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Harvard University
Motto(de facto): Veritas ("Truth")[1]
TypePrivate
EstablishedSeptember 8, 1636 (OS), September 18, 1636 (NS)[2]
EndowmentU.S. $34.9 billion[3]
PresidentDrew Gilpin Faust [14]
Undergraduates6,715
Postgraduates12,424
Location
United States Cambridge
,
MA
,
USA
CampusUrban, 380 acres/154 ha
ColorsCrimson  
NicknameCrimson
MascotJohn Harvard File:Harvard university john mascot.jpg
Websiteharvard.edu

Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts Legislature,[2] Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, as well as the first and oldest corporation in the Americas.[4]

Initially referred to simply as "the new college", the institution was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after its first principal donor, a young clergyman named John Harvard. A graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge in England, John Harvard bequeathed about three hundred and fifty books in his will to form the basis of the college library collection, along with half his personal wealth, £1,500, or seven hundred and fifty pounds sterling.[5] The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" rather than a "college" occurred in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.

In his 1869-1909 tenure as Harvard president, 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. Eliot saw to it that Harvard would attract the best minds from around the world, thus securing its place among the great world universities. The Harvard model influenced American education nationally, at both college and secondary levels. Eliot was responsible for the now famous "Harvard Classics", originally known as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf." During his presidency at Harvard, Dr. Eliot was better known than many Presidents of the United States of the time.[citation needed]

In 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1894 as an outgrowth of the "Harvard Annex" for women,[6] merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[7]

Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes,[8] 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[9][10]). Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization, standing at $34.9 billion as of 2007.

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.[15] 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 president (beginning a tradition), 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.[11]

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 oxblood.

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. 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.

File:John Harvard, statue at Harvard University.JPG
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."[12]

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; actor Jack Lemmon; architect Philip Johnson, ex-Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, author and screenwriter Jeremy Leven, 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, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, writer Louis Menand, economists Gregory Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, 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:

Harvard Yard with freshman dorms in the background

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 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 American Football meeting, which dates back to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game. Yale's victory in 2006 ended a five-year winning streak for Harvard. While Harvard's football team is no longer one of the country's best (it won the Rose Bowl in 1920) as it often was a century ago during football's early days, it, along with Yale, has 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 Yale coach Walter Camp) because of the stadium's structure. The first game of American Football is said to have been a contest between Harvard and Tufts University on June 4, 1875, at Jarvis field in Cambridge, Mass.[13]

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 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 the NCAA title 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", while musically better known outside the university, is actually the alma mater). The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs and other cheers at football and hockey games.

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 Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library.

The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes,[8] 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"[14] and prides itself for being the only one of the world's five "mega-libraries" to have open stacks.[9] 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[15]; 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:

Admissions

Harvard College accepted less than 9% of the applicants for the class of 2011, 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. [16]

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.[17]. 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 minority applicants are faced with in the competition to get into selective universities[18].

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.

Memorial Church

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, which formerly housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard.

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 short walk across the Charles River from Cambridge, with the intent of major expansion southward.[19] 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.

History

In the 17th century, Harvard University established the Indian College in order to educate Native Americans, but it was not a success and disappeared by 1693.

Between 1800 and 1870 a transformation of Harvard occurred which E. Digby Baltzell[20] calls "privatization." Harvard had prospered while Federalists controlled state government, but "in 1824 the federalist party was finally defeated forever in Massachusetts; the triumphant Democratic-Republicans cut off all state funds." By 1870, the "magistrates and ministers" on the Board of Overseers had been completely "replaced by Harvard alumni drawn primarily from the ranks of Boston's upper-class business and professional community" and funded by private endowment.

During this period, Harvard experienced unparalleled growth that put it into a different category from other colleges. Ronald Story notes 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'"[21]. 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'"[22]. 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"[23]. 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."[24]

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 combatting 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."[25] 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."[26] Indeed, Harvard's discriminatory policies, both tacit and explicit, were partly responsible for the founding of Boston College in 1863[citation needed] and Brandeis University in nearby Waltham in 1948.[27]

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 inquistions 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".[28] 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[29].

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[30]. Nonetheless, Harvard's undergraduate population remained predominantly male, with about four men attending Harvard College for every woman studying at Radcliffe[31]. 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 the premier centers of higher learning in the world. Despite periods of reactionary sentiment in the past, the politics of Harvard's affiliates, in line with most of American academia, are generally liberal (center-left): Richard Nixon famously attacked it 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[32]. 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. President George W. Bush graduated from the Harvard Business School while John F. Kennedy and 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, Greg Mankiw and Alan Dershowitz.

Recent developments

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

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.[33][34]

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.[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.

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.[36]

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."[37][38]

In 2005 Harvard received a large donation from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal for the development of research programs in Islamic studies.[39][40] 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.[41][42]

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

Historic events

Reaching the World

Wide World is a division of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) and offers online professional development courses. The courses are aimed at developing pedagoical approaches for educators.

