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- This article is about the institution of higher learning in the United States. For other uses of the name Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation).
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Harvard University |
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| Motto | Veritas (Truth) |
| Established | September 8, 1636 |
| Type | Private |
| President | Lawrence H. Summers |
| Faculty | 2,300 |
| Undergraduates | 6,650 |
| Postgraduates | 13,000 |
| Location | Cambridge, Mass., USA |
| Campus | Urban |
| Athletics | 43 varsity teams |
| Mascot | John Harvard  |
| Website | www.harvard.edu |
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 called simply the New College, it was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after its first principal donor, John Harvard, a former student of Cambridge University. The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" rather than a "college" occurred in the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780.
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[edit] Institution
Harvard is one of the world's most prestigious universities and has the largest endowment of any academic institution in the world ($22.6 billion as of 2004, nearly double that of Yale University, the institution with the second-largest endowment). The 2004 Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings placed Harvard University in sole first place [1].
A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students.
Harvard today has nine faculties, listed below in chronological order of foundation:
- 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 remnants of Radcliffe College were reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
The Harvard University Library System, centered on Widener Library, with 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 important 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.
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.
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 and the Harvard-MIT Data Center. 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. A third major research university, Boston University, is located between Harvard and MIT on the Boston side of the Charles River. These three schools jointly participate in many programs, such as the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology hosted at MIT.
Famous Harvard alumni include seven U.S. Presidents (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush), philosopher Henry David Thoreau, comedian Conan O'Brien, and actor Tommy Lee Jones. See also: List of Harvard University people.
Harvard is known for its liberal left-wing politics. Richard Nixon famously called it the "Kremlin on the Charles" (note that the city in which Harvard is located is sometimes called the "People's Republic of Cambridge").
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.
[edit] 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.
However, despite the Puritan atmosphere, from the beginning the intent was to provide a full liberal education such as that studied at European universities, including the rudiments of mathematics and science ('natural philosophy') as well as classical literature and philosophy.
[edit] Campus
The main campus is located next to Harvard Square in central Cambridge, approximately two miles (3.2 km) from the MIT campus.
The Medical School, the Business School, and the university stadium and some other athletic facilities are located across the Charles River in Boston. Harvard has recently acquired more land in the Allston neighborhood of Boston and is planning to move more of its facilities there.
[edit] Harvard University people
[edit] Further reading
- John T. Bethell, Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press 1998
- John Trumpbour, ed., How Harvard Rules, Boston: South End Press 1989
[edit] External links
- Official Site
- Faculty of Arts and Sciences
- Official Harvard athletics site
- Harvard Commencement Information
- The Harvard Crimson (student newspaper)
- Harvard International Review
- Harvard Asia Pacific Review
- Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations
- Harvard Law Review
| The Ivy League |
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| Brown • Columbia • Cornell • Dartmouth • Harvard • Penn • Princeton • Yale |
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