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Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest corporation in North America.
Initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne", the institution was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after a young clergyman named John Harvard, who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 (which was half of his estate).
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Encyclopedia
Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest corporation in North America.
Initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne", the institution was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after a young clergyman named John Harvard, who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 (which was half of his estate). The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" occurs in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.
During his 40-year tenure as Harvard president (1869–1909), 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. The Harvard model influenced American education nationally, at both college and secondary levels. Eliot also was responsible for publication of the now-famous "Harvard Classics", a collection of "great books" from multiple disciplines, published by P. F. Collier and Sons beginning in 1909, that offered a college education "in fifteen minutes a day of reading." The collection soon became known as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf." During his unprecedentedly influential presidency, Eliot, a prolific book and magazine writer and widely traveled speaker in the pre-radio age, became so widely recognized a public figure that by his death in 1926, his name (and, not coincidentally, Harvard's) had become synonymous with the universal aspirations of American higher education.
Harvard is consistently ranked at or near the top of international college and university rankings, and has the second-largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization (behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), standing at $28.8 billion as of 2008.
History
Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (see: first university in the United States), founded 16 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Harvard College, established in 1635 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was named for its first benefactor, British-born John Harvard of Charlestown, a young minister who, upon his death in 1638, left his library and half his estate to the new institution.The charter creating the corporation of Harvard College was signed by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Dudley in 1650. The College's original purpose was to train Puritan ministers.
During its early years, the College offered a classic academic course based on the English university model but consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy of the first colonists in New England. The College was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Puritan churches throughout New England. An early brochure, published in 1643, justified the College's existence: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches." Harvard's early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae "Truth for Christ and the Church." In a directive to its students, it laid out the purpose of all education: "Let every student be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of all sound learning and knowledge."
On June 11, 1685, Increase Mather became the Acting President of Harvard University (then Harvard College), on July 23, 1686 he was appointed the Rector. On June 27, 1692 he became the President of Harvard, a position which he held until September 6, 1701.
The 1708 election of John Leverett, the first president who was not also a clergyman, marked a turning of the College toward intellectual independence from Puritanism.
In the 17th century, Harvard University established the Indian College to educate Native Americans, but it was not a success and disappeared by 1693.
Between 1830 and 1870 Harvard became "privatized". While the Federalists controlled state government, Harvard had prospered, but the 1824 defeat of the federalist party in Massachusetts allowed the renascent Democratic-Republicans to block state funding of private universities. By 1870, the politicians and ministers that heretofore had made up the university's board of overseers had been replaced by Harvard alumni drawn from Boston's upper-class business and professional community and funded by private endowment.
During this period, Harvard experienced unparalleled growth that securely placed it financially in a league of its own among American colleges. Ronald Story notes that 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, 'unequaled in facilities,' as a budding scholar put it, by any other institution in America — the 'greatest university,' said another, 'in all creation'". 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'". 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". 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."
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 combating 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." 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." Indeed, Harvard's discriminatory policies, both tacit and explicit, were partly responsible for the founding of Boston College in 1863 and Brandeis University in nearby Waltham in 1948.
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 inquisitions 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". 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.
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. Nonetheless, Harvard's undergraduate population remained predominantly male, with about four men attending Harvard College for every woman studying at Radcliffe. 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.
In 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 as the "Harvard Annex for Women", merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
The politics of Harvard
Today, Harvard and its affiliates, in line with most American universities, are considered to be politically liberal (left of center); Richard Nixon, for example, famously referred to it as the "Kremlin on the Charles" around 1970. 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.
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. Republican President George W. Bush graduated from Harvard Business School, Democratic President John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Al Gore graduated from Harvard College and Democratic President Barack Obama graduated from the Harvard Law School. Today, there are both prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices among the faculty of the various schools, such as Martin Feldstein, Harvey Mansfield, Greg Mankiw, and Alan Dershowitz. Marxists like Michael Walzer and Stephen Thernstrom and libertarians such as Robert Nozick have in the past graced its faculty.
