colleges in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries featured college presidents and faculty who were responsible for acting in loco parentis—advising students on extracurricular activities, moral life, and intellectual habits. But “the first system of faculty advisers” (Crowley, 1949) was born at Hopkins, and we can deduce that it was first sparked in a conversation between Gilman and Charles D'Urban Morris, a classicist professor he had appointed somewhere around 1876–1877.

Gilman, Morris, and Griffin: From the European Influence to a Distinctly American System

Although a system of academic advisers was just one of the many contributions Gilman made to the realm of American higher education, it is one of his most enduring. Gilman was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1831, and he graduated from Yale College in 1852. He returned to Yale to help plan and raise funds for the founding of the Sheffield Scientific School. He was later a Sheffield professor of geography, as well as a librarian of Yale College from 1856 to 1865. He resigned these posts in 1872 to become president of the newly organized University of California. The state legislature put a damper on his time and freedom there, so on January 30, 1875, Gilman accepted the offer to establish Johns Hopkins and become its first president. Before actually taking his desk there in 1876, Gilman spent a year traveling extensively to consult the best academies of Europe (particularly Germany), studying their university systems and recruiting what he considered their best faculty. (The first six full professors he handpicked were three Englishmen and two Americans with degrees from German universities.) Advanced research was a huge priority of his, and he is credited with creating the first great American graduate university in the German tradition. An accomplished scholar, not only did he write biographies of James Monroe and James Dwight Dana, but his thoughts on academic philosophy were published in a collection of addresses entitled University Problems (1898), and The Launching of a University (1906), published just two years before his death.

Hopkins was the fruit of his pioneering spirit. As he stated in his inaugural address (Gilman, 1950), “My life thus far has been spent in two universities, one full of honors, the other of hopes; one led by experience, the other by expectations. May the lessons of both, the old and the new, be wisely blended here.” On top of his “personality plus science” values, his way of extending graduate school methodology to undergraduates was a breakthrough. The set-up of an effective graduate school had sufficient European precedent, but his greatest challenge was in applying this to an undergraduate curriculum that would please old and new thinkers. He writes of how many regarded “the traditional course of the American colleges [was] so nearly perfect that it should not only be established by the law of the university, but that it alone should be recognized. At the opposite extreme of opinion were many enlightened persons who believed that the slightest possible restriction should be placed upon the undergraduate's choice. These opposite views demanded one curriculum and no curriculum. An intermediate course was adopted” (Gilman, 1866). He held the revolutionary notion that in nourishing the collegiate aspect of the school, even the graduate level could benefit, as with a closely monitored base the freedoms of the higher levels could more responsibly flourish. “The College implies, as a general rule, restriction rather than freedom; tutorial rather than professorial guidance; residence within appointed bounds; the chapel, the dining halls, and the daily inspection. The college theoretically stands in loco parentis; it does not afford a very wide scope; it gives liberal and substantial foundation on which the university instruction may be wisely built” (Gilman, 1950). Gilman was the first to point out how college and university goals could go hand-in-hand: “The earliest foundations in our country were colleges, not universities ... earnest efforts are now being made to establish universities ... the cry all over the land is for university advantages, not as superseding but as supplementing collegiate discipline” (Gilman, 1950). For Gilman this, of course, meant shattering the traditional four-year class system of American colleges and fostering an environment that allowed undergraduates, much like their graduate counterparts, to proceed at paces they found acceptable, to take classes they were most interested in, and to work in areas they could excel. With the proper source of guidance—academic advisers, in this case—there was no reason why undergraduates could not also contribute to the graduate achievement of a research institution. Thus his progressive viewpoint that “our University seeks the good of individuals rather than of classes” (Gilman, 1950) was a point that the American educational system would long hold on to.

The shadow of Europe was a motivating factor for Gilman in the establishment of academic advising. In Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities 1636–1976, Brubacher and Rudy (1976) write that “in a sense, America had lived for many years on the 'borrowed capital' represented by the important theoretical insights which she imported from Western Europe.” Gilman, in contemplating the academic infrastructure of Hopkins, might have felt the pressure both to continue the Old World traditions that were the basis of great European universities, but also to adapt them in a way that would best suit the American student. Consequently programs of study would be broader and more flexible. Brubacher and Rudy even claim that Gilman had a “suspicion of 'genius,'” a condition he attributed as being most championed in European academies—“It is neither for the genius nor for the dunce but for that great middle class possessing ordinary talents that we build colleges,” Gilman declared, exhibiting the democratic streak that Americans had used to challenge their more established European counterparts.

