History
Clark University was founded by American businessman Jonas Gilman Clark in 1887. He started the university with a million dollars, and later added another million dollars to the fund because he feared the university might someday face a lack of funds. It was opened on October 2, 1889 as the first all-graduate university in the United States.
G. Stanley Hall was the first president of the university. He was the founder of the American Psychological Association and earned the first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States at Harvard. Clark has played a prominent role in the development of psychology as a distinguished discipline in the United States ever since. It was the location for Sigmund Freud's famous "Clark Lectures" in 1909, introducing psychoanalysis to the U.S. Clark celebrated the centennial of the visit in October 2009. A seated sculpture of Freud by Robert Shure is just outside the University Center; students pose with it and dress it up.
Franz Boas, founder of American cultural anthropology and advisor for the first Ph.D. in anthropology, taught at Clark between 1888 and 1892 before resigning (in a dispute with Hall over academic freedom) and moving to Columbia University. Albert Abraham Michelson, the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics, best known for his involvement in the Michelson-Morley experiment, which measured the speed of light, served as a professor from 1889 to 1892. In the 1920s Robert Goddard, a pioneer of rocketry, considered one of the founders of space and missile technology, served as chairman of the Physics Department. The Robert H. Goddard Library, a distinctive modern building by architect John M. Johansen was completed in 1969.
In April 2010, Clark University received the largest gift in its 123-year history, a $14.2 million offering from the late head of a company that ultimately grew into one of the nation's biggest property and casualty insurers. The gift from John Adam is intended to strengthen Clark's graduate programs in education, promote college-readiness among minority students and bolster its research profile related to urban education.
On July 1, 2010, former provost David Angel became the ninth president of Clark.
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—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
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“Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of the prophets. He saw with an open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)