Recent developments
In a controversial decision in March 2008, Harvard announced that no transfer applicants would be admitted for the next two academic years, in an effort to reduce overcrowding in the undergraduate residential House system. This decision was announced after the academic year 2008-2009 transfer applications had already been submitted. Mandana Sassanfar, co-master of Winthrop House, said that the House Masters have been discussing the issue of overcrowding since late 2007 and "decided it was more important to have enough housing for our own students first." This decision has been called "rash," “outrageous,” and “heartbreaking” by transfer applicants and others at Harvard.
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."
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.
On February 21, 2006, president Lawrence Summers announced his intention to resign from 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. 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.
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.
In 2005 Harvard received a large donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for the development of research programs in Islamic studies. 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.
It was announced in the fall of 2008 that Harvard University had received the largest single endowment from one source in its history when Hansjorg Wyss donated $125 million to Harvard University to found the multidisciplinary Hansjorg Wyss Institute at the Medical School. It would help expand the drive for nanotechnological development, stem cell research, bioengineering, molecular biology, and similar issues. In December 2008, Harvard announced that its endowment had lost 22% (approximately $8 billion) in the period July to October 2008, which may necessitate budget cuts.
Institutions
A faculty of about 2,400 professors serve as of school year 2006-2007, with 6,715 undergraduate and 12,424 graduate students. 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 21st and longest-serving president (1869-1909), 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 was 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 reneged on its promise and continued using magenta. Fordham, which adopted maroon because of this, claims that Harvard followed suit with its adoption of crimson.
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 ox blood.
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."
Organizations
Harvard is governed by two boards, one of which is the President and Fellows of Harvard College, also known as the Harvard Corporation and founded in 1650, and the other is 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:
*The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its sub-faculty, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which together serve:
In 1999, the former Radcliffe College was reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Athletics
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 football meeting, which dates back to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game. While Harvard's football team is no longer one of the country's best as it often was a century ago during football's early days (it won the Rose Bowl in 1920), both it and Yale have 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 stadium's structure actually played a role in the evolution of the college game. Seeking to reduce the alarming number of deaths and serious injuries in the sport, the Father of Football, Walter Camp, suggested widening the field to open up the game. But the state-of-the-art Harvard Stadium was too narrow to accommodate a wider playing surface. So, other steps had to be taken. Camp would instead support revolutionary new rules for the 1906 season. These included legalizing the forward pass, perhaps the most significant rule change in the sport's history.
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. The Harvard crew is typically 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 NCAA titles in Men's and Women's Fencing. Harvard also won the Intercollegiate Sailing Association National Championships in 2003.
Harvard's mens' ice hockey team won the school's first NCAA Championship in any team sport in 1989. Harvard was also the first Ivy League institution to win a NCAA championship title in a women's sport when its women's lacrosse team won the NCAA Championship in 1990.
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.
Song
Harvard has several fight songs, the most played of which, especially at football, are "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" and "Harvardiana." While "Fair Harvard" is actually the alma mater, "Ten Thousand Men" is better known outside the university. The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs, and other cheers, at football and hockey games.
Library system and museums
The Harvard University Library System is centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprises over 80 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes. This makes it the largest academic library in the United States, and the fourth among the five "mega-libraries" of the world (after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque nationale, but ahead of the New York Public Library). Harvard describes its library as the "largest academic library in the world" and prides itself for being the only one of the world's five "mega-libraries" to have open stacks. 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; 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:
- The Harvard Art Museums, including:
- The Fogg Museum of Art, with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular strengths are in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th century French art
- The Busch-Reisinger Museum, formerly the Germanic Museum, covers central and northern European art.
- The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which includes ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art
- The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere
- The Semitic Museum.
- The Harvard Museum of Natural History complex, including:
- The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier, is home to the University's film archive and the department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
Admissions
Harvard College accepted 7.1% of applicants for the class of 2012, a record low for the school's entire history. The number of acceptances was lower in 2008 partially because the university anticipated increased rates of enrollment after announcing a large increase in financial aid for 2008. For the class of 2011, Harvard accepted fewer than 9% of applicants, with a yield of 80%. US News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges 2009" ranked Harvard #2 in selectivity (in a tie with Yale, Princeton and MIT, behind Caltech), and first in rank of the best national universities.
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. 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 under-represented minority applicants are faced within the competition to get into selective universities.
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.
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 (commonly referred to as the Quad), which formerly housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard. Each residential house contains rooms for undergraduates, House masters, and resident tutors, as well as a dining hall, library, and various other student facilities.
