Harvard College

Harvard College

File:Harvard shield-College.png
Type	Private
Established	1636
Dean	Evelynn M. Hammonds
Location	Cambridge , Massachusetts , USA
Campus	Urban
Website	college.harvard.edu

View of freshman dormitories in Harvard Yard

Harvard College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of two schools within Harvard University granting undergraduate degrees. Founded in 1636, it is Harvard's oldest school. Instruction of its students is the responsibility of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

History

Lt Gov William Stoughton circa 1700 overlooking one of the buildings of Harvard College

Origins

The name Harvard College dates to 1639. In 1636 the New College, voted into theoretical existence by the General Court of the colony, was founded—without a single building, teacher, or student. In 1639 it was re-named in honor of the deceased John Harvard, a minister from nearby Charlestown, who in his will had bequeathed to it his entire library and a sum of money equal to half his estate. In the understanding of its members at the time, the name "Harvard College" probably referred to the first (as they foresaw it) of a number of colleges which would someday make up a university along the lines of Oxford or Cambridge.The American usage of the word college had not yet developed; to the founders of Harvard, a college was an association of teachers and scholars for education, room, and board. They believed that only a university could examine for and grant degrees; but Harvard graduated its first students in 1642. Twenty-three years later, in 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, "from the Wampanoag ... did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period".

Harvard's first "professor" was schoolmaster Nathaniel Eaton, brother to Theophilus Eaton (founder and first Governor of New Haven) and Francis Eaton (of the Mayflower). In 1639 he was ousted by the directors, because of his overly strict discipline of the students.

Colonial era

Town and gown collaborated closely in the first 150 years, evolving through three phases during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the seventeenth century, Cambridge nurtured the small college. The town helped govern Harvard, maintained order on campus, and provided economic support. The Puritan minister in town provided direct oversight of Harvard and ensured the orthodoxy of the college's leadership. By 1700 Harvard relied less on local leaders to assist in academic governance and the college was strong enough to regulate and discipline its own people. Harvard began to participate as the town's partner in the development of the total community. The college assisted in the building of roads, meetinghouses, and schools. Harvard used its financial resources to support townsmen in their attempts at economic expansion. Harvard and Cambridge also worked together to improve the community's public health and educational system.

Massachusetts Hall (1720) is the oldest building on the Harvard campus.

When the first president Henry Dunster abandoned Puritanism in favor of the Baptist faith in 1653, he provoked a controversy that extended beyond the town to the entire colony. It revealed two distinct approaches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for dealing with dissent. 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 they responded more harshly to rejection of Puritanism. Dunster's conflict with the colony's magistrates began when he failed to have his infant son baptized; as a newly converted Baptist, he believed that only adults should be baptized. When the leaders' efforts to restore Dunster to Puritan orthodoxy failed, they found his heterodoxy untenable. As they had entrusted him as Harvard's president to uphold the colony's mission of promulgating the Puritan vision of Christianity, they thought he threatened the stability of their entire society. Dunster exiled himself in 1654 and moved to nearby Plymouth Colony, where he died in 1658.

American Revolution

Graduates and students fought in the American Revolution, and seven alumni died. Loyalists were outnumbered seven to one by Patriots among the graduates. At the conclusion of the war, they found themselves outside both United States and British society, especially lacking their previous business contacts. John Wentworth, a Loyalist, became governor of Nova Scotia, a colony where Great Britain resettled Loyalists after the war. Patriots had mixed careers after the war, with some going on to wealth and others receding into obscurity. John Adams became the second President of the United States.

19th century

Religion

In 1805 Unitarians rose to dominance at Harvard, a transition that resulted in the eventual secularization of the American college. 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. By 1850 Harvard was the "Unitarian Vatican."

Charles William 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 by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions. Derived from William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, his principles were based 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.

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.

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.

