Everything about Harvard University totally explained
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, Harvard is the
oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest
corporation in North America.
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, a graduate of England's
Emmanuel College, Cambridge (a college of the
University of Cambridge) and
St Olave's Grammar School, Orpington in the UK, bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and half his personal wealth, $1,500 (or £750). The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" occurs in the new
Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.
During his forty 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", merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes, making it the largest academic library in the world, and the fourth among the five "mega-libraries" of the world (after the
British Library, the
Library of Congress, and the French
Bibliothèque nationale, but ahead of the
New York Public Library). Harvard has the
largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization except for the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, standing at $34.9 billion as of 2007.
History
Harvard University 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 was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the
Massachusetts Bay Colony and 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 Gov.
Thomas Dudley in 1650.
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. The College was affiliated with 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 "For Christ and the Church." In its 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."
The 1708 election of
John Leverett, the first president who wasn't 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 wasn't a success and disappeared by 1693.
Between 1830 and 1870 Harvard became "privatized". 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, 'unequalled in facilities,' as a budding scholar put it, by any other institution in America — the 'greatest university,' said another, 'in all creation'". Story also notes that "all the evidence... points to the four decades from 1815 to 1855 as the era when parents, in Henry Adams's words, began 'sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages'". Harvard was also an early leader in admitting ethnic and religious minorities. Stephen Steinberg, author of
The Ethnic Myth, noted that "a climate of intolerance prevailed in many Eastern colleges long before discriminatory quotas were contemplated" and noted that "Jews tended to avoid such campuses as Yale and Princeton, which had reputations for
bigotry.... [while] under President Eliot's administration, Harvard earned a reputation as the most liberal and democratic of the Big Three, and therefore Jews didn't feel that the avenue to a prestigious college was altogether closed". In 1870, one year into Eliot's term,
Richard Theodore Greener became the first African-American to graduate from Harvard College. Seven years later,
Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the
Supreme Court, graduated from Harvard Law School.
Nevertheless, Harvard became the bastion of a distinctly Protestant elite — the so-called
Boston Brahmin class — and continued to be so well into the 20th century. The social milieu of 1880s Harvard is depicted in
Owen Wister's
Philosophy 4, which contrasts the character and demeanor of two undergraduates who "had colonial names (Rogers, I think, and Schuyler)" with that of their tutor, one Oscar Maironi, whose "parents had come over in the steerage."
Though Harvard ended required chapel in the mid-1880s, the school remained culturally Protestant, and fears of dilution grew as enrollment of immigrants, Catholics and Jews surged at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1908, Catholics made up nine percent of the freshman class, and between 1906 and 1922, Jewish enrollment at Harvard increased from six to twenty percent. In June 1922, under President Lowell, Harvard announced a Jewish quota. Other universities had done this surreptitiously. Lowell did it in a forthright way, and positioned it as means of
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." The social milieu of 1940s Harvard is presented in
Myron Kaufman's 1957 novel,
Remember Me to God, which follows the life of a Jewish undergraduate as he attempts to navigate the shoals of casual anti-Semitism, be recognized as a "gentleman," and be accepted into "The Pudding." Indeed, Harvard's discriminatory policies, both tacit and explicit, were partly responsible for the founding of
Boston College in 1863 and
Brandeis University in nearby Waltham in 1948.
Policies of exclusion were not limited to religious minorities. In 1920, "Harvard University maliciously persecuted and harassed" those it believed to be gay via a "
Secret Court" led by Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Summoned at the behest of a wealthy alumnus, the 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've rightly left behind", and "abhorrent and an affront to the values of our university". 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.
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. Nonetheless, Harvard's undergraduate population remained predominantly male, with about four men attending Harvard College for every woman studying at Radcliffe. Following the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe admissions in 1977, the proportion of female undergraduates steadily increased, mirroring a trend throughout higher education in the United States. Harvard's graduate schools, which had accepted females and other groups in greater numbers even before the college, also became more diverse in the post-war period.
Today, Harvard is considered one of a handful of the world's premier centers of higher learning. Despite occasionally weathering periods of reactionary sentiment over its long history, Harvard and its affiliates, in line with most American universities, are politically generally
liberal (center-left);
Richard Nixon, for example, famously attacked 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.
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 and Democratic President
John F. Kennedy and Vice-President
Al Gore graduated from
Harvard College. Today, there are both prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices among the faculty of the various schools, such as
Martin Feldstein,
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, but from within its gates the university prides itself on its fierce and unbending loyalty to the tradition of academic freedom and open and free speech that it has guarded on behalf of American education for nearly four centuries.
Recent developments
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 controversial decision was announced after the academic year 2008-2009 transfer applications had already been submitted. Co-Master Mandana Sassanfar 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.
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."
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 wasn't charged and housing was provided.
