Harvard University

Harvard University
Harvard Wreath Logo 1.svg

Motto: Veritas (Latin for "truth")[1]
Established: September 8, 1636 (OS)
September 18, 1636 (NS)[2]
Type: Private
Endowment: US$28.8 billion[3]
President: Drew Gilpin Faust
Faculty: about 2,400
Staff: 2,497 non-medical, 10,674 medical
Undergraduates: 6,715
Postgraduates: 12,424
Location: Cambridge, MA, U.S.
Campus: Urban, 380 acres (1.5 km2)
Colors: Crimson     
Nickname: Crimson
Mascot: John Harvard Harvard university john mascot.jpg (unofficial)
Athletics: NCAA Division I Ivy League
41 varsity teams
Website: www.harvard.edu
Harvard Logo.png

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,[2] Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest corporation in North America. [4]

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.

In 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 as the "Harvard Annex for Women",[5] merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes,[6] making 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).[7][8] Harvard is consistently ranked number one in international college and university rankings,[9][10][11][12][13] and has the largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization except for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, standing at $28.8 billion as of 2008.

Contents

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, 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.[14]

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 affiliated with the Congregationalist denomination. 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.

Engraving of Harvard College by Paul Revere, 1767.

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.

Eliza Susan Quincy's drawing of the September 1836 procession of Harvard alumni leaving the First Parish Meeting House and walking to the Pavilion. Eliza Susan Quincy was the daughter of Josiah Quincy, President of Harvard University 1829-45.

Between 1830 and 1870 Harvard became "privatized".[15] 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'".[16] 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'".[17] 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".[18] 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.

Five Harvard University Presidents sitting in order of when they served. L-R: Josiah Quincy III, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, James Walker and Cornelius Conway Felton.

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."[19]

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."[20] 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."[21] 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.[22]

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".[23] 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.[24]

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.[25] Nonetheless, Harvard's undergraduate population remained predominantly male, with about four men attending Harvard College for every woman studying at Radcliffe.[26] 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.

The politics of Harvard

Today, Harvard is considered one of a handful of the world's premier centers of higher learning. Today, Harvard and its affiliates, in line with most American universites, are considered to be politically liberal (center-left); Richard Nixon, for example, famously called it around 1970 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 such as Boston and New York City.[27] 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-elect 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

Destroyed by fire in the 1950s, Memorial Hall's ornate tower was rebuilt in 1999

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.[28][29][30][31]

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."[32][33]

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.[34]

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.[35] 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.[36][37]

In 2005 Harvard received a large donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for the development of research programs in Islamic studies.[38][39] 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.[40][41]

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.[42][43][44][45][46][47] 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.[48]

Institutions

Harvard University campus (old map)

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 were 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 had reneged on its promise and continued using magenta. Fordham had adopted maroon because of this and claims that Harvard followed suit with its adoption of crimson.[49]

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.

The John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard is a frequent target of pranks, hacks, and humorous decorations, such as the colorful lei shown above. It is known as the Statue of Three Lies: it's not John Harvard, he wasn't the Founder, and the date's wrong.

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."[50]

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, and Pierre Trudeau; 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; actors Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, 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, and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, political scientists Robert Putnam, Joseph Nye, Samuel P. Huntington, Stanley Hoffman, and Torben Iversen, and scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.

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:

Harvard Yard with freshman dorms in the background

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

Athletics

The logo of the Harvard Crimson athletics teams.

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 Stadium, home of Harvard Crimson and the Boston Cannons.

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.[51][52]

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 Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library.

The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprising over 80 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes,[6] is considered 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"[53] and prides itself for being the only one of the world's five "mega-libraries" to have open stacks.[7] 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;[54] 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.

Henry Moore's sculpture Large Four Piece Reclining Figure located just off Harvard Yard

Harvard operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums:

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.[55]

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.[56] 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 with in the competition to get into selective universities.[57]

Campus

Map showing the architects and dates of construction for the buildings of the main campus near Harvard square, as of 2005. Information on other notable nearby buildings is also included.