Gilman was also well aware that most of the best professors were in Europe. He also was not sure of how to lure the best professors within the states since his new university had no established reputation. His solution was the hiring of young professors: “We shall hope to secure a strong staff of young men, appointing them because they have twenty years before them; selecting them on evidence of their ability; increasing constantly their emoluments, and promoting them because of their merit to successive posts, as scholars, fellows, assistants, adjuncts, professors, and university professors. This plan will give us an opportunity to introduce some of the features of the English fellowship and the German system of privat-docents; or in other words, to furnish positions where young men desirous of a university career may have a chance to begin, sure at least of a support while waiting for promotion” (Gilman, 1950).

Some would be quick to point out that any tell-tale European influence in the fabric of Hopkins would have to be German, with the graduate education valued first and foremost, with students being left to themselves to carve out their own vocational paths. So it may then come as a surprise that academic advising—a personalized form of scholastic counseling that most resembled the English don system—would have been borne out of this institution. Fittingly, a former Oxford University don was behind this.

Charles D'Urban Morris was born in Dorset, England, on February 17, 1827. He graduated from Oxford in 1849, and three years later became a fellow of Oriel College. He came to the United States in 1853 and taught in private schools before being appointed to the professorship of classics at the City College of New York. In the Johns Hopkins Magazine article titled “Pioneers of Scholarship: The Six Who Built Hopkins,” Grauer (2000) explains how because Morris had written two highly regarded Latin textbooks, Gilman made inquiries about him and found that he was considered one of the finest classical scholars in the United States or Britain. Since another professor already had the classics professorship, Gilman offered Morris the lesser collegiate professor post in 1876, in which he would be expected to concentrate on teaching undergraduates, while his senior colleague could focus on graduate students. Morris had a fan base among students, but they were few in number. Hopkins still focused on graduate studies and thus Morris was given little official support. Morris was something of an anomaly at an institution where early emphasis was still placed on science, research, and individual initiative. He taught classical Greek and Latin scholarship, which were less popular among the student population. Gilman noted “the times seemed to be against him, and the number of students who elected his courses was never very large” (Grauer, 2000). Nevertheless, Gilman recognized that Morris's students “honored and loved him as a father, as an elder brother,” and they grieved at his sudden death from a brief illness on February 7, 1886.

Morris was the man Gilman always openly credited with generating the concept of academic advising. Gilman acknowledged that he had in mind the tutor system of the English colleges, but that the term tutor had been so robbed of meaning in the American colleges that the name adviser was adopted instead. The plan for the academic advising system appeared as early as 1877-1878. In Pioneer: A History of Johns Hopkins University 1847–1889, Hawkins (1960) notes that by the fall of 1878 a friend congratulated Gilman on the new plan “which she said overcame the chief objection to the elective system.”

In examining Gilman's other projects at Hopkins, we can detect a definite zeal in establishing systems that would create a proper academic hierarchy. For instance, we know that in the first half decade of its inception, one of the problems at Hopkins was the alienation of junior faculty. These faculty, fearful of Gilman, remained voiceless and reluctant to dive into governing university affairs. We can assume that this tension among the young professors expedited the creation by the Academic Council in May 1882 of a lesser governing body, the Board of Collegiate Advisers, consisting of the president and one representative from each of the eight principal departments of undergraduate study. In many ways this served as a support group to integrate the lower tiers of the faculty with the higher.

As a consequence, this board also bolstered the advent of the academic advising system. We can deduce that the compromise of the group (major) system came out of a desire to be something other than the model of the classical college with a single curriculum, while also steering clear of the over-enthusiastic elective system. This system was one of the leading features of Sheffield, and Gilman had introduced it at California, as well. Characteristically he found a European prototype for this program, calling it “quite in accord with the various plans of attaining academic honors in the English universities” (Gilman, 1886). Although he intended to use the plan at Hopkins from the first, there was no need to elaborate it for twelve matriculates in the fall of 1876. Seven groups of “combinations” were announced during the first year: classical, premedical, mathematical, scientific, pre-theological, pre-law, and literary (not rigidly classical). After the 1882–1883 study of the Board of Collegiate Advisers, certain guidelines were put on the system. Students could not change groups (majors) “without very special reasons” approved by the Board of Collegiate Advisers—the rigid design of each group was there so “sufficient authority” was exerted “to prevent the student from shirking and from being listless and discursive” (Gilman, 1886). This went hand-in-hand with the academic advising program because, with the group system, guidance would be more and more necessary. Soon the systems were becoming so multi-layered that the academic advisers would need an adviser of their own.

