DANIEL COIT GILMAN
GILMAN, DANIEL COIT, educator and first president of Johns Hopkins university, has been the leader in organizing and developing true university work in the United States. His devotion to the cause of higher education, his steady adherence to the ideal rather than the material tendency in our American system of education, and his constant desire to make the scholarship of our country, especially in all departments of higher research, more productive of intellectual force as well as of scientific knowledge and material progress, make him one of the leading figures in our constantly improving university system. It has been justly said of him and of his work: "He believes in individuality, and holds that institutions were made for men and not men for institutions. He knows no selfishness nor has he taken part in the tendency to absorb other foundations into a great educational trust; but his faith and services are for the university invisible, not made with hands, which consists in the productive, scientific work of gifted minds, wherever they are, sympathetic by nature and made still more so by the coordination of studies, as one of the most characteristic features of our age."
He was born in Norwich, Connecticut, July 6, 1831. He is a son of William Charles Gilman; and his earliest ancestor in America was Councillor John Oilman, one of the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, who came to this country from Norfolk, England, in 1638. Through his mother, Eliza Coit, he is descended from some of the leading families of eastern Connecticut.
His preparatory studies were pursued in New York city, and he was graduated from Yale college in 1852. He was engaged in post-graduate work in New Haven and Cambridge; for two years he studied in Berlin, attending lectures by Carl Hitter and Adolf Trendelenburg, after being attached for a short time to the American Legation in St. Petersburg. In 1855 while still in Europe he acted as one of the commissioners to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. He traveled extensively in Europe and gave attention to the social, political and educational condition of the countries he visited and particularly to their physical structure.
