United States University

First university within the us could be a standing declared by over one U.S. university. within the us there's no official definition of what entitles an establishment to be thought-about a university versus a school, and also the common understanding of university has evolved over time. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica tells the story of the gradual emergence of U.S. "universities" thus:
“ within the us the word university has been applied to establishments of the foremost various character, and it's solely since 1880 or thereabouts that an attempt has been seriously created to differentiate between body and university instruction; nor has that effort nonetheless utterly succeeded. Harvard, William and Madonna, and Yale . . . were organized . . . on the plans of land schools that represent the schools of Oxford and Cambridge. Graduates of Harvard and Yale carried these British traditions to different places, and similar schools grew up in ny, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Rhode Island.... Around or close to these nuclei, throughout the course of the nineteenth century, one or additional skilled faculties were often connected, then the word university was naturally applied to a bunch colleges|of faculties|of facultys} associated additional or less closely with a central school or college. Harvard, as an example, most comprehensive of all, has seventeen distinct departments, and Yale has nearly as several. Columbia and Penn have the same scope. within the latter a part of the nineteenth century Yale, Columbia, Princeton and Brown, in recognition of their enlargement, formally modified their titles from schools to universities. ”
The issue is any confused by the actual fact that at time of commencement of the many of the establishments in question, the us did not exist as a sovereign nation. Moreover, queries of establishmental continuity typically build it troublesome to work out actuality "age" of any institution.
Harvard University calls itself "the oldest establishment of upper learning within the United States" and this claim isn't challenged. it's potential to disagree what year ought to be taken as Harvard's "real" commencement date (Harvard uses the earliest potential one, 1636, once the establishment was hired by the bay Colony). However, Harvard has operated since 1650 beneath constant corporation, the "President associate degreed Fellows of Harvard College"; it therefore has an unbroken institutional history geological dating back to the middle seventeenth century (an official Harvard website for the college of Engineering and Applied Sciences  claims, "Founded in 1636, Harvard is America's oldest university").
William & Madonna calls itself "America's second-oldest college", acknowledging Harvard's claim however adding that William & Madonna itself is that the nation's oldest faculty in its "antecedents," the school of Henricopolis or University of Henrico established by the Virginia Company close to state capital, Virginia. This establishment received a charter in 1618 and operated a faculty for many years before being destroyed with the city throughout the Indian Massacre of 1622, however it ne'er offered college-level instruction. the subsequent year, King King of England dissolved the Virginia Company, changing the Colony of Virginia to a dependency. William and Madonna was supported beneath a replacement charter in 1693