Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania in 1740, and its campus opens ahead of you. The University of Pennsylvania was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1740 as a charity school and reorganized in 1755 as a college — the first institution in America to use the term university and offer instruction in both classical subjects and practical fields like medicine, law, and agriculture, a departure from the purely theological focus of Harvard and Yale. Penn's medical school, established in 1765, was the first medical school in the country, and its law school, founded in 1790, was among the earliest.
The campus you see along Locust Walk was developed in the late nineteenth century with red-brick Gothic buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style, unified by the brick walk lined with elm trees. The university's involvement with the surrounding West Philadelphia neighborhood has been complex: Penn expanded steadily through the twentieth century, acquiring and demolishing blocks of the surrounding Black neighborhood, a process that generated lasting tensions between the university and the community. The Furness Building library, designed by Frank Furness in 1890, is the most extraordinary building on campus, a Victorian fantasy of red brick, carved stone, and structural audacity.