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 walk across the Charles River from Cambridge, with the intent of major expansion southward. 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.
Sustainability
In 2000, Harvard hired a full-time campus sustainability professional and launched the Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI).
With a full-time staff of 25, dozens of student interns, and a $12 million Loan Fund for energy and water conservation projects, HGCI is one of the most advanced campus sustainability programs in the country. Harvard was one of only six universities to receive a grade of “A-” from the Sustainable Endowments Institute on its College Sustainability Report Card 2008, the highest grade awarded.
Notable student organizations
A longer list of Harvard student groups can be found under Harvard College.
- The Harvard Crimson is the oldest continuously published college newspaper in America. Founded in 1873, it counts among its many editors numerous Pulitzer Prize winners and two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
- The Harvard University Band (founded 1919) is a non-traditional, student-run marching band, notable for being a scramble band. The Harvard Wind Ensemble, the Harvard Summer Pops Band, and the Harvard Jazz Bands also fall under the umbrella organization of HUB.
- The Harvard International Relations Council includes several famous student organizations, including the Harvard International Review, Harvard Model United Nations, and its Harvard National Model United Nations. The HIR has 35,000 readers in more than 70 countries, regularly features prominent scholars and policymakers from around the globe. HMUN is the oldest high-school-level Model United Nations simulation in the world, having begun as a League of Nations simulation in the 1920s. HNMUN is similarly the longest-running college-level simulation in the world and among the largest in the United States. The IRC has the most members of any Harvard student organization.
- The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor organization and publication founded in 1876. It has a long-standing rivalry with The Crimson and counts among its former members Robert Benchley, John Updike, George Plimpton, Steve O'Donnell, Conan O'Brien, Mark O'Donnell, and Andy Borowitz. This sporadically issued rag was originally modelled on the British magazine of satire, Punch, and has now outlived it, becoming the world's second-oldest humor magazine after the Yale Record. Conan O'Brien was president of the Lampoon during his last two undergraduate years. (The National Lampoon was founded as an offshoot in 1970 from the Harvard publication.)
 - The Harvard Salient is the campus's biweekly conservative magazine, whose past editors include many prominent conservative thinkers and journalists.
- The Harvard Glee Club (founded 1858) is the oldest college choir in the country; the Harvard University Choir is the oldest university-affiliated choir in the country; and the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (founded 1808), technically older than the New York Philharmonic, though it has only been a symphony orchestra for about half of its existence. The Bach Society Orchestra of Harvard University is a chamber orchestra that is staffed, managed, and conducted entirely by students.
- The Hasty Pudding Theatricals (founded 1844) is a theatrical society known for its burlesque musicals and annual "Man of the Year" and "Woman of the Year" ceremonies; past members include Alan Jay Lerner, Jack Lemmon, and John Lithgow.
- WHRB (95.3 FM Cambridge), the campus radio station, is run exclusively by Harvard students out of the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dorm. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its classical, jazz, underground rock and hip-hop, and blues programming, especially its reading period "orgies", when the entire oeuvre of a particular composer, orchestra, band, or artist is played without commercial break, sometimes for several days in succession, to give the station's DJs a chance to catch up on their studies before the semester's final exams.
- The Harvard Undergraduate Council (UC), Harvard College's student government, is a prominent voice on campus on behalf of the student body. Though subject to criticism and scrutiny, the Undergraduate Council is regarded as one of the most active and professional of college student governments.
- The Harvard Institute of Politics is a living memorial to President Kennedy that promotes public service among undergraduates by sponsoring non-credit courses and workshops and internships in the public sector.
- The Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization serves as the umbrella organization for dozens of community service and social change programs at Harvard. PBHA has 1600 volunteers who serve over 10,000 people in the greater Boston area. Notable alumni include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Roger Nash Baldwin, Robert Coles, and David Souter.
- Harvard Student Agencies is the largest student-run corporation in the world, with revenues of $6 million in 2006. Notable alumni include Thomas Stemberg, founder of Staples, Inc.
- Harvard Model Congress is the nation's oldest and largest congressional simulation conference, providing thousands of high school students from across the U.S. and abroad with the opportunity to experience participatory American democracy first-hand.
