Front entrance to Clark University's Jonas Clark Hall, the main academic facility for undergraduate students
Statue at the center of campus of Sigmund Freud, commemorating his 1909 visit to the University
Clark University is a private research university and liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Founded in 1887, it is the oldest institution founded as an all-graduate university. Clark now also educates undergraduates. It is one of only three New England universities, along with Harvard and Yale, to be a founding member of the Association of American Universities.[2]
Clark withdrew membership from the Association of American Universities in 1999.
History and background
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 university fund because he feared the university may face lack of fund someday.[3] The university was opened on October 2, 1889 as the first all-graduate university in the United States.[4]
G. Stanley Hall was the first president of the university. He was the founder of the American Psychological Association, who 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 US.[2]
The university plans to celebrate the centennial of the visit in October of 2009.[5] A statue was erected in the campus quad, affectionately called Red Square, to commemorate this. Red Square has been the location of many student protests and events.
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 Goddard Library, a distinctive modern building by architect John M. Johansen was completed in 1969.[6]
Clark firsts
Clark University was the second institution in the U.S. with Ph.D. programs. Clark's geography program is the only one in North America to have a mountain range named for it. The Clark Mountains, Antarctica, were named by one of the program’s graduates, Paul Siple, famed meteorologist, explorer and inventor of the “wind chill factor.” Siple named the peaks of the Clark Mountains after his faculty instructors: Jones, Atwood, Burnham, Walter Elmer Ekblaw, and Van Valkenburg.
George Blakeslee, history professor from 1903 to 1943, founded the first journal about international relations, which was later absorbed by Foreign Affairs.
Clark and the community
In 1985, the university engaged in a partnership with community groups and business organizations to revitalize Clark neighborhoods. Its efforts in the University Park Partnership program include refurbishing dilapidated or abandoned homes, reselling them to area residents, and subsidizing mortgages for new home buyers.
In 1997, Clark opened a secondary public school, the University Park Campus School (UPCS), that is also a professional development school for Clark’s teacher education program. Because of its long hours and demanding curricula, UPCS has been lauded as a model for collaboration between a university and an urban district. Students are able to attend Clark University free of charge upon graduation, provided they meet certain residency and admissions requirements. In the May 16, 2005, issue of Newsweek, UPCS was named the 68th best high school in the nation. On November 22, 2007, UPCS was featured in a cover story entitled “Town-gown triumph In poorest part of Worcester, Clark helps put children on path to college” in the Boston Globe, by Peter Schworm, Globe Staff. [7]
The UPCS collaborative is one of several sponsored by Clark's Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education focused on urban teacher education and school reform.
Recent developments
In recent years, Clark has received widespread media coverage for its "Fifth-Year Free" program. Under Clark's BA/MA program with the fifth year free, undergraduates who maintain a B+ average are eligible for tuition-free enrollment in its one-year graduate programs, meaning that they can get a Master of Arts degree for the price of a bachelor's degree. Students apply to master's degree programs in their junior year, begin meeting requirements in their senior year and typically complete those requirements in the fifth year. Bachelor's degrees are granted en route to the master's degree.[7]
Clark has marketed its programs off-campus and accepts a student body largely from out of the city and often from out of the state. Clark’s student body comes from all over the country and world. 68% of Clark undergraduate students are from outside Massachusetts and 8% are from abroad. The entire student body of undergraduate and graduate students is 16% international. Clark has developed a reputation as a free-thinking institution.
In recent years, Clark has been noted especially for its geography and psychology departments, with the latter having a distinctive, if increasingly unfashionable "humanistic" orientation (humanistic psychology). The School of Geography was founded by then President Wallace Atwood in 1921, and is the first institution in the United States established for graduate study in this science. It has granted more doctoral degrees than any other geography program in the country. The geography department is best known for its strength in human-environment geography and for the development of the Idrisi geographic information systems software by Prof. Ron Eastman. It was ranked #1 for undergraduate geography by Rugg's Recommendations on Colleges and has consistently been ranked in the top 10 in the nation by other publications. The geography department also offers a graduate-level degree in GIS as part of the Fifth-Year Free program. The department's mission is ambitious: "to educate undergraduate and graduate students to be imaginative and contributing citizens of the world, and to advance the frontiers of knowledge and understanding through rigorous scholarship and creative effort."