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'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 professor) Erich Segal, the much-beloved and also much-ridiculed tear jerker of the 1970s, concerns a romance between a Harvard student and a Radcliffe student. The novel is deeply imbued with local color.[45] A current Harvard tradition is the annual showing of the film Love Story to incoming freshmen, during which the film is openly mocked by the Crimson Key Society, a tour-giving organization on campus.

Though Harvard has been featured in many U.S. films, including Stealing Harvard, Legally Blonde, The Firm, The Paper Chase, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, How High, Soul Man, and Harvard Man, the university has, until the summer of 2007 filming of "The Great Debaters" starring Denzel Washington, not allowed any movies to be filmed in campus buildings since Love Story in the 1960s; 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. [46] The graduation scene from With Honors was filmed in front of Foellenger Auditorium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Also set at Harvard is the Korean hit TV series Love Story in Harvard[47], filmed at University of Southern California.

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 no such department exists at Harvard, or anywhere else. Symbology is a legitimate word, but it is not the name of a distinct academic discipline.[48]

Pamela Thomas-Graham, an alumna of Harvard College, Business School and Law School and the former President & CEO of CNBC, has written 3 mystery novels featuring African-American Harvard economics professor Nikki Chase as the protagonist.[49]

In William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the protagonist Quentin Compson is a student at Harvard.

The student produced Harvard-Radcliffe Television show Ivory Tower [50] is set on the Harvard campus but is about fictional Harvard students.

The protagonist of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation is also a Harvard college undergrad and certain parts of the book and film are set there.

Murder at the B-School, a 2004 book by a former HBS employee, Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, tells the story of a third-year assistant professor of finance who is falsely accused of murder. Cruikshank is quite familiar with the school, having written A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School 1908-1945, and gets many details about HBS right.

Fictional graduates of Harvard are Thurston Howell III and Major Charles Emerson Winchester III.

Views of Harvard

In 1893, Baedeker's guidebook called Harvard "the oldest, richest, and famous of American seats of learning."[51] 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[52] 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.[53]

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.[54] 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.[55] 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.[56][57][58][59]

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.[60][61] 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.[62] 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.[63][64] The Harvard Crimson quoted Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross as being aware of and committed to improving the issues raised by the COFHE survey.[65] 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." [66]

Similar types of criticism 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." [67]

Harvard has one of the highest alumni giving rates [68].

The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni and affirmative action policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate.[69] 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.

Harvard and its students have also been criticized for self-promotion in various forms. In "A Flood of Crimson Ink,"[70] 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.[71]

Harvard also participates in the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU)'s University and College Accountability Network (U-CAN).

Further reading

  • John T. Bethell, Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-674-37733-8
  • John Trumpbour, ed., How Harvard Rules. Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, ISBN 0-89608-283-0
  • Hoerr, John, We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard; Temple University Press, 1997, ISBN 1-56639-535-6

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Harvard University.

