History of Harvard University

The History of Harvard tells the story of Harvard University from 1636 to the present.

Charter creating Harvard College, May 30, 1650

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With some 17,000 Puritans migrating to New England by 1620, Harvard was founded by ministers who realized the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness." It was named for John Harvard, its first benefactor. It received its corporate charter in 1650 and became a university in 1780.^{[citation needed]}

An early, anonymous description of the college, New England's First Fruits (1643) recalled:

"After God had carried us safe to New England, and we ... rear'd convenient places for God's worship ... dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust ... it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard, a godly gentleman and a lover of learning ... to give the one half of his estate ... towards the erecting of a college and all his Library."

When the college's first president Henry Dunster abandoned Puritanism in favor of the Baptist faith in 1654, he provoked a controversy that highlighted two distinct approaches to dealing with dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The colony's Puritan leaders, whose own religion was born of dissent from mainstream Church of England, generally worked for reconciliation with members who questioned matters of Puritan theology but responded much more harshly to outright rejection of Puritanism. Dunster's conflict with the colony's magistrates began when he failed to have his infant son baptized, believing, as a newly converted Baptist, that only adults should be baptized. Efforts to restore Dunster to Puritan orthodoxy failed, and his apostasy proved untenable to colony leaders who had entrusted him, in his job as Harvard's president, to uphold the colony's religious mission. Thus, he represented a threat to the stability of society. Dunster exiled himself in 1654 and moved to nearby Plymouth Colony, where he died in 1658.

In 1692, the leading Puritan divine Increase Mather became president of Harvard. One of his acts was replacing pagan classics with books by Christian authors in ethics classes, and maintaining a high standard of discipline. The Harvard "Lawes" of 1642 and the "Harvard College Laws of 1700" testify to its original high level of discipline. Students were required to observe rules of pious decorum inconceivable in the 19th century, and ultimately to prove their fitness for the bachelor's degree by showing that they could 'read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically.'

During Harvard's early years the town of Cambridge maintained order on campus and provided economic support; the local Puritan minister had direct oversight of Harvard and ensured the orthodoxy of the its leadership. By 1700 Harvard was strong enough to regulate and discipline its own people, and to a large extent the direction in which support and assistance was reversed, Harvard now providing financial support for local economic expansion, improvements to public health, and construction of local roads, meetinghouses, schools.

The early motto of Harvard was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church." In the early classes half the graduates became ministers. By the 1760s the proportion was down to 15%. Ten out of the first twelve presidents were also ministers. Systematic theological instruction was inaugurated in 1721 and by 1827 Harvard became a nucleus of theological teaching in New England.

When Mather stepped down as president in 1701 it marked the beginning of a long term struggle between orthodoxy and liberalism. Harvard's first secular president was John Leverett, who began his term in 1708. Leverett left the curriculum largely intact and sought to keep the College independent of the overwhelming influence of any single sect.

During the American Revolution, Loyalist alumni were outnumbered seven to one by Patriots—seven alumni died in the fighting. (Until the Blizzard of 1978 the Revolution marked the only instance that—in the judgment of Harvard officials—external events justified cancellation of classes.)^{[citation needed]}

19th century

Unitarians

The takeover of Harvard by the Unitarians in 1805 resulted in the secularization of the American college. By 1850 Harvard was the "Unitarian Vatican." The "liberals" (Unitarians) allied themselves with high Federalists and began to create a set of private societies and institutions meant to shore up their cultural and political authority, a movement that prefigured the emergence of the Boston Brahmin class. On the other hand, the theological conservatives used print media to argue for the maintenance of open debate and democratic governance through a diverse public sphere, seeing the liberals' movement as an attempt to create a cultural oligarchy in opposition to Congregationalist tradition and republican political principles.

Science

In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on his campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' 'participation in the Divine Nature' and the possibility of understanding 'intellectual existences.' Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that one can grasp the 'divine plan' in all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time. The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to 'soar with Plato' probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John Norris, and, in a Romantic vein, Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the 'official philosophy' of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school.

Élitism

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.

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.