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

University

No further colleges were founded beside it; and as Harvard began to grant higher degrees in the late eighteenth century, people started to call it "Harvard University." "Harvard College" survived, nonetheless; in accordance with the newly-emerging American usage of the words, it was the undergraduate division of the university—which was not a collection of similar colleges, but a collection of unique schools, each teaching a different subject.

Organization

Harvard's principal governing board, the oldest continuous corporation in The Americas, still goes by its original name of "The President and Fellows of Harvard College" even though it has charge of the entire university and the "fellows" today are simply external trustees such as those who govern most American educational bodies—not residential educators like the fellows of an Oxbridge college. In current Harvard parlance, this governing board is frequently referred to simply as The Harvard Corporation.

Academics

Admission

In 2011, 34,950 students applied for a spot in Harvard's Class of 2015, the highest number in the college's history. This ultimately led to a record-low 6.2% admission rate.

The Class of 2013 had the lowest admissions rate of any academic institution in the United States at the time, at 7%, and highest yield at an estimated 76% before including wait-listed students. The year before, for the Class of 2012, the admissions pool was 27,278 applicants vying for admission, from which 1,948, or 7.1%, ultimately were accepted. For the Class of 2010, the College admitted 2,109 students out of 22,753 applicants for an overall admittance rate of 9.3%.

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 2008-09 transfer applications had already been submitted. Winthrop House Co-Master Mandana Sassanfar said that the House Masters had 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 was called “rash,“ “outrageous,” and “heartbreaking” by transfer applicants and others at Harvard and elsewhere. In January 2010, the College resumed taking applications for transfer students to arrive in Fall 2010.

House system

Nearly all students at Harvard College live on campus, with first-year students living in dormitories in or near Harvard Yard (see List of Harvard dormitories). Upper-class (non-first year) students live in the Houses, which serve as administrative subdivisions of the College as well as living quarters, and help provide a sense of community in what might otherwise be a socially incohesive and administratively daunting university environment. Each house is presided over by a Master, a senior faculty member responsible for guiding the social life and community of the House, while the Allston Burr Resident Dean supervises the day-to-day academic and disciplinary well-being of students within the house. The Master and A.B.R.D. are assisted by other members of the Senior Common Room—select graduate students, faculty, and University officials brought into association with each house. Associated graduate students are known as Tutors and many are resident within the house itself. (Terms such as Tutor, Senior Common Room and Junior Common Room—the House's undergraduate members—reflect the debt to the residential college systems at Oxford and Cambridge.)

The House system was instituted by Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell in the 1930s to combat what he saw as pernicious social stratification engendered by the private, off-campus living arrangements of many Harvard undergraduates at that time; Lowell's solution was to provide on-campus accommodations to every student throughout his entire career in the College. Lowell also saw great benefits flowing from other features of the House system, such as the relaxed and unstructured discussions, academic or otherwise, which he hoped would take place among undergraduates and members of the Senior Common Room (see below) over meals in each house's dining hall.

However, the system has not remained static. In particular, the way that students are assigned to Houses, at the end of their first year, has changed from a "draft" system in which house masters selected students to the random system used today, and the number of houses increased to keep the houses relatively small as the number of undergraduate students grew.

The nine River Houses are south of Harvard Yard, between the Yard and the Charles River and near Harvard Square:

• Adams House, named for several alumni of that name, including U. S. President John Adams;
• Dunster House, named for Harvard's first President, Henry Dunster;
• Eliot House, named for Harvard President Charles William Eliot;
• Kirkland House, named for Harvard President John Thornton Kirkland;
• Leverett House, named for Harvard President John Leverett;
• Lowell House, said to be named for the Harvard-affiliated Lowell family in general (but the most obvious reference is to Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, implementer of the House system);
• Mather House, named for Harvard President Increase Mather;
• Quincy House, named for Harvard President (and sometime mayor of Boston) Josiah Quincy III;
• Winthrop House, more officially called John Winthrop House, named for two famous men of that name: Massachusetts Bay Colony founder John Winthrop and his great-great-great-grandson John Winthrop, 2nd Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy

