Encyclopedia
"Harvard" redirects here. For other uses of the name Harvard, see Harvard .Harvard University is a private university in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.
Harvard consistently ranks among the best universities in the world.
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, 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. The Harvard model influenced American education nationally, at both college and secondary levels.
In 1999, Radcliffe College, initially founded as the "Harvard Annex" for women, merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Harvard has the world's fourth largest library collection , and the largest financial endowment of any academic institution, standing at $29.2 billion as of 2006 .
Institution
A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 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 daily student newspaper [i] of Harvard University [i], was founded in 1873. ...
. The color was unofficially adopted 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, bought red bandannas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.
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 a dull, dark red, almost like oxblood. Harvard Student Agency guides are instructed to tell visitors that this is because the athletic flag which was used for the canonical color had become discolored through use. The
de jure color remains crimson, but the
de facto color, therefore, is quite different.
Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned
Crimson and its mortal enemy the
Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate [i] humor organization and publication founded in 1876 [i] a ...
, the world's oldest 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 choir of Harvard's 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 , and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s.
Harvard College has traditionally drawn many of its students from private schools, though today the majority of undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the globe.
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 mooted and at one point officially agreed upon . 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 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, neighbours on the Charles River."
Over its history, Harvard has graduated many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders
John Hancock,
John Adams,
Theodore Roosevelt,
Franklin Roosevelt and
John F. Kennedy; 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, 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, Shakespeare scholar
Stephen Greenblatt, economists
Gregory Mankiw and Harvey Mansfield, and scholar/composers Robert Levin and
Bernard Rands.
Admissions
Today, Harvard's undergraduate and graduate schools are among the most selective in the United States. Harvard's overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2006 was 9.3%. Harvard College's student population is almost equally balanced between male and female undergraduates, with women slightly outnumbering men in several of the most recent entering classes . Students admitted to the college often score high marks on the
SAT I, with a median score of 1495 out of 1600 for the class of 2009 . One estimate of the average SAT score under the new grading system is 2200 out of a possible 2400. Like other schools in the Ivy League, Harvard College does not offer athletic scholarships. The Class of 2010 had a 80% yield, the highest in the nation. The National Bureau of Economic Research study on Revealed Preference of U.S. Colleges showed that Harvard is the most preferred choice among high school seniors in matchups with other elite colleges
The 2006 figures from
US News and World Report indicated that the business school admitted 14.3% of its applicants, the school of public health 4.5%, the engineering division 12.5%, the law school 11.3%, the education school 14.6%, and the medical school 4.9%. In September 2006, Harvard 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.
Organization
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:
In 1999, the former Radcliffe College was reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Sports and athletic facilities
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 to 1875 and is usually called simply
The Game. Harvard has won The Game for the past five years running. 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, 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 because of the stadium's structure.
Older than The Game by 23 years, the
Yale-Harvard 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 does field top teams in several other sports, such as
ice hockey , 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. But like other Ivy League universities,
Harvard does not offer athletic scholarships. 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.
Harvard has several , the most played of which, especially at football games, are "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" and "Harvardiana" . The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs and other cheers at football and hockey games.
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 women's field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, and men's soccer 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.
has footage from historical games and athletic events including the 2005 pep-rally before the Harvard-Yale Game. has more comprehensive information about Harvard's athletic facilities.
Library system and museums
The Harvard University Library System, centered in
Widener Library in
Harvard Yard and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 15.3 million volumes, is the fourth largest library collection in the world, after the
Library of Congress, the
British Library, and the
French Bibliothèque nationale. Harvard describes its library as the "largest academic library in the world."rd operates several art museums, including the Fogg Museum of Art ; the Busch-Reisinger Museum ; the Sackler Museum ; the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous Blaschka Glass Flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere; and the Semitic Museum.
Harvard in fiction and popular culture
Love Story is a 1970 [i] romance [i] motion picture [i] drama based o ...
, by Harvard alumnus Erich Segal, the much-beloved and also much-ridiculed tearjerker of the 1970s, concerns a romance between a Harvard student and a Radcliffe student. The novel is deeply imbued with local color. A current Harvard tradition is the annual showing of the film Love Story to incoming freshmen, during which the film is openly mocked by the Crimson Key Society, a tour-giving organization on campus.
Though Harvard has been featured in many US films, including
Stealing Harvard,
Legally Blonde is a 2001 [i] comedy film [i] starring Reese Witherspoon [i], produced b...
,
The Firm,
The Paper Chase was a 1970 [i] novel [i], as well as a 1973 [i] movie [i] ...
,
Good Will Hunting is a 1997 film [i] directed by Gus Van Sant [i], set in greater Boston, Massachusetts [i] ...
,
With Honors,
How High is a 2001 [i] comedy film [i], directed [i] by Jesse Dylan [i], ...
, Soul Man, and
Harvard Man is a 2001 [i] feature film [i] written and directed by James Toback [i]. ...
, the University has not allowed any movies to be filmed in campus buildings since
Love Story is a 1970 [i] romance [i] motion picture [i] drama based o ...
in the 1960s; 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. The graduation scene from With Honors was filmed in front of Foellenger Auditorium at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Also set in Harvard is
Korean hit TV series
Love Story in Harvard, filmed at
University of Southern California. Many movies have
characters identified as Harvard graduates, including
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American [i] film [i] about both a soldier's journey during Vietnam War [i] ...
