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Harvard University

Contact Information
Harvard University
University Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138-3800
MA Tel. 617-495-1000
Fax 617-495-0754

Type: School
On the web: http://www.harvard.edu
 Employees: 13,000
Employee growth: (27.8%)

Many parents dream of sending their children to Harvard; and at more than $30,000 a year (undergraduate), some even dream of being able to afford it. Harvard, the oldest institution of higher learning in the US, is home to Harvard College (undergraduate studies) and 10 graduate schools including the Harvard Business, Law, and Medical Schools. The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard was created when Radcliffe College and Harvard University merged in 1999. Harvard has about 20,000 students, about half of whom are enrolled in graduate programs. Harvard's endowment of more than $29 billion is the largest of any university in the world. (Yale ranks #2.)

Key numbers for fiscal year ending June, 2006:
Sales: $2,999.6M
One year growth: 7.1%

Officers:
Provost: Steven E. (Steve) Hyman
VP Government, Community, and Public Affairs: Alan J. Stone
Acting VP Alumni Affairs and Development: Robert Cashion

 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Harvard University

Oldest institution of higher learning in the U.S. and widely considered one of the most prestigious. Founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Mass., it was named Harvard College for a Puritan minister, John Harvard (1607 – 38), who bequeathed to the school his books and half of his estate. It became a university with the establishment of the medical school in 1782. Schools of divinity and law were established in the early 19th century. Charles Eliot, during his long tenure as president (1869 – 1909), made Harvard an institution with national influence. Harvard has educated seven U.S. presidents, many Supreme Court justices, cabinet officers, and congressional leaders, dozens of major literary and intellectual figures, and numerous Nobel laureates. Its undergraduate school, Harvard College, contains about one-third of the total student body. Radcliffe College (1879) was a coordinate undergraduate women's college. From 1960 women graduated from both Harvard and Radcliffe, and in 1999 Radcliffe was absorbed by Harvard, the name surviving in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard University also has graduate or professional schools of business, education, government, dentistry, architecture and landscape design, and public health. Among its affiliated research institutes are the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Fogg Art Museum. Its Widener Library is one of the largest and most important libraries in the world.

For more information on Harvard University, visit Britannica.com.

 
US History Encyclopedia: Harvard University

Puritans so dreaded an uneducated ministry that in 1636, only six years after the founding of Massachusetts Bay, the colony's General Court voted money "towards a schoale or colledge." Named after the Reverend John Harvard, a private benefactor, Harvard College opened in 1638 in a house inside a cattle yard donated by the town of Cambridge, and in 1642, it graduated the first class of nine men. In 1650, the legislature granted an official charter providing for governance by a small, self-perpetuating corporation and a larger board of overseers to be chosen by the magistrates; half were to be ministers.

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The college's charge was "the education of youth in all manner of good literature Artes and sciences." This meant four years of grammar, rhetoric, logic, ethics, natural science, metaphysics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and history as well as Latin, Greek, and (for interpreting the Old Testament) Hebrew. Prospective ministers, the majority of Harvard's graduates for several generations, studied theology for an additional three years. But the established Congregational Church seldom interfered in either curriculum or training.

Following the English (rather than the European) model, students lived in dormitory rooms and ate meals with tutors at "commons." The tutors, ill-paid and often no older than the students, answered to the president of the college, who also taught. Henry Dunster was a formidable early president (1640–1654), as was Increase Mather (1685–1701), a famous Boston divine. Order was a chronic problem. Harvard students, many of whose families paid their tuition with farm produce, consumed much "beef, bread, and beer" and fathers frequently had to pay for broken windows. During a somnolent eighteenth century, posted student social rankings were a chief preoccupation.

Major Changes and Enhanced Independence

Under the presidencies of John T. Kirkland (1810–1828) and especially Josiah Quincy (1829–1845), Harvard—now with a medical college (1782) and law school (1817)—erected new buildings, established permanent professor-ships, and increased its enrollments. Fewer boys came from the New England hinterlands, and more from Boston's economic and cultural elite, grown rich from commerce, finance, and manufacturing. Scions of the plantation South arrived. By the time of the Civil War, faculty were better paid, even affluent, mixing easily with Boston society. Ministers were increasingly rare and serious researchers and men of letters more common, as in, for example, the fields of criticism (James Russell Lowell), chemistry (Josiah Cooke), geology (Louis Agassiz), and economics (Francis Bowen). President James Walker (1853–1860) remarked, "Now a professor is as much a layman as a lawyer or a physician is." Instruction itself grew more secular; only 10 percent of antebellum Harvard graduates became ministers, a startlingly low figure for nineteenth-century America.