Construction of the first of the River houses was financed by a gift of Yale alumnus Edward Harkness in 1928, though assembly of the land on which they would be built had begun decades before. Edward Waldo Forbes, grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, studied two years in England after graduating from Harvard in 1895. Inspired by the Oxford and Cambridge systems, on returning to the U.S. Forbes set out to acquire such land between Harvard Yard and the Charles River as was not already in the hands of university or various associated entities. By 1918 that ambition has been largely fulfilled and the assembled land transferred to Harvard.

The three Quad Houses (in the Harvard—formerly Radcliffe—Quadrangle) enjoy a residential setting half a mile (800 m) northwest of Harvard Yard. These housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard in 1977. They are:

• Cabot House, previously called South House, renamed in 1983 for Harvard donors Thomas Dudley Cabot and Virginia Cabot;
• Currier House, named for Radcliffe alumna Audrey Bruce Currier;
• Pforzheimer House, often called PfoHo for short, previously called North House, renamed in 1995 for Harvard donors Carl and Carol Pforzheimer

A thirteenth House, Dudley House, which is nonresidential but fulfills, for some graduate students and the (very few) off-campus undergraduates (including members of the Dudley Co-op), the same administrative and social functions as the residential Houses do for undergraduates who live on campus. It is named after Thomas Dudley, who signed the charter of Harvard College when he was Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Plans have been proposed for expanding the House system using land owned by Harvard in Allston, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from the River Houses. Suggestions include replacing the Quadrangle Houses with new undergraduate houses on the Allston property.

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

Curriculum and degrees

Harvard College confers two degrees: Artium Baccalaureus (A.B.) and the Scientiarum Baccalaureus, (S.B.) (the same conferred by Radcliffe prior to the merger with Harvard). With the creation of the new engineering undergraduate school, a third undergraduate degree is planned.

What most schools call majors Harvard terms fields of concentration, offering 46 concentrations, including its newest program in Biomedical Engineering. Joint concentrations bridging two standard concentrations may be allowed where the student proposes a plan of study which meaningfully combines the two fields; in contrast, secondary fields (known as minors elsewhere) need not be intellectually related to the student's primary field . Special concentrations include the Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, a certification program in Neurosciences run jointly by the departments of Anthropology, Biochemical Sciences, Biology, Computer Science, History of Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology. Harvard and the New England Conservatory offer a joint 5-year program leading to a both a Harvard Undergraduate degree and NEC Master of Arts.

In addition to satisfying a field of concentration, and completing a specified total number of courses, undergraduates must also fulfill the Core Curriculum, which requires courses in seven of eleven academic areas (such as "Moral Reasoning" and "Social Analysis") — each student exempt from four of the eleven areas depending on that student's concentration. A replacement plan, General Education allowing broader instruction applies to students matriculating with the Class of 2013 or later. (Strangely, an older plan replaced by the Core in the 1980s was also called General Education.)