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." 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'". Under President Eliot's tenure, Harvard earned a reputation for being more liberal and democratic than either Princeton or Yale in regard to bigotry against Jews and other ethnic minorities. 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 élite — the so-called Boston Brahmin class — and continued to be so well into the 20th century.

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.

Eliot

Charles W. Eliot, president 1869-1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. While Eliot was the most crucial figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education, but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions. Derived from William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, these convictions were focused on the dignity and worth of human nature, the right and ability of each person to perceive truth, and the indwelling God in each person.

Sports

Football, originally organized by students as an extracurricular activity, was banned twice by the university for being a brutal and dangerous sport. However, by the 1880s, football became a dominant force at the college as the alumni became more involved in the sport. In 1882, the faculty formed a three-member athletic committee to oversee all intercollegiate athletics, but, due to increasing student and alumni pressure, the committee was expanded in 1885 to include three student and three alumni members. The alumni's role in the rise and commercialization of football, the leading moneymaker for athletics by the 1880s, was evident in the fundraising for the first steel-reinforced concrete stadium. The class of 1879 donated $100,000 - nearly one-third of the cost - to the construction of the 35,000-seat stadium, which was completed in 1903, with the remainder to be collected from future ticket sales.

20th century

During the 20th century, Harvard's international reputation for scholarship 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. It built the largest and finest academic library in the world, and built up the labs and clinics needed to establish the reputation of its science departments and the Medical School. The Law School vied with Yale Law for preeminence, while the Business School combined a large-scale research program with a special appeal to entrepreneurs rather than accountants. The different schools maintain their separate endowments, which are very large in the case of the College/Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Business, Law and Medical Schools, but quite modest for the Divinity and Education schools.

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 1920s Edward Harkness, (1874–1940), a Yale man with oil wealth, was ignored by his alma mater and so gave $12,000,000 to Harvard to establish a house system like that of Oxford University. Yale later took his money and set up a similar system.

In addition to the usual department, specialized research centers proliferated, especially to enable interdisciplinary research projects that could not be handled at the department level. The departments, however, kept jealous control of the awarding of tenure; typically tenured professorships went to outsiders, and not as promotions to assistant professors. Older research centers include the East Asian Research Center, the Center for International Affairs, the Center for Eastern Studies, the Russian Research Center, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Joint Center for Urban Studies (with MIT). The Centers raised their own money, sometimes from endowments but most often from federal and foundation grants, making them increasingly independent entities.

During World War II, Harvard was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program which offered students a path to a Navy commission.

Meritocracy

James Bryant Conant (president, 1933–1953) pledged to reinvigorate creative scholarship at Harvard and reestablish its preeminence among research institutions. Viewing higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, Conant decided that Harvard's undergraduate curriculum needed to be revised so as to place more emphasis on general education. He called on the faculty make a definitive statement about what general education ought to be, at the secondary as well as the college level. The resulting Report, published in 1945, was one of the most influential manifestos in the history of American education in the 20th century.

In the decades immediately after 1945 Harvard reformed its admissions policies as it sought students from a more diverse applicant pool. Whereas Harvard undergraduates had almost exclusively been upper-class alumni of select New England "feeder schools" such as Exeter, Hotchkiss, Choate Rosemary Hall and Milton Academy, increasing numbers of international, minority, and working-class students had, by the late 1960s, altered the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of the college.

Not just undergraduates but the faculty became more diverse, especially in its willingness to hire Jews, Catholics and foreign scholars. The History Department was among the first to hire Jews and how it contributed to the university trend toward professionalism from 1920 to 1950. Oscar Handlin became one of the most influential professors, training hundreds of graduate schools and later serving as head of the University Library.

During the 20th 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.

Women

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. 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.

Minorities

Harvard Yard as seen from the Holyoke Center

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 20th 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 25%. President A. Lawrence Lowell tried to impose a 12% quota on Jews; the faculty rejected it but he managed to cut the numbers in half anyway. By the end of World War II the quotas and most of the latent anti-semitism had faded away.

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 President 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". 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.

Expansion

Over the years, Harvard has grown to include a number of major schools.