At midcentury, Harvard—still state chartered and partially state funded—faced two challenges: one from religious conservatives opposed to the university's religious liberalism, and another from political liberals opposed to its exclusiveness and its hostility to abolitionism. In response, the institution moved to insulate itself from political interference by severing its relation to the state government, forgoing funds but jettisoning politically appointed overseers. The corporation and president dealt with a lesser challenge—this from faculty demanding greater control—by firmly grasping (as a professor put it) "the money, the keys, and the power."

The Regimes of Charles W. Eliot and A. Lawrence Lowell

Charles W. Eliot's presidency (1869–1909) witnessed further change. Student numbers rose to fifteen hundred. Students from the defeated South largely disappeared, to be replaced by representatives of the new economic power centers, New York City in particular. Raised in privilege, students led "gilded" lives at Harvard, immersed in clubs, sports, and society and earning "gentlemen's Cs." Private gifts, from wealthy alumni and others, increased dramatically. President Eliot, trained in chemistry, introduced an elective system that relaxed the traditional college curriculum. But the most profound innovation came when Eliot laid the foundations of the graduate school in 1872. The stress on advanced instruction and research produced unrivaled departments of history (Henry Adams, Edward Channing), philosophy (Josiah Royce, William James), fine arts (Charles Eliot Norton), and English (George Lyman Kittredge), among many others. Eliot strengthened the law and medical schools and established a professional school of business administration. By the end of Eliot's term, Harvard, with its illustrious alumni, lavish patronage, national reach, and distinguished faculty, was the premier institution of higher education in the country, a position it has largely maintained.

President A. Lawrence Lowell (1909–1933), a political scientist, established new professional schools (public health, engineering) but elsewhere modified Eliot's legacy. Focusing anew on undergraduates, Lowell introduced major fields, the tutorial system, and the house plan, which lodged the three upper classes with tutors in residential units, partly as a way to undermine the influence of the Harvard clubs. Lowell's defense of the right of students and faculty to dissent—to oppose U.S. entry into World War I or be prolabor—led to tension with the corporation but enhanced Harvard's reputation for academic integrity. Lowell tolerated new ethnic groups, making Harvard perhaps the most tolerant of American universities. Yet he also helped impose a quota on the admission of Jewish students, fearing that they would crowd out Protestant applicants and develop "inappropriate ethnic consciousness."

Research Science, Student Radicalism, and an Enlarged Endowment

The presidencies of the chemist James B. Conant (1933–1953) and the classicist Nathan Pusey (1953–1971) marked a deemphasis on undergraduates and a dramatic shift in resources toward research science at the expense of the traditional liberal arts. Harvard became a chief recipient of federal research grants during World War II and the Cold War, which triggered the appointment of top researchers in key scientific and engineering fields and the construction of substantial new facilities for them. As of 1967, Harvard had trained 16 percent of Nobel Prize winners, more than any other university. By 1971, total enrollments were 40,000 and the operating budget was $200 million.

The struggle to maintain high academic standards while addressing radical activist demands and the needs of a suffering Cambridge consumed much of the administration of President Derek Bok (1971–1991), a lawyer who expanded Harvard's global presence and applicant pool. His successor, Neil Rudenstine (1991–2001), concentrated on increasing the university's endowment, which rose from $1.3 billion in the early 1970s to over $15 billion by the end of the century. This made Harvard the wealthiest university in the United States by a substantial margin, which prompted criticism of its high yearly tuition ($35,000) and low pay rates for janitorial and other staff. Lawrence Summers, an economist and former secretary of the Treasury, was appointed Harvard's twenty-seventh president in 2001.

Bibliography

Hawkins, Hugh. Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Hershberg, James. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age. New York: Knopf, 1993.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936.

Story, Ronald. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1900–1970. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980.

Yeomans, Henry A. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, 1856–1943. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Harvard University,
mainly at Cambridge, Mass., including Harvard College, the oldest American college.

Harvard College

Harvard College, originally for men, was founded in 1636 with a grant from the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638 it was named for John Harvard, its first benefactor. During the 1640s the college expanded despite inadequate finances, and in 1650 it was incorporated and chartered by the General Court. Intended to be an institution for the education of Puritan ministers, it grew to be an institution of general education, and new and more liberal subjects and policies were introduced.

