Harvard College

Harvard College
Established 1636
Type Private
Location Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Campus Urban
Website college.harvard.edu

Harvard College is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees (the other being Harvard Extension School). Founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States[1] and one of the most prestigious in the world.[2]

History

View of freshman dormitories in Harvard Yard

The "New College" came into existence in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court (colonial legislature, second oldest in British America) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—though without a single building, instructor, or student. In 1638, the college became home for North America's first known printing press, carried by the ship John of London.[3][4] Three years later the college was renamed in honor of deceased Charlestown minister John Harvard (1607–1638) who had bequeathed to the school his entire library and half of his monetary estate.

Harvard's first instructor, schoolmaster Nathaniel Eaton (1610–1674), was also its first instructor to be dismissed—in 1639, for overstrict discipline.[5] The school's first students were graduated in 1642. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, (c. 1643-1666), a native/indigenous American, "from the Wampanoag ... did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period."[6]

Lt Gov William Stoughton, (1631-1701), Colonial Governor: 1694-99, 1700-01; circa 1700 overlooking one of the buildings of Harvard College

At the time of Harvard's founding (as today) the "colleges" of England's Oxford and Cambridge Universities were communities within the larger university, each an association of scholars (both established and aspiring) sharing room and board; Harvard's founders may have envisioned it as the first in a series of sibling colleges which, on the English model, would eventually constitute a university. Though no further "colleges" materialized in colonial times, nonetheless as Harvard began granting higher degrees in the late eighteenth century it was increasingly styled Harvard University—even as Harvard College (in keeping with emerging American usage of that word) was increasingly thought of as the university's undergraduate division in particular.

Though the Indian College was active from 1640 to no later than 1693, it was a minor addition not operated in federation with Harvard according to the English model.

Today Harvard College is responsible for undergraduate admissions, advising, housing, student life, and athletics – generally all undergraduate matters except instruction, which is the purview of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The body known as The President and Fellows of Harvard College retains its traditional name despite having governance of the entire University.

Academics

About 2100 students are admitted each year, representing between six and ten percent of those applying; of those admitted approximately three-quarters choose to attend.[7][8][9][10] These figures make Harvard one of the most selective and most sought-after colleges in the world. Very few transfers are accepted.[11]

Midway through the second year, most undergraduates join one of fifty standard fields of concentration (what most schools call academic majors); many also declare a secondary field (called minors elsewhere). Joint concentrations (combining the requirements of two standard concentrations) and special concentrations (of the student's own design) are also possible.

Most Harvard College concentrations lead to the Artium Baccalaureus (A.B.), normally completed in four years, though students leaving high school with substantial college-level coursework may finish in three. A smaller number receive the Scientiarum Baccalaureus (S.B.), normally requiring five years. There are also special degree programs, such as a five-year program leading to both a Harvard undergraduate degree and a Master of Arts from the New England Conservatory of Music.

Undergraduates must also fulfill the General Education requirement of coursework in eight designated fields:

  • Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding
  • Culture and Belief
  • Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning
  • Ethical Reasoning
  • Science of Living Systems
  • Science of the Physical Universe
  • Societies of the World
  • United States in the World

Each student's exposure (via "Gen Ed") to a range of intellectual areas, while pursuing a chosen concentration in depth, fulfills the injunction of Harvard past-president Abbott Lawrence Lowell that a Harvard "man" should know "a little of everything, and one thing well."[12]

In 2012, dozens of students were disciplined for cheating on a take-home exam in one course.[13] The university does not have an honor code.[14][15]

The total annual cost of attendance, including tuition and room and board, for 2009–2010 was $49,000.[16] Under financial aid guidelines adopted in 2007, families with incomes below $60,000 will no longer pay anything for their children to attend, including room and board. Families with incomes between $60,000 to $80,000 pay only few thousand dollars a year, and families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 will pay no more than 10% of their annual income.[17] In 2009, Harvard offered grants totaling $414 million across all eleven divisions; $340 million came from institutional funds, $35 million from federal support, and $39 million from other outside support. Grants total 88% of Harvard's aid for undergraduate students, with aid also provided by loans (8%) and work-study (4%).[16]