Thus the quest for a dean, or “Chief of Faculty Advisers,” became the next step in the evolution of academic advising at Johns Hopkins. We know that Morris ended up acting as a dean in many ways till his death in 1886, but the search for a new official dean would further cement the university's striving for collegiate conventionalism. We know that Gilman, in searching for a successor to Morris, wanted a man who would be both teacher and adviser. Gilman early on specified the need for an older man with “long continued familiarity with collegiate work.” The opposite was hired: a young man by the name of John Henry Wright who, in less than a year, left to teach Greek at Harvard. Gilman, therefore, proceeded even more slowly in his replacement of a dean and eventually looked within his own faculty and staff. By spring of 1889, Professor Edward Herrick Griffin was appointed “Dean of College Faculty,” on top of already being professor of the history of philosophy. As Gilman (1889) states in his annual report: “The increasing number of undergraduate students has made it apparent for a long time past that an officer should be appointed to act as a friend and counselor of those who are thus enrolled,--the chief of Advisers. After much inquiry, the choice has fallen with unanimity upon Professor Griffin.” Gilman made it clear that Griffin's principal function would be as a “moral and intellectual force among the undergraduates,” their “guide and friend,” and he even entrusted the former Congregationalist minister with morning chapel service. As Hawkins (1960) points out, the appointment of Dean Griffin in the spring of that year symbolized the importance of the undergraduate work. Suddenly, in came a burst of undergraduate extracurricular activities, including athletics, and while the “college spirit” made some administrators nervous that the serious work environment would be a bit compromised, in the end it was a move that would make Hopkins more well-rounded than ever.

Griffin, officially the “Chief of Faculty Advisers,” was always known as “The Dean,” a title befitting the man responsible for actualizing much of Gilman's academic advising vision in his over twenty-five years of service at Hopkins (1889 to 1915). Born in 1843 at Williamstown, MA, Griffin was a highly educated man coming from a unique background. He had an A.B. and M.A. from Williams College, a Doctorate of Divinity from Amherst, and Doctorate of Law from both Princeton and Williams. At twenty-four, he became the pastor of the second largest Congregational church in Vermont. He came to Hopkins as a professor of rhetoric in 1881, and in 1889 he was appointed dean (“Dr. E. H. Griffin, Educator,” 1929). In 1886 he took over the position of professor of philosophy and logic, and from then until the time of his retirement in 1915 all seniors took his “famous course.” It was, however, his personality that made him an ideal dean and rendered him as extremely beloved in the annals of Hopkins. A “Dr. Wight,” quoted in a January 21, 1927 Alumni newsletter, in celebrating his service award from a fraternity, declared, “[students] looked to him for advice not only in scholastic problems but in any problem of their own life about which they were in need of help.” Similarly the January 1958 Johns Hopkins Magazine (Volume IX, Number 4) remembers him quite gloriously: “As dean he was the natural medium of communication between the faculty and the student body. He preferred his role as that of 'mediator rather than executioner' and he believed that the college should be conducted for the benefit of the student. He became known as the 'gentle dean.'” Remembered for “his kindliness and consideration,” Griffin took to having groups of students invited to his home for dinner. Apparently he was also known for visiting sick students at their home and sending them flowers. He was also championed for his introductory annual talk to the incoming class of first-year students, in which he outlined the workings of the university and the interrelationships of its various departments. On the occasion of his death in January 22, 1929, an unattributed obituary recalls these addresses: “When the dean addressed the boys in firm, dignified, yet unstilted language that flowed uninterruptedly, even the most unemotional of the youngsters knew that he was on the verge of a new step, a new period of life ... his address contained a fund of sound advice, the students said in later days.” He seemed an ideal fit for Gilman's formula of learned professor and humanitarian adviser. “Dr. Griffin was long held to be one of the great justifications of the educational system now thought by many to be antiquated—the system which tries to instill general cultures and wide scope of learning.... It was almost impossible to find a branch in which Dr. Griffin was not well versed. His breadth made him able to appreciate the problems confronting each of the men working under him, and made him come to be remembered as a delightful human being, rather than a cold-blooded scholar.”

The Nature of the Early Academic Adviserships

The advisers of the Gilman era had quite a task before them: not only were they the crucial agents of the tie that bound students to administration, they were also instituted as moral forces on campus. It is unclear exactly how many advisers there were to begin with. Hawkins (1960) says “there were approximately thirty faculty members teaching forty-nine matriculates in 1882–1883, and enough of these were advisers to guarantee personal attention.” An hour at which each faculty member could be consulted five days a week appeared in the Circulars (the handbook of the University). Gilman (1886) made sure that this very human role be emphasized when he declared: “The office is not that of an inspector, nor of a proctor, nor of a recipient of excuses, nor of a distant and unapproachable embodiment of the authority of the Faculty. It is the adviser's business to listen to difficulties which the student assigned to him may bring to his notice; to act as his representative if any collective action is necessary on the part of the board of instruction to see that every part of his course of studies has received the proper attention.”