- , founded in 1981, acts an umbrella organization for all cultural groups on campus. It seeks to create awareness about diversity at Harvard and facilitates intercultural and interracial dialogue and relations.
- The Harvard Chess Club is one of the oldest collegiate chess clubs in the country, founded in 1874. An annual match versus Yale on the morning of the Harvard-Yale football has taken place since 1906. Harvard has won several intercollegiate national chess championships, with alumni including International Grandmaster and two-time United States Champion Patrick Wolff.
- Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society is a cooperative bookstore that includes undergraduates on its board of directors.
- The Harvard Wireless Club is the nation's oldest amateur radio club founded in 1909. Their radio station call sign is W1AF. "Professor George W. Pierce was the first president, and Nikola Tesla, Thomas A. Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, Greenleaf W. Pickard and R. A. Fessenden were honorary members."
Notable people
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, Pierre Trudeau, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama; philosopher Henry David Thoreau and author Ralph Waldo Emerson; poets Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; cellist Yo Yo Ma; comedian and television show host, writer, and comedian Conan O'Brien, actors Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Rashida Jones and Tommy Lee Jones; architect Philip Johnson, Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, Weezer singer Rivers Cuomo, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, 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, physicists Lisa Randall and Roy Glauber, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, writer Louis Menand, critic Helen Vendler, historian Niall Ferguson, economists Amartya Sen, N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert Barro, Stephen A. Marglin, Don M. Wilson III and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, political scientists Robert Putnam, Joseph Nye, Stanley Hoffman and scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.
Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university. Since 1974, nineteen Nobel Prize winners and fifteen winners of the American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have served on the Harvard faculty.
Harvard in fiction and popular culture
Harvard's central place in American elite circles has made it the setting for many novels, plays, films and other cultural works.
Love Story, by Harvard alumnus (and Yale classics professor) Erich Segal, 1970, concerns a romance between a wealthy Harvard pre-law hockey player (Ryan O'Neal) and a brilliant Radcliffe student of musicology on scholarship (Ali MacGraw). Both novel and movie are deeply imbued with Cambridge color. One enduring Harvard tradition in recent years has been the annual screening of Love Story to incoming freshmen, during which members of the Crimson Key Society, the tour-giving organization on campus, make catcalls and other offerings of mock abuse. Other works of Erich Segal, The Class (1985) and Doctors (1988) also featured the leading characters as Harvard students.
Harvard has been featured in many U.S. films, including Stealing Harvard, Legally Blonde, Gilmore Girls, Queer as Folk, The Firm, The Paper Chase, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, How High, Soul Man, 21 (2008 film), and Harvard Man. Since the filming of Love Story in the 1960s the university, until the summer of 2007 filming of The Great Debaters did not allow any movies to be filmed in campus buildings; most films are shot in look-alike cities, such as Toronto, and colleges such as UCLA, Wheaton and Bridgewater State, although outdoor and aerial shots of Harvard's Cambridge campus are often used. Legally Blonde filmed the area in front of Harvard's Widener Library but declined to use actual Harvard Students for extras because they were deemed to not be "Harvard enough" due to their non-preppy attire. The shot used extras dressed to "look like" Harvard students instead. The graduation scene from With Honors was filmed in front of Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Numerous novels are set at Harvard or feature characters with Harvard connections. Robert Langdon, the main character in Dan Brown's novels The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons, is described as a Harvard "professor of symbology", (although "symbology" is not the name of an actual academic discipline). The protagonist of Pamela Thomas-Graham's series of mystery novels (Blue Blood, Orange Crushed, and A Darker Shade Of Crimson) is an African-American Harvard professor. Prominent novels with Harvard students as protagonists include William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation. Douglas Preston's ex-CIA agent Wyman Ford is a Harvard alumnus. The students are often accused of communistic tendencies. Ford appears in the novels Tyrannosaur Canyon and Blasphemy. Much of the action in Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic novel The Handmaid's Tale takes place in Cambridge, with vaguely-recognizable Harvard landmarks occasionally making their way into the narrator's place descriptions.