House system

Lowell House in autumn

Nearly all undergraduates live on campus, for the first year in dormitories in or near Harvard Yard (see List of Harvard dormitories) and later in the upperclass Houses—administrative subdivisions of the College as well as living quarters, providing a sense of community in what might otherwise be a socially incohesive and administratively daunting university environment. Each house is presided over by a senior-faculty Master, while its Allston Burr Resident Dean (usually a junior faculty member) supervises undergraduates' day-to-day academic and disciplinary well-being. The Master and Resident Dean are assisted by other members of the Senior Common Room—select graduate students (called tutors), faculty, and University officials brought into voluntary association with each house. Many tutors reside in the House, as do the Master and Resident Dean. (Terms such as tutor, Senior Common Room and Junior Common Room—the House's undergraduate members—reflect a debt to the residential college systems at Oxford and Cambridge from which Harvard's system took inspiration.)[18]

The Houses were created by President Lowell in the 1930s to combat what he saw as pernicious social stratification engendered by the private, off-campus living arrangements of many undergraduates at that time. Lowell's solution was to provide every man—​Harvard was male-only at the time—​with on-campus accommodations throughout his time at the College; Lowell also saw great benefits flowing from other features of the House system, such as the relaxed discussions (academic or otherwise) which he hoped would take place among undergraduates and members of the Senior Common Room over meals in each House's dining hall.[19]

The way in which students come to live in particular Houses has changed greatly over time. Under the original "draft" system, Masters negotiated privately over the assignment of "rising sophomores" (that is, current freshmen, who will be sophomores in the coming academic year) considered most—or least—promising. From the 1960s to the mid-1990s each student ranked the Houses according to personal preference, with an impersonal lottery resolving the oversubscription of more popular houses. Today groups of one to eight freshmen form a block which is then assigned, essentially at random, to an upperclass house.

South of Harvard Yard, near the Charles River, are the nine River Houses:

The construction of the River houses was financed largely by a 1928 gift from Yale alumnus Edward Harkness who, frustrated in his attempts to initiate a similar project at his alma mater, eventually offered 11 million dollars to Harvard.[20][21] Two of the new houses, Dunster and Lowell, were completed in 1930.[20]

Construction of the first River houses began in early 1929,[20] but the land on which they were built had been assembled decades before. After graduating Harvard in 1895, Edward Waldo Forbes (grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson) found himself inspired by the Oxford and Cambridge systems during two years of study in England; on returning to the United States he set out to acquire such land between Harvard Yard and the Charles River as was not already owned by Harvard or some associated entity. By 1918 that ambition had been largely fulfilled and the assembled land transferred to Harvard.[22][23]

The three Quad Houses (in the Radcliffe Quadrangle) enjoy a residential setting one-half mile (800 m) northwest of Harvard Yard. These were built by Radcliffe College and housed Radcliffe College students until the Harvard and Radcliffe residential systems merged in 1977.[24] They are:

A thirteenth house, Dudley House, is nonresidential but fulfills, for some graduate students and the (very few) undergraduates living off campus, the administrative and social functions provided on-campus residents by the other twelve houses.

Harvard's residential houses are paired with Yale's residential colleges in sister relationships.

Athletics

Main article: Harvard Crimson

By the late 19th century critics of intercollegiate athletics, including Harvard president Charles William Eliot, believed that sports competition had become over-commercialized and took students away from their studies, and they called for reform and limitations on all sports. This opposition prompted Harvard's athletic committee to target 'minor' sports—basketball and hockey—for reform and regulation in order to deflect attention from the major sports—football, baseball, track, and crew. The committee made it difficult for the basketball team to operate by denying financial assistance and limiting the number of overnight away games in which the team could participate. Several losing seasons, negative attitudes toward the commercialization of intercollegiate sports, and the need for reform contributed to basketball's demise at Harvard in 1909.[25]

Today Harvard, one of the eight members of the Ivy League, claims to have the largest Division I intercollegiate athletics program, with 41 varsity teams and over 1,500 student-athletes.

Begun in 1852 the Harvard-Yale Regatta is the oldest intercollegiate athletic rivalry in the United States. Better known is the annual Harvard-Yale football game—"The Game", to insiders—first played in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1875, and now played on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, making it one of many significant games played on "Rivalry Day."

Undergraduate organizations

Harvard has hundreds of undergraduate organizations. Every spring there is an "Arts First week," founded by John Lithgow during which arts and culture organizations show off performances, cook meals, or present other work; in 2005 over 40% of students participated in at least one Arts First event. Notable organizations include the student-run business organization Harvard Student Agencies, the daily newspaper The Harvard Crimson, the humor magazine the Harvard Lampoon, the a cappella groups the Din & Tonics and the Krokodiloes, and the public service umbrella organization the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA).