Student organizations

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

Media and campus publications

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

• The Harvard Crimson is the United States' oldest continually published daily college newspaper with readers from across Harvard University and around the world.
• Harvard Yearbook Publications, Inc. is the student organization that has published the college's Senior yearbook since 1950.
• The Harvard Advocate is the oldest continuously published college literary magazine. Famous past members include T. S. Eliot and Theodore Roosevelt.
• The Harvard International Review, one of the most widely-distributed undergraduate journals in the world with 35,000 readers in more than 70 countries. The HIR regularly features prominent scholars and policymakers from around the globe.
• The Harvard Lampoon, an undergraduate humor organization and publication founded in 1876 and rival to the Harvard Crimson. The magazine was originally modelled on the former British satirical periodical Punch, and has outlived it to become the world's oldest continually running humor magazine. Conan O'Brien was president of the Lampoon. The National Lampoon was founded as an offshoot in 1970.
• Radio station WHRB (95.3 FM Cambridge), housed in Pennypacker Hall, is run exclusively by Harvard students. It is known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its classical, jazz, underground rock, blues, and hip-hop programming, as well as its news and sports coverage. Its seasonal "Orgies" (the term is a registered trademark of the station) are long blocks of air devoted to certain bands, composers, genres, themes, and much more. Additional listenership is scattered worldwide via the internet. Famous past members, or "ghosts", include Alex Ross and Dan Raviv.
• The Harvard Interactive Media Group publishes a quarterly academic review devoted to media studies and video games.
• The Harvard Political Review, a quarterly magazine of U.S. and international politics founded in 1969 by a group of undergraduates including Al Gore.
• The Harvard Review of Philosophy, an undergraduate publication of professional philosophy
• The Harvard Science Review, Harvard's longest running undergraduate science publication.
• The Harvard Undergraduate Research Journal, Harvard's only campus publication that showcases peer-reviewed undergraduate student research.
• The Harvard Independent, an alternative weekly with news, opinion, sports, arts, and features.
• Harvard Undergraduate Television produces the world's oldest and longest-running college soap opera, Ivory Tower, and is the only television organization on campus.
• On Harvard Time is Harvard's premiere comedy news program, similar in style to The Daily Show, and has quickly become the most popular TV show on campus.

Community service organizations

• The Phillips Brooks House Association is an umbrella community service organization operating in Phillips Brooks House of Harvard Yard, consists of 78 program committees and over 1,800 student volunteers, and serves close to 10,000 clients in the Cambridge and Boston area.
• Harvard for Haiti
• Harvard for Japan

Political organizations

• The Harvard Undergraduate Council, a non-partisan group of elected representatives from across the College that advocates on behalf of students, operates student services, and dispenses funds to other organizations.
• The Harvard Institute of Politics, a non-partisan living memorial to President John F. Kennedy that promotes public service and provides political opportunities to undergraduates.
• The Harvard College Democrats, the largest partisan political group on campus.
• The Harvard Republican Club, one of the largest groups on campus and the nation's oldest college political group, founded in 1888.
• The Harvard Speech and Parliamentary Debate Society is Harvard's premier debating organization and one of the top intercollegiate debate teams in the world.
• Harvard Model Congress, the nation's oldest and largest congressional simulation conference, provides thousands of high school students from across the U.S. and abroad with the opportunity to experience American government first-hand.
• The Harvard International Relations Council, is the largest student organization at Harvard College and is composed of several different programs that promote international awareness on campus, including a magazine, teaching program, speakers program, and Model United Nations.

Musical groups

Opera companies

• Lowell House Opera, founded in 1938 and the oldest continually performing opera company in New England, involves members of the Boston community and undergraduates in its ambitious productions.
• The Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players, founded in 1956, is an independent, nonprofit student theater group dedicated to performing comic opera.

Choral groups

• The Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, a select mixed-voice choir formed in 1971 when Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges merged.
• Harvard Glee Club, the oldest college chorus in America, founded in 1858.
• Radcliffe Choral Society, founded in 1898, an all-women chorus.
• The Harvard Radcliffe Chorus, the largest mixed choir at Harvard University, has a diverse membership consisting of faculty members, staff, community members, and both undergraduate and graduate students. HRC was founded in 1979 and continues to perform twice a year as of 2005.
• Harvard University Choir, the oldest university choir in the nation, formally established in 1834 but in existence since the eighteenth century, performs the oldest Christmas Carol Services in continuous existence in North America.
• The Kuumba Singers of Harvard College, founded in 1970, a 100-member choir dedicated to the celebration of black creativity and spirituality through song, dance, spoken word, and other forms of creative expression, explores and shares the rich musical tradition of black culture through African folk songs, Negro spirituals, Traditional and Contemporary gospel, Master Choral Works, and original compositions. All are welcome to join.