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.

Memorial Church

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.[58] 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).[59] 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.[60] 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.[61]

Notable student organizations

A longer list of Harvard student groups can be found under Harvard College.

The Harvard Lampoon "castle" with its characteristic rooftop ibis and its purple and yellow door

Notable people

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.

Further information: Nobel Prize laureates by university affiliation

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.[68] 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.[69] 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.[70] 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).[71] 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,[72] filmed at University of Southern California. American television's fictional Harvard graduates include Sex and the City character Miranda Hobbes, Gilligan's Island's resident aristocrat Thurston Howell, III, played by Jim Backus, M*A*S*H's 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 Harvard-Radcliffe Television show[73] 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."[74] 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[75] and the Academic Ranking of World Universities. The 2007 U.S. News & World Report rankings place Harvard in first place among "National Universities".[76]

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.[77] 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 renorming of the test in the mid-1990s), suggesting that the quality of the student body and its motivation have also increased.[78] 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.[79][80][81][82]

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.[83][84] 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.[85] 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.[86][87] The Harvard Crimson quoted Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross as being aware of and committed to improving the issues raised by the COFHE survey.[88] 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."[89]

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."[90] 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.[91]

The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate.[92] 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,"[93] 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

See also

  • Academic dress of Harvard University
  • Brainpower Triangle
  • Harvard Business School
  • Harvard College
  • Harvard Divinity School
  • Harvard Extension School
  • Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
  • Harvard Graduate School of Design
  • Harvard Graduate School of Education
  • Harvard Law School
  • Harvard Medical School
  • Harvard School of Dental Medicine
  • Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
  • Harvard School of Public Health
  • Harvard University Police Department
  • John F. Kennedy School of Government
  • Radcliffe College
  • Secret Court of 1920