Notable alumni

Architecture
Art
Astronauts
Astronomy
Athletics
Biology
Business
Economics
Education
Journalism
Law
Literature
Mathematics
Performance arts - music, theater and film
Philosophy
Physics
Politics
Religion

Fictional alumni

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Rudolph, Frederick (1961). The American College and University. University of Georgia Press. p. 3. ISBN 0-8203-1285-1.
  2. ↑ Keller, Morton; Keller, Phyllis (2001). Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University. Oxford University Press. pp. 463–481. ISBN 0-19-514457-0. Harvard's professional schools... won world prestige of a sort rarely seen among social institutions. (...) Harvard's age, wealth, quality, and prestige may well shield it from any conceivable vicissitudes.
    Spaulding, Christina (1989). "Sexual Shakedown". In Trumpbour, John. How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire. South End Press. pp. 326–336. ISBN 0-89608-284-9. ...[Harvard's] tremendous institutional power and prestige (...) Within the nation's (arguably) most prestigious institution of higher learning...
  3. ↑ "The instrument behind New England’s first literary flowering". Harvard University. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  4. ↑ "Rowley and Ezekiel Rogers, The First North American Printing Press" (PDF). Maritime Historical Studies Centre, University of Hull. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  5. ↑ Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (1986)
  6. ↑ Monaghan, E. J., 2005, p. 55, 59
  7. ↑ Worland, Justin (31 March 2011). "Harvard Accepts Record Low 6.2 Percent of Applicants to the Class of 2015". The Crimson. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
  8. ↑ Jan, Tracy (30 March 2009). "Harvard admission rate dips to 7 percent". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 13 April 2011.
  9. ↑ Yield Holds Steady For 2013 — Harvard News Office
  10. ↑ A record pool leads to a record-low admissions rate — Harvard News Office
  11. ↑ Menz, Petey. "The Real 1%: Harvard Admits 15 Transfer Students". thecrimson.com. The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 7 March 2015.
  12. ↑ Full text of "The story of Harvard". Archive.org. Retrieved on 2013-09-07.
  13. ↑ Perez-Pena, Richard (February 1, 2013). "Students Disciplined in Harvard Scandal". The New York Times. Retrieved September 15, 2013.
  14. ↑ Hu, Melody Y.; Newcomer, Eric P. (March 24, 2010). "Administrators Discuss College Honor Code". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved September 15, 2013. "...one thing remains certain: many College administrators are looking for a way to combat academic dishonesty at Harvard—which Harris recently called a real problem"...
  15. ↑ Harrington, Rebecca (September 14, 2012). "Song of the Cheaters". The New York Times. Retrieved September 15, 2013. "...an honor code, a system ... Harvard has long resisted
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 "Tuition at Harvard Schools: FY1990 – FY2010" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved August 28, 2010.
  17. ↑ Rimer, Sara; Finder, Alan (December 10, 2007). "Harvard Steps Up Financial Aid". The New York Times.
  18. ↑ Harvard College Office of Residential Life (2008). "History of the House System". Retrieved 2008-04-20.
  19. ↑ Morison, Samuel Eliot (1936). Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636–1936. pp. 476–478.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 20.2 Bethell, John (1998). Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 102–103. ISBN 978-0-674-37733-2.
  21. ↑ "Gifts - 1928-1929" (Press release). Harvard University News Office. June 20, 1929. HU 37.5, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, Mass. "This figure [of gifts and legacies received during the year] includes $5,444,000 received from E. S. Harkness to defray the expenses of constructing the first Harvard houses."
  22. ↑ Lowe, Charles U. "The Forbes Story of the Harvard Riverside Associates: How Harvard Acquired the Land on which Lowell House was Built," February 20, 2002.lowell.harvard.edu
  23. ↑ Sacks, Benjamin J. "Harvard's 'Constructed Utopia' and the Culture of Deception: the Expansion toward the Charles River, 1902-1932," The New England Quarterly 84.2 (June 2011): 286–317.
  24. ↑ Sofen, Adam A. "Radcliffe Enters Historic Merger With Harvard, April 21, 1999.
  25. ↑ Marc Horger, "A Victim of Reform: Why Basketball Failed at Harvard, 1900-1909," New England Quarterly 2005 78(1): 49-76,
  26. ↑ Thomas S. Kuhn (2000) The Road since Structure, edited by James Conant and John Haugeland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

General references

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Harvard University.
Wikisource has the text of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (9th ed.) article Harvard College.

Coordinates: 42°22′26″N 71°07′01″W / 42.374°N 71.117°W