In the 18th cent., particularly under John Leverett (1708–24), enrollment and campus facilities increased and the religious attachment to Congregationalism declined. Systematic theological instruction was inaugurated in 1721 with the establishment of a professorship of divinity, and by 1827, with the opening of Divinity Hall, Harvard became a nucleus of theological teaching in New England. In its early years the college was largely supported by the colony and the New England community as a whole, but support soon came in the form of gifts, and in 1823 the last state grant was received. Under Charles W. Eliot, the college became a great modern university. Its physical plant and curriculum were expanded, the graduate school was established, and the law and medical schools were reorganized. Eliot is also noted for his introduction of the elective system at Harvard.

Radcliffe, Graduate Schools, and Other Facilities

From two distinct schools, Radcliffe College for women (est. 1879, chartered 1894) and Harvard evolved in the 1970s into coordinate colleges with shared facilities and professors; all degrees were granted by Harvard. In 1999, Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard College, which became a coeducational undergraduate institution. At the same time the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard was established. The university also has graduate schools of divinity (1816), law (1817), arts and sciences (1872), education (1920), business (1908), and design (1936). Harvard also has schools of medicine (1782), public health (1922), and dental medicine (1941). The school of public administration (1936) was reorganized as the John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1966.

Harvard's libraries house over 15 million volumes, the largest university collection in the world. Among its many museums are the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Fogg, Sackler, and Busch-Reisinger museums of art. Harvard is closely associated with numerous research facilities, including the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Arnold Arboretum, Harvard Forest, a center for Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and a center for Italian renaissance studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy.

Bibliography

See histories by S. E. Morison (1936) and E. J. Kahn (1969).

 
Education Encyclopedia: Harvard University

Harvard University, the oldest educational institution in the United States, was founded sixteen years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636 and later chartered in 1650 in what is now the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere, Harvard University was named for its first benefactor, John Harvard of Charlestown, Massachusetts, who, on his death in 1638, left his library and a portion of his estate to the school. In 1640 Henry Dunster became the first president and also constituted the entire faculty. For more than fifty years Harvard remained the only college in America.

It has been said that "when Harvard speaks, the country listens," and throughout its history Harvard, as the country's premier university, shaped the direction of education in the United States. John Harvard's bequest was the first of the private gifts for education in America, and the act of the colony in 1636 marks the beginning of state aid to higher education in the United States. New England's First Fruits, an anonymous tract celebrating the establishment of higher education in the colonies, was published in London in 1643. Among the influential colonists were a number of Cambridge (hence Harvard's city name) and Oxford graduates who were eager to replicate the English college in the American frontier. During its early years, Harvard College offered a classic academic course based on the English university model merged with the prevailing Puritan philosophy of the early colonists. Harvard College was loosely affiliated with the Congregationalist church; not surprisingly most of its first graduates became ministers throughout New England, while other graduates entered government service or private business.

Curriculum

Harvard College's course of study was similar to the curricula of Cambridge and Oxford universities. Unlike the English model, Dunster first created a curriculum for Harvard that only lasted three years, but in 1652 a fourth year was added. The Harvard core curriculum became a model for American education institutions to follow, not only colleges but also grammar schools and academies that prepared students for higher learning and collegiate studies. The curriculum from its founding through the eighteenth century was theological; early nineteenth-century studies expanded the curriculum to include Latin, Greek, mathematics (including astronomy), English composition, philosophy, theology, natural philosophy, and either Hebrew or French. This prescribed course of study established a pattern for American liberal arts colleges. The most common forms of instruction were oral exercises - the lecture, the declamation, and the disputation.

Charles W. Eliot, who served as president from 1869 to 1909, transformed the college into a modern university, a feat accomplished primarily by transforming the curriculum. Although course electives existed at Harvard throughout the nineteenth century, Eliot became an unrelenting advocate of the elective system, which in turn permitted him to initiate institutional reform where college studies could accommodate broader as well as more specialized interests of students. The elective system permitted Harvard to become more responsive to the many evolving democratic, technological, and vocational needs of society. By the turn of the twentieth century, Harvard's elective system was the freest in the country with no subject requirements for studies beyond the first year.

Faculty

With the expansion of the curriculum, Eliot increased the Harvard faculty from 60 to 600 members. During Eliot's administration Radcliffe College was established for women. Eliot and others refused to admit women to Harvard but were willing to create a coordinate college that would provide a similar education for women. In 1894 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts chartered Radcliffe College; Elizabeth Cary Agassiz served as this institution's first president. She was followed by LeBaron Russell Briggs, the former dean of students and a professor of rhetoric at Harvard.