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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.
  2. ^ a b An appropriation of £400 toward a "school or college" was voted on October 28th, 1636 (OS), at a meeting which initially convened on Sept. 8th and was adjourned to Oct. 28th. Some sources consider October 28th, 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 8th, 1836, apparently ignoring the calendar change; and the tercentenary celebration began on 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.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link), 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 2006-09-08.: "Harvard claims birth on the day the Massachusetts Great and General Court convened to authorize its founding. This was Sept. 8, 1636 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 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." Cite error: The named reference "founding" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  3. ^ Harvard endowment posts solid positive return
  4. ^ "Higher education in America began with Harvard": Rudolph, Frederick (1990) [1961]. The American College and University. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-8203-1284-3. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help), p. 3. 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 their website says "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 proceeds to note 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].
  5. ^ John Harvard Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography, edited by James Grant Wilson, John Fiske and Stanley L. Klos Six volumes, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1887-1889
  6. ^ Sally Schwager, "Taking up the Challenge: The Origins of Radcliffe," in Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History, ed. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 87-115.
  7. ^ [8]
  8. ^ a b See the FAQ on the Harvard-Google partnership.
  9. ^ a b "Speaking Volumes: Professor Sidney Verba Champions the University Library" Harvard Gazette. February 26, 1998. Accessed February 19. 2007.
  10. ^ See the ranked list of U.S. libraries from the American Library Association.
  11. ^ [9]
  12. ^ Times Higher Education Supplement World Rankings 2006
  13. ^ Smith, R.A. "Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics", New York: Oxford University Press, 1988
  14. ^ "Largest Academic Library in the World". President and Fellows of Harvard College. 2005. Retrieved 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 2006-09-16.
  15. ^ See the library portal listing of archives and special collections [10].
  16. ^ "America's Best Colleges 2007". Retrieved 2007-03-20.
  17. ^ 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.
  18. ^ Harvard Ends Early Admission, The New York Times, By Alan Finder and Karen W. Arenson, September 12, 2006
  19. ^ http://www.allston.harvard.edu/
  20. ^ 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.
  21. ^ 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)
  22. ^ Story, R. (1980). op. cit. p. 97, (1815-1855 as the era when Harvard began to be perceived as socially advantageous)
  23. ^ Steinberg, S. (2001). The Ethnic Myth. Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-4153-X. (Harvard most democratic of the Big Three under Eliot, p. 234)
  24. ^ 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."
  25. ^ 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.
  26. ^ Kaufman, Myron (1957). Remember Me to God. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Co.
  27. ^ 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."
  28. ^ 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.
  29. ^ Malcolm Gladwell. (2005). Getting In. The New Yorker, October 10 2005
  30. ^ Malka A. Older. (1996). Preparatory schools and the admissions process. The Harvard Crimson, January 24 1996
  31. ^ Associated Press. (2004). In first, Harvard admits more women than men as undergraduates. The Boston Globe, April 1 2004
  32. ^ O'Brien, R. D. (2004). Kerry Tops Crimson Poll. The Harvard Crimson, October 29 2004.
  33. ^ "Faust Expected To Be Named President This Weekend," The Harvard Crimson, 8 February 2007
  34. ^ "Harvard names Drew Faust as its 28th president," Office of News and Public Affairs, 11 February 2007
  35. ^ Bombardieri, M. (2005). Summers' remarks on women draw fire. The Boston Globe, January 17 2005.
  36. ^ [11]
  37. ^ "Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences,", February 2007
  38. ^ "Dean's Letter on Growth and Renewal of the faculty,", April 2007
  39. ^ Saudi Gives $20 Million to Georgetown & Harvard
  40. ^ Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal donates $20 million to support the Harvard University Islamic Studies Program
  41. ^ Saudi in the Classroom
  42. ^ The Saudi Fifth Column On Our Nation's Campuses
  43. ^ "Harvard Student Agencies, Inc."
  44. ^ "Harvard Student Agencies, About Us"
  45. ^ Rogers, M. F. (1991). Novels, Novelists, and Readers: Toward a Phenomenological Sociology of Literature. SUNY Press, ISBN 0-7914-0603-2.
  46. ^ Burr, T. (2005). An exception was probably made for "The Great Debate" because it is beased off a true story in which Harvard features prominently. 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. Reel Boston. The Boston Globe, February 27 2005.
  47. ^ Catalano, N. M. (2004). Harvard TV Show Popular in Korea. The Harvard Crimson, December 13 2004.
  48. ^ Jampel, C. E. (2004). Ruffling Religious Feathers. The Harvard Crimson, February 12 2004.
  49. ^ amazon.com
  50. ^ [12]
  51. ^ 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. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help), p. 83. (Facsimile reprint of original, published in Leipzig and New York)
  52. ^ [13] — A 2007 ranking from the THES - QS of the world’s research universities.
  53. ^ US News and World Report. (2006). National Universities: Top Schools.
  54. ^ Rosane, O. (2006). College Administrators Take On Inflated Grade Averages. Columbia Spectator, March 20 2006.
  55. ^ Kohn, A. (2002). The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation. The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8 2002.
  56. ^ No author given. (2003). Brevia. Harvard Magazine, January-February 2003.
  57. ^ Milzoff, R. M., Paley, A. R., & Reed, B. J. (2001). Grade Inflation is Real. Fifteen Minutes March 1 2001.
  58. ^ 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.").
  59. ^ Associated Press. (2004). Princeton becomes first to formally combat grade inflation. USA Today, April 26 2004.
  60. ^ Hicks, D. L. (2002). Should Our Colleges Be Ranked?. Letter to [The New York Times, September 20,2002.
  61. ^ 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.
  62. ^ Bombardieri, M. (2005). Student life at Harvard lags peer schools, poll finds. The Boston Globe, March 29 2005.
  63. ^ 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.
  64. ^ Feinstein, B., Schneider, A. P., Thompson, A. H., & Wasserstein, S. A. (2003). The Cult of Yale, Part II. The Harvard Crimson, November 20 2003.
  65. ^ Ho, M. W. & Rogers, J. P. (2005). Harvard Students Less Satisfied Than Peers With Undergraduate Experience, Survey Finds. The Harvard Crimson, March 31 2005.
  66. ^ [http://www.cnn.com/2006/EDUCATION/06/29/harvard.summers.ap/index.html
  67. ^ [http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/03.11/professors.html
  68. ^ http://www2.acs.ncsu.edu/UPA/peers/current/research_intensive/alumgiv.htm
  69. ^ Shapiro, J. (1997). A Second Look.
  70. ^ Steinberger, M. (2005). A Flood of Crimson Ink. Wall Street Journal, April 29 2005.
  71. ^ Gibbs, Nancy (2006-08-13). "Who Needs Harvard?". Time. Retrieved 2006-12-19. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)


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