A cappella groups

• Harvard Krokodiloes, an all-male a cappella group, Harvard's oldest
• Harvard Opportunes, Harvard's oldest mixed vocal a cappella group
• Harvard Din & Tonics, an all-male a cappella group founded in 1979
• Harvard LowKeys, mixed vocal, both male and female
• Harvard-Radcliffe Veritones, mixed vocal, both male and female
• Harvard Callbacks, mixed vocal, both male and female
• Radcliffe Pitches, all-female a cappella group founded in 1975
• Harvard's Under Construction, a mixed vocal Christian music a capella group founded in the early 1980s
• Harvard Fallen Angels, an all-female a cappella group founded in 2000
• 'Cliffe Notes- the contemporary a cappella subset of the Radcliffe Choral Society (Harvard's premier women's chorus est. 1899)

Orchestras and bands

• Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra, founded in 1808.
• Harvard Bach Society Orchestra, founded in 1898 as "The Musical Club of Harvard University," is Harvard's chamber orchestra.
• Harvard University Band, founded in 1919, plays university sporting events and in other community venues.
• Harvard Pops Orchestra, known for their fun performances and innovative repertoire
• Harvard Mozart Society Orchestra, founded in 1984, performs often with Robert Levin

Other performance groups

• THUD (The Harvard Undergraduate Drummers), founded in 1999, known for their creative percussion performance with plastic SOLO cups, brooms, and traditional instruments
• The Noteables, a non-audition group that performs revue-style musical theater

Theater and dance

• The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club is an organization that connects smaller campus theater groups and supports all campus productions. The HRDC directly oversees productions within the Loeb Theater, which it shares with the nationally acclaimed American Repertory Theater. The HRDC also organizes seminars and workshops to connect students with professionals in the field.
• Hasty Pudding Theatricals, known informally simply as The Pudding, is a theatrical student society at Harvard University, known for its burlesque musicals. They present original student-written and -composed musicals with near-professional production values. Formed in 1795 as a fraternity, the Pudding has performed a production every year since 1891, except during World Wars I and II. Each production is entirely student-written. Although the cast remains all-male (with female parts performed by actors in drag), women participate in the productions as members of the business staff, orchestra, and tech crew.
• The Immediate Gratification Players (IGP) and On Thin Ice (OTI), Harvard's two undergraduate improv troupes, are among the oldest collegiate Improvisational comedy groups in the nation. Unlike many college troupes, both groups' constitutions require they present all campus shows free of charge.
• Harvard blackC.A.S.T. (Community and Student Theater) is Harvard's theater group dedicated to black theatrical production and fostering a black theater community on campus. Past productions include Amen Corner, Before it Hits Home, and The Colored Museum.
• The Harvard-Radcliffe Dance Company
• The Harvard Ballet Company
• The Harvard Ballroom Team, one of the largest national collegiate ballroom teams
• The Harvard Ballet Folklórico de Aztlán
• Harvard Deepam performs Bharatanatyam
• The Harvard Intertribal Indian Dance Troupe performs Native American powwow dances.
• The Harvard Pan-African Dance and Music Ensemble is dedicated to raising awareness of the depth and diversity of African expressive culture through the performance of dance and music from all over the continent.
• The Harvard Crimson Dance Team

Academic organizations

• Dynamo
• Harvard College Engineering Society
• Harvard College Stem Cell Society A student group dedicated to raising awareness about the ethics, politics, and science of stem cell research.
• Women in Science at Harvard-Radcliffe