The function of the early advisers as a liaison between faculty and student was outlined for all students in “Instruction Preliminary to the Degree of Bachelor of Arts,” in the Hopkins course catalogue, The Register (1878): “Each student who has been admitted either as a Matriculate or as a candidate for Matriculation, will be assigned by the President to the care of some one of the instructors, who will then act as his special adviser. It will be the business of such adviser to give counsel to the student as to his course of study, to watch his progress in it, and to serve as the channel through which the student may communicate to the Faculty any request he may wish to make.” Again, the same catalogue emphasizes that this faculty member, who is “chief adviser,” is employed in “counseling him in respect to the order of his studies, and acting when necessary as his medium of communication with the Faculty.”

The purpose of the system was two-fold. Part of the motivation was to provide guidance to undergraduates who would be otherwise seen as lost (especially as compared to the university's initial demographic, the graduate population), and was, therefore, parental in nature. In the University Circulars (1883), the text actually placed the role of the adviser side by side with the role of parents: “In accordance with parental advice and with the counsel of a member of the faculty who acts as an Adviser, every student must decide upon one of the several combinations of study which are offered to him.” The same Circulars, in the section titled Advisers, defined this person as possessing the faculties of “a friend to consult in the perplexities that arise in the progress of an educational course, ... to whom he will go for advice and assistance, and through whom he will present to the Faculty any special requests ... it is expected that every Adviser will make it his business to establish relations of friendliness and confidence with the students assigned to his care.”

The other purpose for an advising system was its generation as a logical offshoot of Gilman's affinity for groups (majors) and hierarchical structures to keep the administration functioning efficiently. Gilman seemed to feel that it was necessary not just for the overall well-being of the student body, but also for the faculty and administration. “One of his first duties will be to ascertain from each of them with what special intentions and wishes he [the student] has entered the University; and then to give him advice as to the studies he should pursue, and the order in which he should attempt to complete them. As soon as these arrangements are made, the Adviser should furnish the President with a scheme of the work which the student proposes to complete with a view to graduation.” We can tell that the University's administration wanted some separation from the day-to-day life of the students, and thus appointing such intermediaries would allow appropriate distance. The adviser, by tending to individual's academic goals on top of “friendly” duties, was in effect tending to the details of the school's microcosm so that the university macrocosm as a whole could hope to operate well. For instance, the text in the Circulars goes on to emphasize that “the Adviser being thus responsible for the studies taken up by the undergraduate students, and for the order in which they are to be pursued, no instructor will receive into a class any student who does not bring with him written assurance that his Adviser has considered his course as a whole, and approves his pursuing such a study at that time. Before withdrawing from a class, the student must also confer with his Adviser and ask his consent.” The advisers were therefore maintaining the integrity of the groups (majors) and establishing order among a student body that could not be expected to simply stay on track.

Much of the academic advising system comes from Gilman's own desire for an “intermediate path,” a school that could merge Old World and New World, English and German, even North and South. The adviser was yet another compromise, another system to meet all needs at a clear halfway point. “Every undergraduate was expected, with the advice of his parents, to determine which group he would adopt. He was also assigned to the care of one of the academic staff, who would act as his adviser, and whose counsel he might seek in familiar and friendly interviews” (Gilman 1886). The friendly-air/efficient-system dichotomy was also explicitly addressed by Gilman when he went on to express:

“directing every undergraduate to one of the staff as his counselor and adviser has not only given efficiency to the group system of studies, but has tended to the maintenance of most friendly intercourse between teachers and their pupils. The adviser's relation to the student is like that of a lawyer to his client or of a physician to one who seeks his counsel. ... It is the adviser's business to listen to difficulties which the student assigned to him may bring to his notice; to act as his representative if any collective action is necessary on the part of the board of instruction; to see that every part of his course of studies has received the proper attention. The advisers are purposely chosen as representatives of all the groups; they hold frequent meetings and advise with one another as to their methods of instruction and as to the improvements which are possible in the study plans. They scrutinize with care the report of proficiency which are laid before them by the different instructors; and determine the honors and promotions of the undergraduates. They have never had occasion to consider the discipline of a student for misconduct or discourtesy; for the entire university is organized as a society and the collegiate students become as conscious of this as the graduates. The collegiate residence, the common table, the enforced attendance upon chapel, and the sharp distinction between study hours and play-time are wanting; but the best characteristic of college life is perpetuated and revived—the friendly guidance of young scholars by those who are more mature and who love the work of teaching” (Gilman, 1886).