President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who served from 1909 to 1933, refocused the undergraduate course of study to ensure that a liberal education would include concentration on a single field as well as a distribution of course requirements among other disciplines. James Bryant Conant, who served as Harvard president from 1933 to 1953, initiated the examination of general education, which in turn served to redefine the concept of core curriculum, a course of study that delineated breadth in interdisciplinary fields outside the student's major field of study. Conant's General Education Committee, which released in 1945 the legendary Harvard Redbook, General Education in a Free Society, set the direction for American college and secondary curriculum for the later part of the twentieth century. Under Conant's leadership, in 1943 Harvard and Radcliffe agreed to enroll women students in Harvard classrooms for the first time. But women would not earn Harvard degrees until the 1970s.

Recent presidents Nathan M. Pusey, Derek Bok, and Neil L. Rudenstine have each contributed significantly toward strengthening the quality of undergraduate and graduate education at Harvard while at the same time maintaining the university's role as a preeminent research institution. "Harvard has shaped the world of higher education," said the late Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. "It's the cathedral that provides inspiration for all the others."

Bibliography

Bailyn, Bernard, et al. 1986. Glimpses of the Harvard Past. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Keller, Morton, and Keller, Phyllis. 2001. Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morrison, Samuel Eliot. 1936. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636 - 1936. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Rudolph, Frederick. 1977. Curriculum: A History of the American Undergraduate Course of Study since 1636. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sollors, Werner; Titcomb, Caldwell; and Underwood, Thomas A., eds. 1993. Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe. New York: New York University Press.

Synnott, Marcia G. 1979. The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1900 - 1970. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Internet Resource

Harvard University. 2002. www.harvard.edu.

— ROBERT A. SCHWARTZ, CRAIG KRIDEL

 
Wikipedia: Harvard University
"Harvard" redirects here. For other uses, see Harvard (disambiguation).

Harvard University
Harvard_shield-University.png
Motto (de facto): Veritas ("Truth")[1]
Established September 8, 1636 (OS), September 18, 1636 (NS)[2]
Type Private
Academic term Semester
Endowment U.S. $34.9 billion[3]
President Drew Gilpin Faust [14]
Staff 2,497 non-medical, 10,674 medical
Undergraduates 6,715
Postgraduates 12,424
Location Flag of the United States Cambridge, MA, USA
Campus Urban, 380 acres/154 ha
Colors Crimson      
Nickname Crimson
Mascot John Harvard Harvard_university_john_mascot.jpg
Athletics NCAA Division I Ivy league
41 varsity teams
Website harvard.edu
Public transit access Harvard (MBTA station)

Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts Legislature,[2] Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, as well as the first and oldest corporation in the Americas.[4]

Initially referred to simply as "the new college", the institution was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after its first principal donor, a young clergyman named John Harvard. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in England, John Harvard bequeathed about four hundred books in his will to form the basis of the college library collection, along with half his personal wealth worth several hundred pounds. The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" rather than a "college" occurred in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.

In his 1869-1909 tenure as Harvard president, Charles William Eliot radically transformed Harvard into the pattern of the modern research university. Eliot's reforms included elective courses, small classes, and entrance examinations. Eliot saw to it that Harvard would attract the best minds from around the world, thus securing its place among the great world universities. The Harvard model influenced American education nationally, at both college and secondary levels. Eliot, it should be noted, was responsible for the now famous "Harvard Classics" originally known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf." During his presidency at Harvard, Dr. Eliot was more well-known than then many of Presidents of the United States at the time.

In 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1894 as an outgrowth of the "Harvard Annex" for women,[5] merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[6]

Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes,[7] making it the largest academic library in the world, and the fourth among the five "mega-libraries" of the world (after the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the French Bibliothèque Nationale, but ahead of the New York Public Library[8][9]). Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization, standing at $34.9 billion as of 2007.

Institutions


Harvard University campus (old map)
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Harvard University campus (old map)


A faculty of about 2,400 professors serve as of school year 2006-2007, with 6,715 undergraduate and 12,424 graduate students.[15] The school color is crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The color was unofficially adopted (in preference to magenta) by an 1875 vote of the student body, although the association with some form of red can be traced back to 1858, when Charles William Eliot, a young graduate student who would later become Harvard's president (beginning a tradition), bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.