Pre-professional organizations

• Harvard Student Agencies is the largest student-run corporation in the world. Founded in 1957, HSA is a $6 million non-profit that employs students and provides them with practical business experience.
• Harvard College Consulting Group is the largest active pre-professional student group at Harvard. It is dedicated to providing trained student analysts with term-time consulting projects for businesses and international non-profit entities. It also focuses on providing exclusive membership opportunities in consulting and finance (private equity, internal financial consulting, etc.)
• Veritas Financial Group is one of the largest undergraduate organizations at Harvard College and has a global reputation for producing leaders and innovators in the financial services industry
• Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business The largest undergraduate business organization on Harvard's campus.
• Harvard Financial Analysts Club is a student group dedicated to teaching undergraduates the core principles and methods used in finance, as well as managing the two largest student-run investment funds on campus. One is a $32,000 equity fund and the other is a $100,000 Cleantech Investment Fund in partnership with ex-Jones Soda CEO Peter van Stolk.
• Harvard Investment Association An undergraduate student group founded in 1993. It is dedicated to student education on investing and financial markets and providing opportunities for investing experience.
• The Harvard College Business Club is Harvard's first mainstream business club, geared towards providing a general business education. In large part, HCBC seeks to accomplish this goal through its emerging online social network, which connects undergraduates with business leaders and potential employers.
• The Leadership Institute at Harvard College is the largest leadership training and development organization at Harvard College.
• Harvard College Engineering Society is a student-run organization at Harvard College aimed at promoting engineering and cross-disciplinary collaboration on campus through participating in competitions and working on various engineering projects, as well as serving as a resource for undergraduate engineers at Harvard.

Unrecognized student groups

• Final Clubs: A.D., Delphic, Fly, Fox, Owl, Phoenix-SK, Porcellian, Spee
• Fraternities: Alpha Epsilon Pi, Phi Iota Alpha, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Sigma Chi
• Female social clubs: Bee, Isis, The Seneca, La Vie, Pleiades, Sabliere Society
• Sororities: Delta Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Alpha Pi Omega
• Other social groups: Alpha Club, Hasty Pudding, Oak Club, Rose Club, Signet

Religious life

Chabad House

The Chabad House at Harvard is a community center for Jewish students operated by the Orthodox Jewish Chabad movement. Presently headed by Rabbi and Mrs. Hirsch and Rabbi and Mrs. Zarchi, it was founded in 1997. According to Professor Ruth Wisse, its success is due to the personality and energy of Rabbi Zarchi. The rabbis live at the Chabad House with their young children, which contributes to a warm family atmosphere at their Friday evening Shabbat dinners for students. In April 2010 it placed a bid of $6 million to purchase the building of the former DU Club located at 45 Dunster Street from the Fly Club. The bid was reportedly more than twice the tax-assessed value of the building and land.

Athletics

According to the university, Harvard is home to the largest Division I intercollegiate athletics program in the U.S., with 41 varsity teams and over 1,500 student-athletes. Harvard is one of eight members of the Ivy League, along with Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, The University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

Harvard and Yale enjoy the oldest intercollegiate athletic rivalry in the United States, the Harvard-Yale Regatta, dating back to 1852, when rowing crews from each institution first met on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Harvard won that contest by two boat lengths. Since 1859, the crews have met nearly every year (except during major wars). The race is typically held in early June in New London, Connecticut.

Better known is the annual Harvard-Yale football game, known to insiders of both institutions as simply, "The Game." It was first played in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1875. Harvard won the initial contest 4-0. In recent years, The Game is always played on the Saturday before Thanksgiving, making it one of many significant games played on "Rivalry Day."

Harvard and Cornell University also field a rivalry in Men's Ice Hockey.

Sibley's Harvard Graduates

• Harvard Librarian John Langdon Sibley published 3 volumes of biographies of Harvard Graduates from 1873 to 1885 covering the Classes of 1642 to 1679 and left a posthumous fund to the Massachusetts Historical Society to continue this project: Clifford K. Shipton published 14 volumes covering the Classes of 1690 to 1771 from 1933 to 1975; In 1999 the 18th volume was published covering the Classes of 1772 to 1774.

• Beginning with Class of 1820 Regular Class Reports were published.