On February 21, 2006, president
Lawrence Summers announced his intention to resign the presidency, effective June 30, 2006. His resignation came just one week before a second planned vote of no confidence by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Former president
Derek Bok 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. 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.
In 2005 Harvard received a large donation from
Saudi Prince
Alwaleed bin Talal for the development of research programs in
Islamic studies. 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.
Institutions
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.
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's of a duller, darker hue, resembling that of
ox blood.
Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned
Crimson and its rival the
Harvard Lampoon, a noted humor magazine; the
Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines and the oldest current publication at Harvard; and the
Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual
burlesque and celebrates notable actors at its
Man of the Year and
Woman of the Year ceremonies, and the
Harvard Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players, one of the premier Gilbert and Sullivan societies in New England which performs two operettas per school year. The
Harvard Glee Club is the oldest college chorus in America, and the
University Choir, the official choir of the
Harvard Memorial Church, is the oldest choir in America affiliated with a university. The
Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality (thus making it technically older than the
New York Philharmonic, which is the oldest professional orchestra in America), and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s. The school also has a number of a cappella singing groups, the oldest of which is the
Harvard Krokodiloes.
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."
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 Elliott 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,
Tommy Lee Jones, and
Matt Damon; architect
Philip Johnson, ex-
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
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, the
President and Fellows of Harvard College, also known as the Harvard Corporation and founded in 1650, and the
Harvard Board of Overseers. The
President of Harvard University is the day-to-day administrator of Harvard and is appointed by and responsible to the Harvard Corporation.
Harvard today has nine faculties, listed below in order of foundation:
In 1999, the former
Radcliffe College was reorganized as the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Sports and athletic facilities
Harvard 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 doesn't offer athletic scholarships.
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 sport eventually adopted the forward pass (invented by famous Yale coach
Walter Camp) because of the stadium's structure.
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 has several fight songs, the most played of which, especially at football games, are "
Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" and "
Harvardiana" ("
Fair Harvard", which while musically better known outside the university than "Ten Thousand Men" is, is actually the
alma mater). The
Harvard University Band performs these fight songs and other cheers at football and hockey games.
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.
Library system and museums
The
Harvard University Library System, centered in
Widener Library in
Harvard Yard and comprising over 80 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes, and prides itself for being the only one of the world's five "mega-libraries" to have open stacks. 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.
Harvard operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums:
» *The
Harvard Art Museums, including:
**
The Fogg Museum of Art, with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular strengths are in Italian
early Renaissance, British
pre-Raphaelite, and 19th century French art
» **
The Busch-Reisinger Museum, formerly the Germanic Museum, covers central and northern European art.
**
The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which includes ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art
» *
The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere
*
The Semitic Museum.
» * The
Harvard Museum of Natural History complex, including:
**
The Harvard University Herbaria, which contains the famous Blaschka
Glass Flowers exhibit
» **
The Museum of Comparative Zoology
**
The Harvard Mineralogical Museum » *
The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by
Le Corbusier, is home to the University's film archive and the department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
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 2008" ranked Harvard as the most selective undergraduate college in the United States, and second in rank of the best national universities (Princeton ranked number one).
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.. 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.
Campus
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.
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. 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's 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).
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. 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.
Notable student organizations
A longer list of Harvard student groups can be found under
Harvard College.
The Harvard Crimson is one of America's oldest daily university newspapers. Founded in 1873, it counts among its many editors numerous Pulitzer Prize winners and two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The Harvard International Relations Council includes several famous student organizations, including the Harvard International Review, Harvard Model United Nations, and it Harvard National Model United Nations. The HIR has 35,000 readers in more than 70 countries, regularly features prominent scholars and policymakers from around the globe. HMUN is the oldest and most prestigious high-school-level Model United Nations simulation in the world, having begun as a League of Nations simulation in the 1920s. HNMUN is similarly the longest-running college-level simulation in the world and among the largest in the United States. The IRC has the most members of any Harvard student organization.
The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor organization and publication founded in 1876 and rival to the Harvard Crimson and counts among its former members Robert Benchley, John Updike, George Plimpton, Steve O'Donnell, Mark O'Donnell, and Andy Borowitz. This sporadically issued rag was originally modelled on the British magazine of satire, Punch, and has now outlived it, becoming the world's second-oldest humor magazine after the Yale Record. Conan O'Brien was president of the Lampoon during his last two undergraduate years. (The National Lampoon was founded as an offshoot in 1970 from the Harvard publication.)
The Harvard Advocate (founded 1866) is the nation's oldest college literary magazine. Past members include Theodore Roosevelt, T. S. Eliot, and Mary Jo Salter.
The Harvard Salient (External Link) is the campus's biweekly conservative magazine, whose past editors include many prominent conservative thinkers and journalists.