The history of Harvard's color has been contested by Fordham University. Both schools were identifying with magenta and since neither were willing to use a new color, they agreed that the winner of a baseball game would be allowed official use of magenta. Fordham emerged the winner, but Harvard had reneged on its promise and continued using magenta. Fordham had adopted maroon because of this and claims that Harvard followed suit with its adoption of crimson.[10]

Although the officially stated color is crimson, the color actually used on sport uniforms and other Harvard insignia is, in fact, very different from crimson. Rather than a bright crimson, it is of a duller, darker hue, resembling that of oxblood.

Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson and its rival the Harvard Lampoon, a noted humor magazine; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines and the oldest current publication at Harvard; and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual burlesque and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies. The Harvard Glee Club is the oldest college chorus in America, and the University Choir, the official choir of the Harvard Memorial Church, is the oldest choir in America affiliated with a university. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality (thus making it technically older than the New York Philharmonic, which is the oldest professional orchestra in America), and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s. The school also has a number of a cappella singing groups, the oldest of which is the Harvard Krokodiloes.

The John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard is a frequent target of pranks, hacks, and humorous decorations, such as the colorful lei shown above. It is known as the Statue of Three Lies: it's not John Harvard, he wasn't the Founder, and the date's wrong.
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The John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard is a frequent target of pranks, hacks, and humorous decorations, such as the colorful lei shown above. It is known as the Statue of Three Lies: it's not John Harvard, he wasn't the Founder, and the date's wrong.

Harvard has a friendly rivalry with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which dates back to 1900, when a merger of the two schools was frequently discussed and at one point officially agreed upon (ultimately canceled by Massachusetts courts). Today, the two schools cooperate as much as they compete, with many joint conferences and programs, including the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, the Broad Institute, the Harvard-MIT Data Center and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register in undergraduate or graduate classes without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees. The relationship and proximity between the two institutions is a remarkable phenomenon, considering their stature; according to The Times Higher Education Supplement of London, "The US has the world’s top two universities by our reckoning — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neighbors on the Charles River."[11]

Harvard has produced many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Pierre Elliott Trudeau; philosopher Henry David Thoreau and author Ralph Waldo Emerson; poets Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; actor Jack Lemmon; architect Philip Johnson, ex-Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, author and screenwriter Jeremy Leven, and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Among its most famous current faculty members are biologists James D. Watson and E. O. Wilson, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, writer Louis Menand, economists Gregory Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, and scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.

Organizations

Harvard is governed by two boards, the President and Fellows of Harvard College, also known as the Harvard Corporation and founded in 1650, and the Harvard Board of Overseers. The President of Harvard University is the day-to-day administrator of Harvard and is appointed by and responsible to the Harvard Corporation.

Harvard today has nine faculties, listed below in order of foundation:

Harvard Yard with freshman dorms in the background
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Harvard Yard with freshman dorms in the background

In 1999, the former Radcliffe College was reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Sports and athletic facilities

Harvard has several athletic facilities, such as the Lavietes Pavilion, a multi-purpose arena and home to the Harvard basketball teams. The Malkin Athletic Center, known as the "MAC," serves both as the university's primary recreation facility and as a satellite location for several varsity sports. The five story building includes two cardio rooms, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a smaller pool for aquaerobics and other activities, a mezzanine, where all types of classes are held at all hours of the day, and an indoor cycling studio, three weight rooms, and a three-court gym floor to play basketball. The MAC also offers personal trainers and specialty classes. The MAC is also home to Harvard volleyball, fencing, and wrestling. The offices of several of the school's varsity coaches are also in the MAC.

Weld Boathouse and Newell Boathouse house the women's and men's rowing teams, respectively. The men's crew also uses the Red Top complex in Ledyard, CT, as their training camp for the annual Harvard-Yale Regatta. The Bright Hockey Center hosts the Harvard hockey teams, and the Murr Center serves both as a home for Harvard's squash and tennis teams as well as a strength and conditioning center for all athletic sports.

As of 2006, there were 41 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other NCAA Division I college in the country. As with other Ivy League universities, Harvard does not offer athletic scholarships.

Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax each fall in their annual American Football meeting, which dates back to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game. Yale's victory in 2006 ended a five-year winning streak for Harvard. While Harvard's football team is no longer one of the country's best (it won the Rose Bowl in 1920) as it often was a century ago during football's early days, it, along with Yale, has influenced the way the game is played. In 1903, Harvard Stadium introduced a new era into football with the first-ever permanent reinforced concrete stadium of its kind in the country. The sport eventually adopted the forward pass (invented by Yale coach Walter Camp) because of the stadium's structure. The first game of American Football is said to have been a contest between Harvard and Tufts University on June 4, 1875, at Jarvis field in Cambridge, Mass.[12]

Older than The Game by 23 years, the Harvard-Yale Regatta was the original source of the athletic rivalry between the two schools. It is held annually in June on the Thames river in eastern Connecticut. As of 2006, Harvard has won on the Thames in every varsity race since 1999. The Harvard Crew is considered to be one of the top teams in the country in rowing.