This is key to understanding Gilman's educational philosophy—character, spirit, and personality were paramount in instructors' profiles as Gilman gave them the double responsibility of being role models, reflecting what he hoped the students could one day be. “For my own part, I believe that the merits of a college consist in what it does for the character of students. If they are taught fidelity and accuracy; if they learn to appreciate the value of authority as well as the privileges of freedom, if their wills are trained to overcome difficulty; if social, intellectual, and religious natures are developed; if the love of knowledge is quickened—then the college is a success. Manliness will be its product. Example is more powerful than legislation in the training of young men. They follow those they admire. Hence it seems to me that the college will be efficient in direct proportion to that character of its academic staff” (Gilman, 1950). Gilman seemed to be implying that if the teachers have outstanding natures, so will the students and thus so will society at large. By the end of his inaugural speech, he echoes this desire to bolster male development through the mix of academic discipline and interpersonal counseling: “The object of the university is to develop character—to make men. It misses its aim if it produces learned pedants, or simple artisans, or cunning sophists, or pretentious practitioners. Its purport is not so much to impart knowledge to the pupils, as to whet the appetite, exhibit methods, develop powers, strengthen judgment, and invigorate the intellectual and moral forces. It should prepare for the service of society a class of students who will be wise, thoughtful, progressive guides in whatever department of work or thought they may be engaged.”

Hawkins (1960) writes that “the favorable student-faculty ratio and the sense of innovation made [academic advising] unusually effective in the opening years of Johns Hopkins,” but for Gilman the true triumph came in the subsequent “wide imitation of the adviser system [as] a gain for American colleges.” Indeed Johns Hopkins today continues to be a testament to Gilman's interest in merging scholarship and research, undergraduate interests with graduate, the individual with the academy. Today, with approximately 4,200 undergraduates and 1,600 graduate students, nearly 80 percent of Hopkins undergraduates produce research by the time of graduation, as Hopkins is still a leader in encouraging original research at the undergraduate level just as much as at the graduate level. Hopkins has gone on to enjoy affiliation with thirty-one Nobel laureates—a faculty of examples that Gilman would applaud. And, as Gilman would have wanted, the group system expanded to a diverse array of majors, with the college's academic strengths being incredibly eclectic: art history, biological and natural sciences, biomedical engineering, English, history, international studies, medicine, political theory, public health, Romance languages, and writing.

For Gilman, after all, the secret of his success at Hopkins in his time and onward—a lesson for any academic institution for that matter—lay in one key element: “It is not the site, nor the apparatus, nor the halls, nor the library ... which draws the scholars—it is a body of living teachers, skilled in their specialties, eminent in their calling, loving to teach. Such a body of teachers will make a university anywhere” (Gilman, 1950).

These teachers, who were also the academic advisers, thus become the very heart of the institution. While brick and mortar house the libraries, provide shelter for students, make space for laboratories and lecture halls, they are simply shells without the presence of humans who are engaged in the most critical task of helping their charges succeed at their academy.

Today we may find the language of the nineteenth century stilted and the references to a male-only student body sexist, although Gilman himself was not against coeducation. Nonetheless, we clearly recognize the seeds of the academic advising profession as envisioned by Gilman. Further, the role of academic adviser at Hopkins in the last quarter of the nineteenth century doesn't seem too far off from the role of academic adviser in the twenty-first century. Gilman's (1883) language is unequivocal: “... every under-graduate is assigned to one of the teachers who acts as his adviser, and who has an influential control over his selection of studies.” Thus as the need for more freedom in curricular choice intersects with the in loco parentis philosophy endorsed in the last quarter of nineteenth-century American higher education institutions, Gilman proposes the establishment of an academic adviser system. Ironically the strong presence of an in loco parentis philosophy underpinning the role of adviser in the nineteenth century, while losing much of its caché in mid-twentieth century, is finding a resurgence now in slightly altered form. That the words of Gilman can still have meaning 130 years later is a testament to his foresight. The formal system of academic advisers that Gilman espoused takes on many forms now, but the very core of how advising is practiced can be seen back then at the beginning of one of America's great universities. While Hopkins is given credit for many significant firsts in American higher education, adding the creation of a formal system of academic advisers to the roster gives additional luster to this institution.