,
A Few Good Men, written by Aaron Sorkin [i], was an acclaimed Broadway [i] play and ...
,
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis [i] is a first person narrative describing episo ...
, and
Two Weeks Notice.
The novel
The Da Vinci Code is a mystery [i]/detective [i] novel [i] by American [i] ...
has its main character, Robert Langdon, as a Harvard "professor of symbology," although no such field exists at Harvard. Pamela Thomas-Graham, an alumna of Harvard College, Business School and Law School and the former President & CEO of CNBC, has written 3 mystery novels featuring African-American Harvard economics professor Nikki Chase as the protagonist.
The character
Frasier Crane from the
sitcoms
Cheers and
Frasier claimed to be a graduate of Harvard and
Oxford University.
The student produced show
Ivory Tower is set on the Harvard campus but is about fictional Harvard students.
Overview of the campus
The main campus is centered around
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 and the Harvard School of Public Health are located in the Longwood district of
Boston.
Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main
libraries of the University, several academic buildings, 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 , is halfway between Harvard Yard and the Quadrangle, 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 Roslindale area of Boston;
the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in
Washington, D.C.;
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. 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.
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 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
Harvard's founding in 1636 came in the form of an act of the colony's
Great and General Court. By all accounts the chief impetus was to allow the training of home-grown clergy so the Puritan colony would not need to rely on immigrating graduates of England's
Oxford and
Cambridge universities for well-educated pastors, "dreading," as a 1643 brochure put it, "to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches." In its first year, seven of the original nine students left to fight in the
English Civil War.
Harvard was also founded as a school to educate American Indians in order to train them as ministers among their tribes. Harvard's Charter of 1650 calls for "the education of the English and Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness." Indeed, Harvard and missionaries to the local tribes were intricately connected. The first Bible to be printed in the entire North American continent was printed at Harvard in an Indian language, Massachusett. Termed the Eliot Bible since it was translated by John Eliot, this book was used to facilitate conversion of Indians, ideally by Harvard-educated Indians themselves. Harvard's first American Indian graduate, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck from the Wampanoag tribe, was a member of the class of 1665. Caleb and other students-- English and American Indian alike-- lived and studied in a dormitory known as the Indian College, which was founded in 1655 under then-President Charles Chauncy. In 1698 it was torn down owing to neglect. The bricks of the former Indian College were later used to build the first Stoughton Hall. Today a plaque on the SE side of Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard, the approximate site of the Indian College, commemorates the first American Indian students who lived and studied at Harvard University.
The connection to the Puritans can be seen in the fact that, for its first few centuries of existence, the Harvard Board of Overseers included, along with certain commonwealth officials, the ministers of six local congregations , who today, although no longer so empowered, are still by custom allowed seats on the dais at commencement exercises.
Despite the Puritan atmosphere, from the beginning the intent was to provide a full
liberal education such as that offered at European universities, including the rudiments of mathematics and science as well as
classical literature and philosophy.
In 1755, Harvard's oldest endowed lectures, the prestigious Dudleian lectures on religion, were first held. During the Revolutionary War,
General Washington and the Continental Army quartered in Harvard buildings and organized military exercises in Cambridge Common.
Between 1800 and 1870 a transformation of Harvard occurred which E. Digby Baltzell calls "privatization." Harvard had prosperred while
Federalists controlled state government, but "in 1824 the federalist party was finally defeated forever in Massachusetts; the triumphant Jeffersonian-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'". 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 " 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
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." 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 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. As late as the 1950s, Wilbur Bender, then the dean of admissions for Harvard College, sought 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
Andover and Groton, 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.
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 :
Richard Nixon famously attacked it as the "
Kremlin on the
Charles". In
2004, the
Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper [i] of Harvard University [i], was founded in 1873. ...
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" , 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
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 now serves as interim president, as of July 1. 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.
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.
Notable student organizations
The
Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper [i] of Harvard University [i], was founded in 1873. ...
, one of the nation's oldest daily college newspapers. 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 Lampoon is an undergraduate [i] humor organization and publication founded in 1876 [i] a ...
, 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 humor magazine . Conan O'Brien was president of the Lampoon. The National Lampoon is a humor [i] magazine [i] that began in 1970 as an offshoot of the Harvard Lampoon [i] ...
was founded as an offshoot in 1970 from the Harvard publication.
- The Hasty Pudding Theatricals, 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 J.P. Morgan.
- WHRB , the campus radio station, run exclusively by Harvard students, and given space on the Harvard campus in the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dorm. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its classical, jazz, underground rock and blues programming, WHRB uses the radio "Orgy" format, where the entire catalog of a certain band, record, or artist is played in sequence.
- The Harvard Advocate, the oldest college literary publication in the country. Past members include T. S. Eliot and Theodore Roosevelt.
- The Harvard Institute of Politics, a living memorial to John F. Kennedy that promotes public service among undergraduates.
- The , a 501c3 non-profit organization which serves as the umbrella organization for 78 public service programs at Harvard. PBHA has 1600 volunteers which serve over 10,000 people in the greater Boston area. Notable alums include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, David Souter, and John F. Kennedy