References

  1. Appearing as it does on the coat of arms itself, Veritas is not a motto in the usual heraldic sense. Properly speaking, rather, the motto is Christo et Ecclesiae ("for Christ and the church") which appears in impressions of the university's seal; but this legend is otherwise not used today, while 'veritas' has widespread currency as a de facto university motto.
  2. 2.0 2.1 An appropriation of £400 toward a "school or college" was voted on October 28, 1636 (OS), at a meeting which initially convened on September 8 and was adjourned to October 28. Some sources consider October 28, 1636 (OS) (November 7, 1636 NS) to be the date of founding. In 1936, Harvard's multi-day tercentenary celebration considered September 18 to be the 300-year anniversary of the founding. (The bicentennial was celebrated on September 8, 1836, apparently ignoring the calendar change; and the tercentenary celebration began by opening a package sealed by Josiah Quincy at the bicentennial). Sources: meeting dates, Quincy, Josiah (1860). History of Harvard University. 117 Washington Street, Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Co.. , p. 586, "At a Court holden September 8th, 1636 and continued by adjournment to the 28th of the 8th month (October, 1636)... the Court agreed to give £400 towards a School or College, whereof £200 to be paid next year...." Tercentenary dates: "Cambridge Birthday". Time Magazine (1936-09-28). Retrieved on 2006-09-08.: "Harvard claims birth on the day the Massachusetts Great and General Court convened to authorize its founding. This was Sept. 8, 1937 under the Julian calendar. Allowing for the ten-day advance of the Gregorian calendar, Tercentenary officials arrived at Sept. 18 as the date for the third and last big Day of the celebration;" "on Oct. 28, 1636 ... £400 for that 'school or college' [was voted by] the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony." Bicentennial date: Marvin Hightower (2003-09-02). "Harvard Gazette: This Month in Harvard History". Harvard University. Retrieved on 2006-09-15., "Sept. 8, 1836 - Some 1,100 to 1,300 alumni flock to Harvard's Bicentennial, at which a professional choir premieres "Fair Harvard." ... guest speaker Josiah Quincy Jr., Class of 1821, makes a motion, unanimously adopted, 'that this assembly of the Alumni be adjourned to meet at this place on the 8th of September, 1936.'" Tercentary opening of Quincy's sealed package: The New York Times, September 9, 1936, p. 24, "Package Sealed in 1836 Opened at Harvard. It Held Letters Written at Bicentenary": "September 8th, 1936: As the first formal function in the celebration of Harvard's tercentenary, the Harvard Alumni Association witnessed the opening by President Conant of the 'mysterious' package sealed by President Josiah Quincy at the Harvard bicentennial in 1836."
  3. http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2008/12/04/the_toll_on_harvard_81b/
  4. (See: Harvard Corporation)Rudolph, Frederick (1990) [1961]. The American College and University. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. p. 3. ISBN 0820312843.  With regard to age, several institutions founded in the mid-1700s have a difference of opinion over relative position, but none today explicitly challenges Harvard's "oldest" position. One possible challenger is Georgetown University, whose founding date is debated. In the past the university has taken 1634 as the date of its foundation (two years before that of Harvard),[1] this being the year that Jesuit education began on the site.[2] [3] It was not until 1789, however, the founding date currently recognized by the university, that the name Georgetown was taken for the institution. Another potential claimant, the College of William and Mary, describes itself, and is described by supporters, as "America's second-oldest college" and gives its year of "founding" as 1693[4]. A page of its website states, "The College of William & Mary... was the first college planned for the United States. Its roots go back to the College proposed at Henrico in 1619...." but notes that "The College is second only to Harvard University in actual operation."[5]. See Henricus for the University of Henrico, and Colonial colleges for a summary of relevant institutional dates. Unqualified characterizations of Harvard as "oldest" abound. The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article on Harvard University which opens with the line "HARVARD UNIVERSITY, the oldest of American educational institutions" (Volume 13, HAR-HUR, p. 38; also [6]). Baedeker's United States, in 1893 called Harvard "the oldest... of American seats of learning." Harvard's own choice of words is "Harvard University... is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States."[7], thus recognizing the fact that fifteen universities existed in the Spanish dominions in the Americas, from Mexico to Cordoba in Argentina and Santiago in Chile.
  5. Schwager, Sally (2004). "Taking up the Challenge: The Origins of Radcliffe". in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (ed.). Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1403960984. 