Today, Harvard fields top teams in several other sports, such as ice hockey (with a strong rivalry against Cornell), squash, and even recently won the NCAA title in Men's and Women's Fencing. Harvard also won the Intercollegiate Sailing Association National Championships in 2003. Harvard has several fight songs, the most played of which, especially at football games, are "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" and "Harvardiana" ("Fair Harvard", while musically better known outside the university, is actually the alma mater). The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs and other cheers at football and hockey games.

Harvard-Radcliffe Television has footage from historical games and athletic events including the 2005 pep-rally before the Harvard-Yale Game. Harvard's official athletics website has more comprehensive information about Harvard's athletic facilities.

Library system and museums

The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library.
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The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library.

The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes,[7] is considered the fourth largest library collection in the world, after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque Nationale. (Note that the Wikipedia articles for the respective libraries seem to suggest that the Lenin Library in Moscow is considerably larger than the Bibliotheque Nationale.) Harvard describes its library as the "largest academic library in the world"[13] and prides itself for being the only one of the world's five "mega-libraries" to have open stacks.[8] Cabot Science Library, Lamont Library, and Widener Library are three of the most popular libraries for undergraduates to use, with easy access and central locations. There are rare books, manuscripts and other special collections throughout Harvard's libraries[14]; Houghton Library, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Harvard University Archives consist principally of rare and unique materials. America's oldest collection of maps, gazetteers, and atlases both old and new is stored in Pusey Library and open to the public. The largest collection of East-Asian language material outside of East Asia is held in the Harvard-Yenching Library.

Harvard operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums:

Admissions

US News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges 2007" ranked Harvard as the second-best undergraduate college in the United States, one point behind Princeton University.[15]

US News and World Report listed 2006 admissions percentages of 14.3% for the school of business, 4.5% for public health, 12.5% for engineering, 11.3% for law, 14.6% for education, and 4.9% for medicine.[16]. In September 2006, Harvard College announced that it would eliminate its early admissions program as of 2007, which university officials argued would lower the disadvantage that low-income and minority applicants are faced with in the competition to get into selective universities[17].

Campus

The main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in central Cambridge and extends into the surrounding Harvard Square neighborhood. The Harvard Business School and many of the university's athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located in Allston, on the other side of the Charles River from Harvard Square. Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health are located in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston.

Memorial Church
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Memorial Church

Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the university, academic buildings including Sever Hall and University Hall, Memorial Church, and the majority of the freshman dormitories. Sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates live in twelve residential Houses, nine of which are south of Harvard Yard along or near the Charles River. The other three are located in a residential neighborhood half a mile northwest of the Yard at the Quadrangle, which formerly housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard.

Radcliffe Yard, formerly the center of the campus of Radcliffe College (and now home of the Radcliffe Institute), is adjacent to the Graduate School of Education.

Satellite facilities

Apart from its major Cambridge/Allston and Longwood campuses, Harvard owns and operates Arnold Arboretum, in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston; the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in Washington, D.C.; the Harvard Forest in Petersham Mass; and the Villa I Tatti research center in Florence, Italy.

Major campus expansion

Throughout the past several years, Harvard has purchased large tracts of land in Allston, a short walk across the Charles River from Cambridge, with the intent of major expansion southward.[18] The university now owns approximately fifty percent more land in Allston than in Cambridge. Various proposals to connect the traditional Cambridge campus with the new Allston campus include new and enlarged bridges, a shuttle service and/or a tram. Ambitious plans also call for sinking part of Storrow Drive (at Harvard's expense) for replacement with park land and pedestrian access to the Charles River, as well as the construction of bike paths, and an intently planned fabric of buildings throughout the Allston campus. The institution asserts that such expansion will benefit not only the school, but surrounding community, pointing to such features as the enhanced transit infrastructure, possible shuttles open to the public, and park space which will also be publicly accessible.

