Daniel Drew was not a man known for generosity. A cattle drover turned stock manipulator, he earned the label "robber baron" through decades of market schemes on Wall Street. But Drew was also a devout Methodist, and in 1866 he approached church leaders at the Methodist Centenary Celebration with an offer to build, equip, and endow a theological seminary near New York City. He purchased the Gibbons estate for $140,000, and the Greek Revival mansion that William Gibbons had commissioned in 1836 became the centerpiece of the new campus. Drew asked that his pastor, John McClintock, serve as the seminary's first president. The faculty Drew attracted made lasting contributions to biblical scholarship: James Strong, a professor of exegetical theology, compiled Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible during his tenure, a reference work that remains in use more than a century later.

For its first decades, Drew trained hundreds of Methodist ministers and produced scholarship that shaped American Protestantism. Women were admitted as students beginning in 1920, and Olive Winchester earned a Doctor of Theology in 1925, becoming the first woman to complete a Th.D. from Drew's divinity school. The institution's reach extended far beyond New Jersey - the Reverend Henry Appenzeller, an 1885 graduate, became the first Protestant missionary to Korea, founding the Korean Methodist Church, translating the Bible into Korean, and establishing schools that endure today. In 2016, members of the Chungdong First Methodist Church in Seoul, which Appenzeller founded in 1887, visited campus and donated a bronze bust of their patron. Graduate education began in 1912, and the university expanded steadily, adding a College of Liberal Arts and a Graduate School that broadened the curriculum into the humanities, sciences, and social sciences.

Madison sits about twenty-five miles west of New York City, an affluent commuter town in Morris County once known as "the Rose City" for its nineteenth-century rose-cultivating industry. Drew's campus occupies the original Gibbons estate, and the Florence and Robert Zuck Arboretum within its grounds contains native and non-native trees, two small glacial ponds, and populations of turtles, muskrats, herons, and migratory Canada geese. The setting has attracted filmmakers: scenes from Deconstructing Harry, The Incredible Hulk, and Insidious: The Red Door were shot on campus, and the university's Mead Hall famously doubled as a New England college in a 1999 episode of The Sopranos. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, an independent professional company, makes its home on the grounds.

Drew has a habit of quiet pioneering. In 1984, psychology professors Philip Jensen and Richard Detweiler launched the Computer Initiative, making Drew the first liberal arts college to require that every incoming freshman have a personal computer - a program that ran for nearly three decades before the rest of the world caught up. Former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean served as president from 1990 to 2005, tripling the endowment and committing more than sixty million dollars to campus construction. In 2015, research fellow William Campbell shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing a drug that treats parasitic diseases. The university's Rose Memorial Library holds a first edition of the King James Bible and what is regarded as the finest collection of Willa Cather's papers assembled in the United States. In January 2026, Drew announced the sale of Drew Forest and Zuck Arboretum to the Borough of Madison, a move that ensures the preservation of the green spaces that have defined the campus since the Gibbons era.