  6. 6.0 6.1 See the FAQ on the Harvard-Google partnership.
  7. 7.0 7.1 "Speaking Volumes: Professor Sidney Verba Champions the University Library". Harvard Gazette (The President and Fellows of Harvard College). 1998-02-26. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/02.26/SpeakingVolumes.html. Retrieved on 2007-02-19. 
  8. See the ranked list of U.S. libraries from the American Library Association.
  9. the QS rankings
  10. Academic Ranking of World Universities
  11. The Top 100 Global Universities - 2006. Retrieved, August 30, 2008.
  12. Professional Ranking of World Universities
  13. "Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities". Retrieved on 2008-08-30.
  14. Harvard Charter of 1650, Harvard University Archives, harvard.edu
  15. Baltzell, D. E. & Schneiderman, H. G. (1994). Judgment and Sensibility: Religion and Stratification." Transaction Publishers, ISBN 1-56000-048-1. The material cited is a review of a book by Ronald Story (1980), The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870, Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0-8195-5044-2.
  16. Story, R. (1980). The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870. Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0-8195-5044-2 (p. 50: Harvard's explosive growth from 1800 to 1850 separate it from other colleges)
  17. Story, R. (1980). op. cit. p. 97, (1815-1855 as the era when Harvard began to be perceived as socially advantageous)
  18. Steinberg, S. (2001). The Ethnic Myth. Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-4153-X. (Harvard most democratic of the Big Three under Eliot, p. 234)
  19. Wister, Owen (1914). Philosophy 4. The Macmillan Company. , p. 23: "had colonial names;" p. 36, "Bertie's and Billy's parents owned town and country houses in New York. The parents of Oscar had come over in the steerage. Money filled the pockets of Bertie and Billy; therefore were their heads empty of money and full of less cramping thoughts. Oscar had fallen upon the reverse of this fate. Calculation was his second nature." 'Philosophy 4, by Owen Wister at Project Gutenberg
  20. Steinberg, Stephen (1977). The Academic Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-87855-635-4.  pp. 21-23; quotes full text policy announcement, explains the openness by suggesting Lowell perceived his actions to be forthright and courageous and as motivated by a wish to restrict the growth of campus anti-semitism.
  21. Kaufman, Myron (1957). Remember Me to God. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Co.. 
  22. Levenson, Michael (2006), "Brandeis pulls artwork...." The Boston Globe, May 3, 2006:"Brandeis, a nonsectarian institution, was founded in 1948, by American Jews seeking to establish a university free from the quotas that Jews faced at elite colleges."
  23. Wright, W. (2005). Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, St. Martin's Press, New York. ISBN 0-312-32271-2.
  24. Malcolm Gladwell. (2005). Getting In. The New Yorker, October 10, 2005
  25. Malka A. Older. (1996). Preparatory schools and the admissions process. The Harvard Crimson, January 24, 1996
  26. Associated Press. (2004). In first, Harvard admits more women than men as undergraduates. The Boston Globe, April 1, 2004
  27. O'Brien, R. D. (2004). Kerry Tops Crimson Poll. The Harvard Crimson, October 29, 2004.
  28. "Harvard College Denies transfer students after housing shortage".
  29. "Transfers Crowded Out".
  30. "Harvard adopts Princeton's no-transfer policy".
  31. "Harvard’s decision to eliminate transfer admissions was misguided and rash".
  32. "Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,", February 2007
  33. "Dean's Letter on Growth and Renewal of the faculty,", April 2007
  34. Letter to the Harvard community regarding Hurricane Katrina
  35. Bombardieri, M. (2005). Summers' remarks on women draw fire. The Boston Globe, January 17, 2005.
  36. "Faust Expected To Be Named President This Weekend," The Harvard Crimson, 8 February 2007
  37. "Harvard names Drew Faust as its 28th president," Office of News and Public Affairs, 11 February 2007
  38. Saudi Gives $20 Million to Georgetown & Harvard
  39. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal donates $20 million to support the Harvard University Islamic Studies Program
  40. Saudi in the Classroom
  41. The Saudi Fifth Column On Our Nation's Campuses
  42. $125 million gift is Harvard's largest, The Record. Published October 8, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2008.
  43. Alum gives Harvard $125 million, MSNBC. Published October 7, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2008.
  44. Harvard gets largest ever donation from an individual: $125-million, The Globe and Mail. Published October 7, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2008.
  45. Chinlund, Christine. Harvard gets $125 million for biological engineering institute, The Boston Globe. Published October 7, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2008.