One of the foremost driving forces for Harvard's pending expansion is its goal of substantially increasing the scope and strength of its science and technology programs. The university plans to construct two 500,000 square foot (50,000 m²) research complexes in Allston, which would be home to several interdisciplinary programs, including the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an enlarged Engineering department.

In addition, Harvard intends to relocate the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard School of Public Health to Allston. The university also plans to construct several new undergraduate and graduate student housing centers in Allston, and it is considering large-scale museums and performing arts complexes as well.

History

In the 17th century, Harvard University established the Indian College in order to educate Native Americans, but it was not a success and disappeared by 1693.

Between 1800 and 1870 a transformation of Harvard occurred which E. Digby Baltzell[19] calls "privatization." Harvard had prospered while Federalists controlled state government, but "in 1824 the federalist party was finally defeated forever in Massachusetts; the triumphant Democratic-Republicans cut off all state funds." By 1870, the "magistrates and ministers" on the Board of Overseers had been completely "replaced by Harvard alumni drawn primarily from the ranks of Boston's upper-class business and professional community" and funded by private endowment.

During this period, Harvard experienced unparalleled growth that put it into a different category from other colleges. Ronald Story notes in 1850, Harvard's total assets were "five times that of Amherst and Williams combined, and three times that of Yale.... By 1850, it was a genuine university, 'unequalled in facilities,' as a budding scholar put it by any other institution in America — the 'greatest University,' said another, 'in all creation'"[20]. Story also notes that "all the evidence... points to the four decades from 1815 to 1855 as the era when parents, in Henry Adams's words, began 'sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages'"[21]. Harvard was also an early leader in admitting ethnic and religious minorities. Stephen Steinberg, author of The Ethnic Myth, noted that "a climate of intolerance prevailed in many eastern colleges long before discriminatory quotas were contemplated" and noted that "Jews tended to avoid such campuses as Yale and Princeton, which had reputations for bigotry.... [while] under President Eliot's administration, Harvard earned a reputation as the most liberal and democratic of the Big Three, and therefore Jews did not feel that the avenue to a prestigious college was altogether closed"[22]. In 1870, one year into Eliot's term, Richard Theodore Greener became the first African-American to graduate from Harvard College. Seven years later, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, graduated from Harvard Law School.

Nevertheless, Harvard became the bastion of a distinctly Protestant elite — the so-called Boston Brahmin class — and continued to be so well into the 20th century. The social milieu of 1880s Harvard is depicted in Owen Wister's Philosophy 4, which contrasts the character and demeanor of two undergraduates who "had colonial names (Rogers, I think, and Schuyler)" with that of their tutor, one Oscar Maironi, whose "parents had come over in the steerage."[23]

Though Harvard ended required chapel in the mid-1880s, the school remained culturally Protestant, and fears of dilution grew as enrollment of immigrants, Catholics and Jews surged at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1908, Catholics made up nine percent of the freshman class, and between 1906 and 1922, Jewish enrollment at Harvard increased from six to twenty percent. In June 1922, under President Lowell, Harvard announced a Jewish quota. Other universities had done this surreptitiously. Lowell did it in a forthright way, and positioned it as means of combatting anti-Semitism, writing that "anti-Semitic feeling among the students is increasing, and it grows in proportion to the increase in the number of Jews.... when... the number of Jews was small, the race antagonism was small also."[24] The social milieu of 1940s Harvard is presented in Myron Kaufman's 1957 novel, Remember Me to God, which follows the life of a Jewish undergraduate as he attempts to navigate the shoals of casual anti-Semitism, be recognized as a "gentleman," and be accepted into "The Pudding."[25] Indeed, Harvard's discriminatory policies, both tacit and explicit, were partly responsible for the founding of Boston College in 1863[citation needed] and Brandeis University in nearby Waltham in 1948.[26]

Policies of exclusion were not limited to religious minorities. In 1920, "Harvard University maliciously persecuted and harassed" those it believed to be gay via a "Secret Court" led by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Summoned at the behest of a wealthy alumnus, the inquistions and expulsions carried out by this tribunal, in conjunction with the "vindictive tenacity of the university in ensuring that the stigmatization of the expelled students would persist throughout their productive lives" led to two suicides. Harvard President Lawrence Summers characterized the 1920 episode as "part of a past that we have rightly left behind", and "abhorrent and an affront to the values of our university".[27] Yet as late as the 1950s, Wilbur Bender, then the dean of admissions for Harvard College, was seeking better ways to "detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems” in prospective students[28].

During the twentieth century, Harvard's international reputation grew as a burgeoning endowment and prominent professors expanded the university's scope. Explosive growth in the student population continued with the addition of new graduate schools and the expansion of the undergraduate program. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States.

