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ation, remains the envy of the entire world. But this has not always been the case. The American higher education structure took the best of the British university model (teaching, lecturing, and the seminar method) and melded it with the German university model (focus on primary research) to produce institutions that are considered among the finest in the world: colleges and universities that have produced more Nobel laureates and path-breaking research and discoveries than any other institutions in the history of mankind. As Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, correctly asserted, “The United States has, overall, the most effective system of higher education the world has ever known.” And all this was launched by a model crafted in Baltimore in 1876 at Johns Hopkins University by Daniel Coit Gilman, a Yale-trained geographer who served as Director of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale (designated as Connecticut’s land-grant institution in 1863) and the third president of the University of California. While Gilman’s alma mater awarded the first Ph.D. degree in America in 1861, it took the careful shaping of the research university—as effected by Gilman thanks to the beneficence of industrialist Johns Hopkins—to put the United States resolutely on the path toward leading the world in post-graduate education and the discoveries that have followed. This presentation will focus on Gilman and his influence on late 19th century American higher education and the model he and his Hopkins’ colleagues developed. From hiring the original six faculty to launching the longest-running university press in America to establishing the fundamental requirements of the Ph.D. to building a teaching hospital and founding a medical school, Gilman’s twenty-five-year tenure as president of Johns Hopkins University remains one of the most remarkable periods in the birth and development of the modern American research university. About the speaker: Michael T. Benson is president and professor of history at Coastal Carolina University. A twenty-five-year veteran of various positions in public higher education, Michael has served as president of four different colleges and universities in Utah, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Michael began his academic and professional career studying and working in Italy, England, and Israel for over six years. Michael earned a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University, a master’s degrees from the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, and a doctorate in modern history from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rotary Foundation Scholar and member of the Oxford Blues basketball team. He will complete the requirements for the master’s degree in liberal arts (MLA) from Johns Hopkins University in August 2021. Author of numerous publications, Michael has completed three books: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel (Praeger, 1997); College for the Commonwealth: A Case for Higher Education in American Democracy (with Hal Boyd, University Press of Kentucky, 2017), and Gilman at Hopkins: The Birth of the Modern American Research University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). His biography of Gilman was completed during his time within the MLA program at Hopkins and many of the courses he completed help to augment his research and writing during the past three years. Michael’s volunteer work has included service on the President's Council of the Association of Governing Boards (AGB) and chair of the NCAA Honors Committee. He was recently appointed to the board of trustees for the national leadership honor society, Omicron Delta Kappa Society (ODK), and Educational Foundation, Inc.