The total cost of tuition, room and board for the 2007-2008 academic year was $39,000 which reflects a tuition increase of 4.49% from 2006-07.[8]
Research centers and institutes
Clark has eight research institutes and centers.
The William and Jane Mosakowski Institute[8] for Public Enterprise seeks to improve through the successful mobilization of use-inspired research the effectiveness of government and other institutions in addressing social concerns. The institute focuses on important social issues, including focal areas such as education reform, environmental sustainability, access to healthcare, human development, well-being and global change.
The George Perkins Marsh Institute [9] conducts collaborative, interdisciplinary research on human-environment relationships and the human dimensions of global environmental change.
The Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies [10] an interdiscplinary center which focuses on the causes and effects of Holocausts and Genocides around the world.
The Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education [11] develops models of urban schooling, teaching and teacher education through local partnership, in order to learn from these models and expand the knowledge-base of effective practice through research.
The Center for Risk and Security (CRS) [12] at the George Perkins Marsh Institute conducts in-depth studies of homeland security issues using a risk-analysis perspective. The Center's broad range of security issues includes: terrorism; disaster management; law and human rights; resource availability; and public health.
The Center for Technology, Environment and Development (CENTED) [13], founded in 1987, is a center for the study of natural and technological hazards in the United States. Projects include theoretical work on hazard analysis, hazard taxonomies, vulnerability, environmental equity, corporate risk management, emergency planning and hazardous waste transportation.
The Center for Community-Based Development (CCBD) [14] is the research arm of the IDCE Program. CCBD works with host country colleagues and institutions to help local communities increase productivity and conserve natural resources. CCBD disseminates its approach and research through publications and training courses, both at Clark and overseas.
Clark Labs [15] is an international leader in the research and development on geospatial technologies including the development of computer software and analytical techniques for GIS and remote sensing with an emphasis on monitoring and modeling earth system dynamics. Clark Labs continues to develop and distribute IDRISI, a geographic information system (GIS) software package that is in use at more than 40,000 sites in over 180 countries worldwide.
Housing
Students entering Clark must live on campus for the first two years unless their primary address is within 25 miles of campus. The residence halls at Clark are organized by those who live there; the
- First Year Experience halls: (Bullock, Sanford, Johnson and Wright),
- Mixed Class halls (Dana and Hughes)
- Single Sex hall (Dodd - Female Only)
- Suite-style and Apartment-style halls (Maywood and Blackstone)
Clark also owns apartments which, while outside of the main campus area, exclusively house Clark students.
The first Clark 'residence halls' (Wright and Bullock) opened in 1959. Prior to that time dormitories stood in the current location of Dodd and the surrounding 'Fuller-Quad.' Blackstone, the newest of the halls, opened in 2007. [16][17][18]
It should also be noted that, as of Fall 2007, gender blind/neutral housing is an option at Clark, meaning that students of different genders can room together. [19]
Norman Finkelstein controversy
In April 2009, President John Bassett denied Clark University Students for Palestinian Rights, a student group, the right to bring Norman Finkelstein to speak about what Finkelstein called the "Gaza Massacre" because Finkelstein "would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding". He also cited a conflict in scheduling regarding a conference on Holocaust and Genocide Studies put on by the university in the same month. [9] However, following various protests, including a public protest in the center of campus and a petition campaign, Basset reversed his decision and allowed Finkelstein to speak on April 27, the last day of classes for the semester. Finkelstein spoke to around 400 students, faculty and community members in Atwood Hall.[10]
Notable alumni and faculty
References
External links
Further reading
- W. Carson Ryan Publication: New York: The Carnegie Foundation, 1939. Clark University, 1887-1987: A Narrative History, Author: William A. Koelsch Publication: Worcester: Clark University Press, 1987.
Coordinates: 42°15′04″N 71°49′23″W / 42.250977°N 71.823169°W / 42.250977; -71.823169