The Harvard Glee Club (founded 1858) is the oldest college choir in the country and the oldest men's chorus in the world; the Harvard University Choir is the oldest university-affiliated choir in the country; and the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra (founded 1808), technically older than the New York Philharmonic, though it has only been a symphony orchestra for about half of its existence. The Bach Society Orchestra of Harvard University is a chamber orchestra that's staffed, managed, and conducted entirely by students.
The Harvard University Band (founded 1919) is a non-traditional, student-run marching band, notable for being a scramble band. The Harvard Wind Ensemble, the Harvard Summer Pops Band, and the Harvard Jazz Bands also fall under the umbrella organization of HUB.
The Hasty Pudding Theatricals (founded 1844) is a theatrical society known for its burlesque musicals and annual "Man of the Year" and "Woman of the Year" ceremonies; past members include Alan Jay Lerner, Jack Lemmon, and John Lithgow.
WHRB (95.3 FM Cambridge), the campus radio station, is run exclusively by Harvard students out of the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dorm. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its classical, jazz, underground rock and hip-hop, and blues programming, especially its reading period "orgies", when the entire oervre of a particular composer, orchestra, band, or artist is played without commercial break, sometimes for several days in succession, to give the station's DJs a chance to catch up on their studies before the semester's final exams.
The Harvard Undergraduate Council (UC), Harvard College's student government, is a prominent voice on campus on behalf of the student body. Though subject to criticism and scrutiny, the Undergraduate Council is regarded as one of the most active and professional of college student governments.
The Harvard Institute of Politics is a living memorial to President Kennedy that promotes public service among undergraduates by sponsoring non-credit courses and workshops and internships in the public sector.
The Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization serves as the umbrella organization for dozens of community service and social change programs at Harvard. PBHA has 1600 volunteers who serve over 10,000 people in the greater Boston area. Notable alumni include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Roger Nash Baldwin, Robert Coles, and David Souter.
Harvard Student Agencies is the largest student-run corporation in the world, with revenues of $6 million in 2006.. Notable alumni include Thomas Stemberg, founder of Staples, Inc., and Robert Cecot and Michael Kopko, the Harvard founders of DormAid.
Harvard Model Congress is the nation's oldest and largest congressional simulation conference, providing thousands of high school students from across the U.S. and abroad with the opportunity to experience participatory American democracy first-hand.
The Harvard Foundation for Intercultural and Race Relations, founded in 1981, acts an umbrella organization for all cultural groups on campus. It seeks to create awareness about diversity at Harvard and facilitates intercultural and interracial dialogue and relations.
Canaveral Club, started by the 1890 College graduating class, is a gun and hunting club at Cape Canaveral, Florida, founded by C.B. Horton and George H. Reed of Boston.
Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society is a cooperative bookstore that includes undergraduates on its board of directors.
Veritas Records (named after the Harvard motto) is a student run record label founded by Dan Zaccagnino '05 and Matthew Siegel '05. To date, Veritas Records has released three full length compilation albums. One of the artists featured on the label, DJ Shiftee, went on to win the title of DMC World Supremacy Champion in 2007. Chester French, a band featured on the compilations, is now signed to Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the largest talent agency in the world. Mantis Evar is on the Board of Advisors for Veritas, and acts as executive producer and mastering engineer on many of the projects. Dan, Matt, and Mantis founded the social collaborative website Indaba Music, which launched in February 2007.
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.
People associated with Harvard University
Presidents of Harvard
Notable non-graduate alumni of Harvard
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, the much-loved and -ridiculed tear jerker of 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. 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, The Firm, The Paper Chase, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, How High, Soul Man, and Harvard Man. Since the filming of Love Story in the 1960s the university, until the summer of 2007 filming of The Great Debaters didn't 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.. 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. 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" isn't the name of an actual academic discipline). 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. 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, filmed at University of Southern California. American television's fictional Harvard graduates include Gilligan's Island's resident aristocrat Thurston Howell, III, played by Jim Backus,
and M*A*S*H's pompous Boston Brahmin, Major Charles Emerson Winchester III, played by David Ogden Stiers. Ivory Tower is a student-produced Harvard-Radcliffe Television show about fictional Harvard students.
Professors Dr. Richard Alpert and Dr. Timothy Leary were fired from Harvard in May of 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." 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 and the Academic Ranking of World Universities. The 2007 U.S. News & World Report rankings place Harvard in second place among "National Universities," behind Princeton University.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. The Harvard Crimson quoted Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross as being aware of and committed to improving the issues raised by the COFHE survey. Former Harvard President Larry Summers stated: "I think the single most important issue is faculty-student engagement, where there's 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."
Similar types of criticism have been directed at some other large research universities. In addition, some observers don't 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."
Harvard has one of the highest alumni giving rates.
The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni and affirmative action policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate. 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," 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."
In 2006, Time featured a cover story titled "Who Needs Harvard?", discussing how many students were happier in smaller, lesser-known colleges and universities.
Harvard also participates in the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU)'s University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN).
Further Information
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