Also set at Harvard is the Korean hit TV series Love Story in Harvard, filmed at University of Southern California. American television's fictional Harvard graduates include Sex and the City character Miranda Hobbes, Gilligan's Islands resident aristocrat Thurston Howell, III, played by Jim Backus,
M*A*S*Hs pompous Boston Brahmin, Major Charles Emerson Winchester III, played by David Ogden Stiers and Dr. Frasier Crane of Cheers and Frasier. Ivory Tower is a student-produced show about fictional Harvard students.
Most recently the university was prominently featured in the 2008 television series pilot for Fringe.
Professors Dr. Richard Alpert and Dr. Timothy Leary were fired from Harvard in May 1963. Popular opinion attributes their discharge to their activism involving psychedelics, and the popularization and dispensation of psilocybin to students.
Views of Harvard
In 1893, Baedeker's guidebook called Harvard "the oldest, richest, and most famous of American seats of learning." The first two facts remain true today; the third is also arguably true. As of 2007, Harvard has been ranked first among world universities every time since the publications of the THES - QS World University Rankings and the Academic Ranking of World Universities. The 2007 U.S. News & World Report rankings place Harvard in first place among "National Universities".
Harvard is the target of a number of criticisms, some of them leveled by other research-based American universities. It has been accused of grade inflation, as have other colleges and universities. A review of the SAT scores of entering students at Harvard over the past two decades shows that the rise in GPAs has been matched by a linear rise in both verbal and math SAT scores of entering students (even after correcting for the reforming of the test in the mid-1990s), suggesting that the quality of the student body and its motivation have also increased. Regardless, after media criticism, Harvard reduced the number of students who receive Latin honors from 90% in 2004 to 60% in 2005. Moreover, the prestigious honors of "John Harvard Scholar" and "Harvard College Scholar" will now be given only to the top 5 percent and the next 5 percent of each class — essentially, those with a GPA of 3.8 or above.
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The New York Times, and some students have criticized Harvard for its reliance on teaching fellows for some aspects of undergraduate education; they consider this to adversely affect the quality of education. The New York Times article also detailed that the problem was prevalent in some other Ivy League schools.
In 2005, The Boston Globe reported obtaining a 21-page Harvard internal memorandum that expressed concern about undergraduate student satisfaction based on a 2002 Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) survey of 31 top universities. The Globe presented COFHE survey results and quotes from Harvard students that suggest problems with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, social life on campus, and sense of community dating back to at least 1994. The magazine section of the Harvard Crimson echoed similar academic and social criticisms. The Harvard Crimson quoted Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross as being aware of and committed to improving the issues raised by the COFHE survey. Former Harvard President Larry Summers stated: "I think the single most important issue is faculty-student engagement, where there is too large a fraction of our teaching that takes place in sections taught by graduate students. Too much of it takes place in large lectures, where faculty members don't know students' names. And too little of it involves the kind of active learning experience, whether it's in a laboratory, a debate in a class, or whether it's a seminar dialogue, or whether it's joint work in an archives."
Similar criticisms have been directed at some other large research universities. In addition, some observers do not consider large class sizes in Core Curriculum courses to be an impediment to learning. Professor of Government Michael Sandel, who teaches a popular course called "Justice" with nearly 900 students, has stated that "the large class size actually helps foster learning. So many students are reading the same texts and wrestling with the same moral dilemmas, the discussion continues outside the classroom." Others note that Columbia's core classes, which are taught in small seminars, offer a better pedagogical method.
Harvard has one of the highest alumni giving rates.
The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate. Under new financial aid guidelines, parents in families with incomes of less than $60,000 will no longer be expected to contribute any money to the cost of attending Harvard for their children, including room and board. Families with incomes in the $60,000 to $80,000 range contribute an amount of only a few thousand dollars a year. In December 2007, Harvard announced that families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 will only have to pay up to 10% of their annual household income towards tuition.
Harvard and its students have also been criticized for self-promotion in various forms. In "A Flood of Crimson Ink," Steinberger asserts that one reason Harvard receives much attention from the press is because "Harvard graduates are disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of American journalism."
Further reading
- Hoerr, John, We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard; Temple University Press, 1997, ISBN 1-56639-535-6
- John T. Bethell, Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-674-37733-8
- Harry R. Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (2006) ISBN 1586483935
- John Trumpbour, ed., How Harvard Rules. Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, ISBN 0-89608-283-0
- Story, R. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class,1800-1870, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981
See also
External links
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