In the decades immediately after the Second World War, Harvard reformed its admissions policies as it sought students from a more diverse applicant pool. Whereas Harvard undergraduates had almost exclusively been white, upper-class alumni of select New England "feeder schools" such as Exeter and Andover, increasing numbers of international, minority, and working-class students had, by the late 1960s, altered the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of the college[29]. Nonetheless, Harvard's undergraduate population remained predominantly male, with about four men attending Harvard College for every woman studying at Radcliffe[30]. Following the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe admissions in 1977, the proportion of female undergraduates steadily increased, mirroring a trend throughout higher education in the United States. Harvard's graduate schools, which had accepted females and other groups in greater numbers even before the college, also became more diverse in the post-war period.

Today, Harvard is considered one of the premier centers of higher learning in the world. Despite periods of reactionary sentiment in the past, the politics of Harvard's affiliates, in line with most of American academia, are generally liberal (center-left): Richard Nixon famously attacked it as the "Kremlin on the Charles". In 2004, the Harvard Crimson found that Harvard undergraduates favored Kerry over Bush by 73% to 19%, consistent with Kerry's margin in major eastern cities such as Boston and New York City[31]. While Harvard has sometimes been criticized as elitist and "hostile to progressive intellectuals" (Trumpbour), there have been both prominent conservatives and liberals who have attended the school. President George W. Bush graduated from the Harvard Business School while John F. Kennedy and Al Gore graduated from Harvard College. Today, there are both prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices among the faculty of the various schools, such as Martin Feldstein, Greg Mankiw and Alan Dershowitz.

Recent developments

Destroyed by fire in the 1950s, Memorial Hall's ornate tower was rebuilt in 1999
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Destroyed by fire in the 1950s, Memorial Hall's ornate tower was rebuilt in 1999

Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th president of Harvard. An American historian, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, Faust is the first female president in the university's history. [32] [33]

On February 21, 2006, president Lawrence Summers announced his intention to resign the presidency, effective June 30, 2006. His resignation came just one week before a second planned vote of no confidence by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Former president Derek Bok served as interim president. Members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which instructs graduate students in GSAS and undergraduates in Harvard College, had passed an earlier motion of "lack of confidence" in Summers' leadership on March 15, 2005 by a 218-185 vote, with 18 abstentions. The 2005 motion was precipitated by comments about the causes of gender demographics in academia made at a closed academic conference and leaked to the press.[34] In response, Summers convened two committees to study this issue: the Task Force on Women Faculty and the Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering. Summers had also pledged $50 million to support their recommendations and other proposed reforms.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Harvard, along with numerous other institutions of higher education across the United States and Canada, offered to take in students who were unable to attend universities and colleges that were closed for the fall semester. Twenty-five students were admitted to the College, and the Law School made similar arrangements. Tuition was not charged and housing was provided. [35]

In February 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers formally approved the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences to become the 14th School of Harvard (Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences). In his April letter Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy Knowles said, "most of the net growth in the next few years will be in the sciences and engineering." [36] [37]

In 2005 Harvard received a large donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for the development of research programs in Islamic studies.[38][39] The acceptance by Harvard and other universities of this and comparable donations has drawn criticism from some commentators and accusations that the donations are used to spread pro-Saudi propaganda.[40][41]

Notable student organizations

A longer list of Harvard student groups can be found under Harvard College.

  • The Harvard Crimson, one of the nation's oldest[citation needed] daily college newspapers. Founded in 1873, it counts among its many editors numerous Pulitzer Prize winners[citation needed] and two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
  • The Harvard International Review, one of the most widely-distributed[citation needed] undergraduate journals in the world with 35,000 readers[citation needed] in more than 70 countries. The HIR regularly features prominent[citation needed] scholars and policymakers from around the globe.
  • The Harvard Lampoon, an undergraduate humor organization and publication founded in 1876 and rival to the Harvard Crimson. The erratically produced magazine was originally modelled on the former British satirical periodical Punch, and has outlived it to become the world's second-oldest[citation needed] humor magazine (after the Yale Record). Conan O'Brien was president of the Lampoon for two of the four years he attended. The National Lampoon was founded as an offshoot in 1970 from the Harvard publication.
The Harvard Lampoon "castle" with its characteristic rooftop ibis and its purple and yellow door
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The Harvard Lampoon "castle" with its characteristic rooftop ibis and its purple and yellow door