They include:

• Arts and Sciences
• Engineering and Applied Sciences
• Harvard Extension School
• Harvard Medical School
• Harvard School of Dental Medicine
• Harvard Business School (Founded in 1908, HBS was originally located in Harvard Yard. The present campus, with its stately Georgian buildings following the gentle curve on the Boston side of the Charles River, was dedicated in June 1927.)
• Graduate School of Design
• Harvard Divinity School
• Graduate School of Education
• John F. Kennedy School of Government
• Harvard Law School
• Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
• Harvard School of Public Health

Further reading

• Abelmann, Walter H., ed. The Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology: The First 25 Years, 1970-1995 (2004). 346 pp.
• Bailyn, Bernard, et al. Glimpses of the Harvard Past (1986). 149 pp.
• Beecher, Henry K. and Altschule, Mark D. Medicine at Harvard: The First 300 Years (1977). 569 pp.
• Bentinck-Smith, William, ed. The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries (2d ed.1982). 499 pp.
• Bentinck-Smith, William. Building a Great Library: The Coolidge Years at Harvard (1976). 218 pp.
• Bethell, John T.; Hunt, Richard M.; and Shenton, Robert. Harvard A to Z (2004). 396 pp. excerpt and text search
• Bethell, John T. Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-674-37733-8
• Bunting, Bainbridge. Harvard: An Architectural History (1985). 350 pp.
• Carpenter, Kenneth E. The First 350 Years of the Harvard University Library: Description of an Exhibition (1986). 216 pp.
• Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School. 1908-1945 (1987). 303 pp.
• Cuno, James et al. Harvard's Art Museums: 100 Years of Collecting (1996). 364 pp.
• Elliott, Clark A. and Rossiter, Margaret W., eds. Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives (1992). 380 pp.
• Hall, Max. Harvard University Press: A History (1986). 257 pp.
• Harvard U. Education, Bricks and Mortar: Harvard Buildings and Their Contribution to the Advancement of Learning (1949) online edition
• Hawkins, Hugh. Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (1972). 404 pp.
• Hay, Ida. Science in the Pleasure Ground: A History of the Arnold Arboretum (1995). 349 pp.
• Hoerr, John, We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard; Temple University Press, 1997, ISBN 1-56639-535-6
• Howells, Dorothy Elia. A Century to Celebrate: Radcliffe College, 1879-1979 (1978). 152 pp.
• James, Henry. Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869-1909 (1930) online edition
• Keller, Morton, and Phyllis Keller. Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University (2001), major history covers 1933 to 2002 online edition
• King, Moses, Harvard and its surroundings, Cambridge, Massachusetts : Moses King, 1884
• Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (1977). 674 pp.
• LaPiana, William P. Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education, (1994). 254 pp. on reforms by Christopher Columbus Langdell, at he law school
• Lawless, Greg. The Harvard Crimson Anthology: 100 Years at Harvard (1980).
• Lewis, Harry R. Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (2006) ISBN 1586483935
• Lipset, Seymour Martin and Riesman, David. Education and Politics at Harvard (1975). 440 pp.
• Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (1986) 512pp; excerpt and text search
• Powell, Arthur G. The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Educational Authority (1980). 341 pp.
• Reid, Robert. Year One: An Intimate Look inside Harvard Business School (1994). 331 pp.
• Rosenblatt, Roger. Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (1997). 234 pp. student unrest
• Rosovsky, Nitza. The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1986). 108 pp.
• Seligman, Joel. The High Citadel: The Influence of Harvard Law School (1978). 262 pp.
• Shipton, Clifford K. Sibley's Harvard Graduates: Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College. (1999) 19 vol to the class of 1774
• Sollors, Werner; Titcomb, Caldwell; and Underwood, Thomas A., eds. Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1993). 548 pp.
• Story, R. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class,1800-1870, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1981
• Townsend, Kim. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (1996). 318 pp.
• Trumpbour, John, ed., How Harvard Rules. Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, ISBN 0-89608-283-0
• Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, ed. Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History (2004). 337 pp.
• Whitehead, John S. The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, 1776-1876 (1973). 262 pp.
• Winsor, Mary P. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (1991). 324 pp.
• Wright, Conrad Edick. Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (2005). 298 pp.