Harvard University

Harvard redirects here. For information about undergraduate education at Harvard University, see Harvard College. For other uses of the name Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation).

Template:Infobox University2 Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. It was founded on September 8, 1636, by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Originally referred to simply as the New College, it was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after its first principal donor, a young clergyman named John Harvard. A young graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, John Harvard in his will bequeathed a few hundred books to form the basis of the college library collection, along with 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.

Contents

1 Institution

2 History

2.1 Recent developments

3 Criticism of Harvard

4 Campus

5 Harvard University people

6 Further reading

7 External links

8 Notes

Institution

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Memorial Hall - Sanders Theater

Measured purely by statistics, Harvard is one of the world's most prominent universities —as Baedeker's guidebook phrased it in 1893, "the oldest, richest, and most famous of American seats of learning." Since 1974, for example, nineteen Nobel Prize winners and fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners have served on the Harvard faculty. With more than 15 million volumes, Harvard's library system is surpassed in size and scope only by the Library of Congress and the British Library. The university has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world ($22.6 billion as of 2004,Template:Ref nearly double that of the next most-endowed, Yale). Harvard's 41 official sports teams put it in a tie for widest-ranging NCAA sports program. All these resources make it attractive to potential students; year after year, for example, the college attracts more National Merit scholars than any other institution in the country.

Where the more subjective question of "prestige" is concerned, Harvard also fares well. For example, in the faculty reputational surveys which form a key component of the college and university rankings published annually by US News & World Report, Harvard consistently ranks in the top echelon (along with Princeton, Yale, MIT, Penn and Stanford). Harvard's fame extends worldwide as well; from the UK, for example, the 2004 Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings placed Harvard University in sole first place.Template:Ref For more information, see a list of quotations regarding Harvard's prestige.

A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. Admission to Harvard is very competitive, and its overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2005 was 9.1%.Template:Ref According to The Atlantic Monthly in 2003, it was the fifth most selective undergraduate program in the United States, after MIT, Princeton, Caltech, and Yale.Template:Ref Harvard's graduate schools are also very selective: the 2006 figures from U.S. News indicated that the business school admitted 14.3% of its applicants, the engineering division admitted 12.5%, the law school admitted 11.3%, the education school admitted 11.2%, and the medical school admitted 4.9%.Template:Ref

The school color is a shade richer than red but brighter than burgundy, referred to as 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, bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.

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

Gore Hall, the former Library (no longer standing)

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its subfaculty, the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which together serve:
- Harvard College, the University's undergraduate portion (1636)
- The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (organized 1872)
- The Harvard Division of Continuing Education, including Harvard Extension School and Harvard Summer School
The Faculty of Medicine, including the Medical School (1782) and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine (1867, the first U.S. dental school).
Harvard Divinity School (1816)
Harvard Law School (1817)
Harvard Business School (1908)
The Graduate School of Design (1914)
The Graduate School of Education (1920)
The School of Public Health (1922)
The John F. Kennedy School of Government (1936)

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

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Memorial Church

The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 14.5 million volumes, is the largest university library system in the world and, after the Library of Congress, the second-largest library system in the United States. Harvard also has several notable art museums, including the Fogg Museum of Art (with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with particular strengths in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art); the Busch-Reisinger Museum (central and northern European art); the Sackler Museum (ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art); the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous glass flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and the Semitic Museum.

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The Science Center, located just north of Harvard Yard

Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson; the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines; 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; and the Harvard Glee Club, the oldest and one of the most prestigious college choruses in America. 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. Let's Go Travel Guides, a leading travel guide series and a division of Harvard Student Agencies (http://www.hsa.net/), is run solely by Harvard students who research and edit improved versions of the books every summer. Harvard student organizations run the gamut, from publications, to political clubs, ethnic and religious associations, special interests, community service, and so on.

Weld Hall, a freshman residence dormitory in Harvard Yard

The radio station WHRB (95.3FM Cambridge), is run exclusively by Harvard students, and is given space on the Harvard campus in the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dormitory. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its top-notch classical, jazz, underground rock and blues programming, WHRB is also home of the notorious radio "Orgy" format, where the entire catalog of a certain band, record, or artist is played in sequence.

Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax in their annual football meeting, which dates to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game as a sign of its importance. 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, today Harvard does field top teams in several other sports, such as ice hockey, crew, and squash. As of 2003, there were 43 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other college in the country.

Harvard College has traditionally taken many of its students from private American preparatory schools such as Phillips Exeter Academy, the Lawrenceville School, Groton School, St. Paul's School, Milton Academy, and Phillips Andover Academy, though today most undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the globe. Harvard has traditionally had close ties to Boston Latin School, the oldest public school in the United States, founded in 1635. Early incoming Harvard classes were predominantly from Boston Latin; still today over a dozen students each year matriculate to Harvard from this inner-city magnet school.

Harvard contains many strong departments that are ranked among the best in the world. Some lesser known departments also have significant global influence. For example, the Department of African and African-American Studies is widely recognized as the foremost in the world, notwithstanding the recent departure of Cornel West for Princeton University. Another example is Harvard's Judaic Studies Department, which was headed by Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson. Harvard boasts a unique $5 million Judaica library which has identified and categorized books by ink type, font type, paper thickness, pagination style, binding method and numerous other categorizations.

