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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“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
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—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“When the coherence of the parts of a stone, or even that composition of parts which renders it extended; when these familiar objects, I say, are so inexplicable, and contain circumstances so repugnant and contradictory; with what assurance can we decide concerning the origin of worlds, or trace their history from eternity to eternity?”
—David Hume (1711–1776)