  46. Harvard alum donates record $125M, USA Today. Published October 7, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2008.
  47. Alum gives Harvard $125M for bioengineering center, The Washington Post. Published October 7, 2008. Retrieved October 15, 2008.
  48. Hechinger, John (2008-12-04). "Harvard Hit by Loss as Crisis Spreads to Colleges", Wall Street Journal, p. A1. 
  49. University Colors
  50. Times Higher Education Supplement World Rankings 2006
  51. "History of American Football" NEWSdial.com
  52. Nelson, David M., Anatomy of a Game: Football, the Rules, and the Men Who Made the Game, 1994, Pages 127-128
  53. "Largest Academic Library in the World". President and Fellows of Harvard College (2005). Retrieved on 2006-09-16.. However, there is some debate about what constitutes a "single" library: the University of California states that "With collections totaling more than 34 million volumes, the more than 100 libraries throughout UC are surpassed in size on the American continent only by the Library of Congress collection" ("University of California: Cultural Resources > Libraries". University of California (2004-05-16). Retrieved on 2006-09-16.
  54. See the library portal listing of archives and special collections [8].
  55. "America's Best Colleges 2007". Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
  56. U.S. News & World Report (2006). In 2005, only 8.9% of a record of over 22000 applicants were accepted - making it the most competitive year in history.The Best Graduate Schools 2006.
  57. Harvard Ends Early Admission, The New York Times, By Alan Finder and Karen W. Arenson, September 12, 2006
  58. Harvard University Allston Initiative Home Page
  59. "Harvard Green Campus Initiative". Harvard University. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  60. "America's Greenest Colleges". Forbes Magazine. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  61. "College Sustainability Report Card 2008". Sustainable Endowments Institute. Retrieved on 2008-05-21.
  62. http://www.pbha.org
  63. "Harvard Student Agencies, Inc."
  64. "Harvard Student Agencies, About Us"
  65. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hcc/old.html
  66. http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~hcc/archive/hy98.html
  67. "The Harvard Wireless Club: 80 Years of History of W1AF"
  68. Rogers, M. F. (1991). Novels, Novelists, and Readers: Toward a Phenomenological Sociology of Literature. SUNY Press, ISBN 0-7914-0603-2.
  69. Burr, T. (2005)
  70. Reel Boston. The Boston Globe, February 27, 2005.
  71. Jampel, C. E. (2004). Ruffling Religious Feathers. The Harvard Crimson, February 12, 2004.
  72. Catalano, N. M. (2004). Harvard TV Show Popular in Korea. The Harvard Crimson, December 13, 2004.
  73. The Ivory Tower
  74. Baedeker, Karl (1971) [1893]. The United States, with an Excursion into Mexico: A Handbook for Travellers. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-71341-1. , p. 83. (Facsimile reprint of original, published in Leipzig and New York)
  75. [9] — A 2008 ranking from the THES - QS of the world’s research universities.
  76. US News and World Report. (2006). National Universities: Top Schools.
  77. Rosane, O. (2006). College Administrators Take On Inflated Grade Averages. Columbia Spectator, March 20, 2006.
  78. Kohn, A. (2002). The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation. The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8, 2002.
  79. No author given. (2003). Brevia. Harvard Magazine, January-February 2003.
  80. Milzoff, R. M., Paley, A. R., & Reed, B. J. (2001). Grade Inflation is Real. Fifteen Minutes March 1, 2001.
  81. Bombardieri, M. & Schweitzer, S. (2006). "At Harvard, more concern for top grades." The Boston Globe, February 12, 2006. p. B3 (Benedict Gross quotes, 23.7% A/25% A- figures, characterized as an "all-time high.").
  82. Associated Press. (2004). Princeton becomes first to formally combat grade inflation. USA Today, April 26, 2004.
  83. Hicks, D. L. (2002). Should Our Colleges Be Ranked?. Letter to [The New York Times, September 20, 2002.
  84. Merrow, J. (2004). Grade Inflation: It's Not Just an Issue for the Ivy League. Carnegie Perspectives, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
  85. Bombardieri, M. (2005). Student life at Harvard lags peer schools, poll finds. The Boston Globe, March 29, 2005.
  86. Adams, W. L., Feinstein, B., Schneider, A. P., Thompson, A. H., & and Wasserstein, S. A. (2003). The Cult of Yale. The Harvard Crimson, November 20, 2003.
  87. Feinstein, B., Schneider, A. P., Thompson, A. H., & Wasserstein, S. A. (2003). The Cult of Yale, Part II. The Harvard Crimson, November 20, 2003.
  88. Ho, M. W. & Rogers, J. P. (2005). Harvard Students Less Satisfied Than Peers With Undergraduate Experience, Survey Finds. The Harvard Crimson, March 31, 2005.
  89. [10]
  90. Six Top Teachers Honored with Harvard College
  91. University Planning & Analysis
  92. Shapiro, J. (1997). A Second Look.
  93. Steinberger, M. (2005). A Flood of Crimson Ink. Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2005.

External links