Notable alumni

For more information see List of Harvard University people

Architecture

• Buckminster Fuller (expelled)
• Philip Johnson

Art

• Waldo Peirce

Astronomy

• Andrew Fraknoi

Athletics

• Ryan Fitzpatrick
• Eddie Grant
• Bobby Jones
• Christopher Nowinski

Business

• Steve Ballmer
• Lloyd Blankfein
• Jim Cramer
• Bill Gates (did not graduate)
• James Halperin (did not graduate)
• Trip Hawkins
• William Randolph Hearst (expelled)
• Sumner Redstone
• Mark Zuckerberg (did not graduate)

Economics

• Ben Bernanke
• Martin Feldstein
• Steven Levitt
• Merton Miller
• Robert M. Solow
• James Tobin

Education

• Edwin H Baker Pratt

Journalism

• Nicholas D. Kristof
• Anthony Lewis
• Walter Lippmann

Law

• Harry Blackmun
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
• John Roberts
• David Souter

Literature

• James Agee
• William S. Burroughs
• Michael Crichton
• E. E. Cummings
• John Dos Passos
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• T. S. Eliot
• Norman Mailer
• Edmund Pearson
• Erich Segal
• Wallace Stevens
• John Updike

Mathematics

• Theodore Kaczynski
• Tom Lehrer

Performance arts - music, theater and film

• Darren Aronofsky
• Leonard Bernstein
• Andy Borowitz
• Amy Brenneman
• Carter Burwell
• Nestor Carbonell
• Rivers Cuomo
• Matt Damon (did not graduate)
• Fred Gwynne
• Hao Huang
• Rashida Jones
• Tommy Lee Jones
• Jack Lemmon
• Ryan Leslie
• John Lithgow
• Donal Logue
• Yo-Yo Ma
• Tom Morello
• Conan O'Brien
• Natalie Portman
• Joshua Redman
• Elisabeth Shue
• Mira Sorvino
• Michael Stern

Philosophy

• Donald Davidson
• Daniel Dennett
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Charles Sanders Peirce
• W.V.O. Quine
• George Santayana
• Henry David Thoreau

Physics

• Philip Warren Anderson
• Theodore Hall
• J. Robert Oppenheimer

Politics

• John Adams
• John Quincy Adams
• Samuel Adams
• Benazir Bhutto
• Sir George Downing
• Al Franken
• Elbridge Gerry
• Al Gore
• John Hancock
• Edward M. Kennedy
• John F. Kennedy
• Robert F. Kennedy
• Henry Kissinger
• Deval Patrick
• Tom Ridge
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Theodore Roosevelt
• Jay Rockefeller
• Chuck Schumer
• Meshech Weare
• John Weston

Religion

• Joseph Stevens Buckminster
• Aga Khan IV
• Cotton Mather
• Increase Mather
• Theodore Parker

Fictional alumni

• A. J. (The Fairly OddParents) (one episode)
• Oliver Barrett IV
• Patrick Bateman
• Quentin Compson (did not graduate)
• Frasier Crane (Frasier)
• Denzel Crocker of The Fairly Oddparents {one episode}
• Ari Gold (Entourage)
• Thurston Howell III
• Montgomery (Monty) Kessler (With Honors (film))
• Method Man (movie: How High)
• Reverend Samuel Parris as a character in The Crucible
• Herb Powell
• Redman (movie: How High)
• James "Toofer" Spurlock
• Charles Emerson Winchester III

General references

• Gookin, Daniel, Historical Collections, 53: Railton, "Vineyard's First Harvard Men," 91-112.
• King, Moses, Harvard and its surroundings, Cambridge, Massachusetts : Moses King, 1884
• Monaghan, E. J. (2005). Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America University of Massachusetts Press. Boston: MA

External links

• Harvard College
• Harvard University
• List of Harvard BA Graduates Class from 1642 to 1782
• List of Harvard BA Graduates Class from 1783 to 1886