An example of cooperation, "The Coop" is the official bookstore of both institutions

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 (ultimately cancelled 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 (http://hst.mit.edu/), the Harvard-MIT Data Center (http://www.hmdc.harvard.edu/) and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology (http://dibinst.mit.edu/). In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register (i.e., Harvard students can register for courses offered at MIT, and vice versa) without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees. The city of Cambridge is notable for the presence of two major research universities within two miles (3.2 km) of each other. Additional cross-register arrangements exist with Boston College and Boston University through the Boston Theological Institute (http://www.bostontheological.org)

Over its history, Harvard has graduated many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the most famous are political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, and John F. Kennedy; philosopher Henry David Thoreau and author Ralph Waldo Emerson; poets T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; actor Jack Lemmon; architect Philip Johnson; civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois; and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Among its most famous faculty members are biologists James D. Watson and Edward Osborne Wilson.'For a fuller listing of famous faculty and alumni (including all seven US Presidents with degrees from the college or one of the graduate schools), see List of Harvard University people.

Harvard affiliates' politics 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.Template:Ref At the same time, Harvard has been called the "incubator for an American ruling class" (Douthat) and "hostile to progressive intellectuals". (Trumpbour) Bush himself, in fact, graduated from the Harvard Business School. Indeed, there are both prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices among the faculty of the various schools.

Though Harvard has been featured in many films, including Legally Blonde, The Firm, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, and Harvard Man, the University has not allowed any movies to be filmed on its campus since Love Story in the 1960s. Many movies have characters identified as Harvard graduates, including A Few Good Men, American Psycho, and Two Weeks Notice.

History

Harvard's foundation 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.

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 (Boston, Cambridge, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxbury and Watertown), 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 ('natural philosophy') as well as classical literature and philosophy. Nonetheless, Harvard became the bastion of a distinctly Protestant elite--the so-called Boston Brahmin class--well into the 20th century. Its discriminatory policies against immigrants, Catholics and Jews were partly responsible for the founding of Boston College in the 19th century and Brandeis University in 1948. The social milieu at Harvard is depicted in Owen Wister's Philosophy 4, set in the 1870s, 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." Myron Kaufman's 1957 novel Remember Me to God follows the life of a Jewish undergraduate in 1940s Harvard, navigating the shoals of casual antisemitism as he desperately seeks to become a gentleman, be accepted into The Pudding, and marry the Yankee protestant Wimsy Talbot.

Recent developments

In a move unprecedented in the history of Harvard on March 15, 2005, members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which instructs graduate students in GSAS and undergraduates in Harvard College, passed 218-185 a motion of "lack of confidence" in the leadership of the current president Lawrence Summers, with 18 abstentions. A second motion that offered a milder censure of the president passed 253 to 137, also with 18 abstentions. Although the immediate cause for disapproval were Summers' controversial statements about women, the resistance against Summers is said to express reservations about the changes he wants to implement that according to his opponents would weaken the position of the liberal arts and favor a conservative curriculum. The resolution has no immediate formal effects since the president is not elected by the professors nor by the students but by the Harvard Corporation and can therefore only be discharged by this body.

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 has also pledged $50 million to support their recommendationad and other proposed reforms.

Criticism of Harvard

Harvard is the target of a number of critiques, many of them also levelled at other research-based American educational institutions. It has been accused of grade inflation,Template:Ref Template:Ref as have other Ivy League institutions and Stanford University.Template:Ref The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the New York Times, and some students have criticized Harvard (as well as many leading universities)Template:Ref Template:Ref for its reliance on teaching fellows in undergraduate education, as many in the faculty are engaged in research (assistant teaching is not taken into account by the major college and university rankings); they consider this to be detrimental to the quality of education.Template:Ref Template:Ref According to some internal faculty and external observers, including former Harvard president Derek Bok,Template:Ref the Harvard Corporation exercises disproportionate power, negatively compromising the indepedence of Harvard academics. The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni and wealthy benefactors, Template:Ref has been the subject of debate, as has been its preference for underrepresented minorities. Similar debates have occurred at other prominent schools. Minorities and women are considered underrepresented on the Harvard faculty according to The New York Times, as at several other Ivy League universities.Template:Ref The College is not the sole target of criticism: the Business School has been criticized for over-reliance on the case method,Template:Ref, and several Law School faculty have been implicated in plagiarism.Template:Ref

Campus

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Harvard Stadium

The main campus is centered around Harvard Yard in central Cambridge, and extends into the surrounding Harvard Square neighborhood, approximately two miles (3.2 km) from the MIT campus. 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, and the University has plans to move more of its facilites to recently-acquired land in Allston. Harvard Medical School is located in the Longwood district of Boston.

Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the University, several academic buildings and the majority of the freshman dormitories. Upperclass students live in twelve residential Houses; three Houses are located at the Quadrangle, in a residential neigborhood half a mile northwest of the Yard, and the other nine are in a largely commercial district south of the Yard, situated along or close to the banks of the Charles River.

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