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Harvard University

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"Harvard" redirects here. For other uses of the name Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation).

Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is an accredited private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded on September 8, 1636 by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States"Higher education in America began with Harvard": , p. 3. With regard to age, several universities founded in the mid-1700s jockey for relative position, but no institution challenges Harvard's "oldest" status, explicitly or implicitly. One of the few potential rival claimants, 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[link]. 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."[link]. 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 [link]). 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."[link]. and a member of the Ivy League. 


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, John Harvard bequeathed a few hundred books in his will to form the basis of the college library collection, along with several hundred pounds. 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. The Harvard model influenced American education nationally, at both college and secondary levels.


In 1999, Radcliffe College, initially founded as the "Harvard Annex" for women, merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[link]


Harvard has the world's third largest library collection (after the British Library and the Library of Congress)[link], and the largest financial endowment of any academic institution, standing at $25.9 billion as of 2005, and the second largest endowment for a non-profit organization behind only the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. [link]





Contents





Institution




A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. The school color is crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The color was unofficially adopted (in preference to magenta) by an 1875 vote of the student body, although the association with some form of red can be traced back to 1858, when Charles William Eliot, a young graduate student who would later become Harvard's president, bought red bandannas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta. 


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 a dull, dark red, almost like oxblood. Harvard Student Agency guides are instructed to tell visitors that this is because the athletic flag which was used for the canonical color had become discolored through use. The de jure color remains crimson, but the de facto color, therefore, is quite different.


Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines and the oldest current publication at Harvard; the Harvard Lampoon, a social club which occasionally publishes a humor magazine ("semi-secret Sorrento Square organization which used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine"); and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual burlesque and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies; and the Harvard Glee Club, the oldest college chorus in America.  The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s.


Harvard College has traditionally drawn many of its students from private schools, though today the majority of undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the globe. 




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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 mooted 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 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, "The US has the world’s top two universities by our reckoning — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neighbours on the Charles River."[Times Higher Education Supplement World Rankings 2006]


Over its history, Harvard has graduated many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy; 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, and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Among its most famous faculty members are biologists James D. Watson and E. O. Wilson.


Harvard affiliates' politics 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 CityO'Brien, R. D. (2004). [Kerry Tops Crimson Poll]. The Harvard Crimson,  October 29 2004.. 
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.



Admissions


Harvard's overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2006 was 9.3%,No author given. (2006). [The Class of 2010 is the most diverse in Harvard history]. Harvard University Gazette, March 30 2006 making it one of the most selective universities in the country. The 2006 figures from US News and World Report indicated that the business school admitted 14.3% of its applicants, the engineering division admitted 12.5%, the law school admitted 11.3%, the education school admitted 14.6%, and the medical school admitted 4.9%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]..



Organization


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

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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 Stadium

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Harvard Stadium






Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax in their annual American Football meeting, which dates to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game. Harvard has won The Game for the past five years running.  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.


Red Top is the training camp used by the Harvard crew for the annual Harvard-Yale Regatta. Red Top consists of a complex of several buildings including living quarters for the crews and the red-topped boathouse which gives the facility its name. Situated within the town of Ledyard, Connecticut, Red Top is located on the eastern shore of the Thames river just north of the Groton US Naval Base and directly across the river from the northern finish/start line for the race and the rock at Bartlett's Cove. 


Red Top was the subject of a litigation several years ago when the town of Ledyard attempted to tax the property. Harvard claimed the property as tax exempt under its status as a non-profit organization. The case was taken all the way to the Connecticut Supreme Court which decided in favor of the University. 


At one time Red Top was considered of enough importance to merit its own eponymous stop on the train route that runs along the Thames river. Although The Race has decreased in national importance in the second half of the 20th century, with the rise of other more telegenic sports, the rivalry continued at Red Top each year contines to be of interest among rowing enthusiasts and historians of sports. 


Red Top, like the Yale Boathouse complex named "The Ferry", also serves as an important geographical and navigational landmark on the Thames River because of its high visibility. 


Today, Harvard does field top teams in several other sports, such as ice hockey (with a strong rivalry against Cornell), rowing, and squash, even recently winning the NCAA title in Men's and Women's Fencing. But like other Ivy League universities, Harvard does not offer athletic scholarships. 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.


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 chiefly a commencement song).  The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs and other cheers at football and hockey games. 


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 women's field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, and men's soccer are also in the MAC.


Weld Boathouse and Newell Boathouse house the women's and men's rowing teams, respectively. 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.


[Harvard's official athletics website] has more comprehensive information about Harvard's athletic facilities.



Library system and museums

The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 15.3 million volumes, is the fourth largest library collection in the world, after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque nationale; it is the largest university library system in the world.  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. Houghton Library is the primary repository for Harvard's rare books and manuscripts. 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 outisde of East Asia is held in the Harvard-Yenching Library.


Harvard operates several art museums, including the Fogg Museum of Art (with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with particular strengths in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art); the Busch-Reisinger Museum (formerly Germanic Museum, and formerly housed in Adolphus Busch Hall) (central and northern European art; and a Flentrop pipe organ, familiar from recordings by E. Power Biggs); the Sackler Museum (ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art); the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous Blaschka Glass Flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere; and the Semitic Museum.



Harvard in fiction and popular culture

Love Story, by Harvard alumnus (and Yale professor) Erich Segal, the much-beloved and also much-ridiculed tearjerker of the 1970s, concerns a romance between a Harvard student and a Radcliffe student. The novel is deeply imbued with local color.Rogers, M. F. (1991). Novels, Novelists, and Readers: Toward a Phenomenological Sociology of Literature. SUNY Press, ISBN 0791406032. 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 US 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 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 Wheaton and Bridgewater State, although outdoor and aerial shots of Harvard's Cambridge campus are often used. Burr, T. (2005).  [Reel Boston]. The Boston Globe, February 27 2005. The graduation scene from With Honors was filmed in front of Foellenger Auditorium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Also set in Harvard is Korean hit TV series Love Story in HarvardCatalano, N. M. (2004). [Harvard TV Show Popular in Korea]. The Harvard Crimson, December 13 2004., filmed at University of Southern California.  Many movies have 
characters identified as Harvard graduates, including Apocalypse Now, A Few Good Men, American Psycho, and Two Weeks Notice.


The novel The Da Vinci Code has its main character, Robert Langdon, as a Harvard "professor of symbology," although no such field exists at Harvard.Jampel, C. E. (2004). [Ruffling Religious Feathers]. The Harvard Crimson, February 12 2004.


The character Frasier Crane from the sitcom Cheers claimed to be a graduate of Harvard and Oxford.



Overview of the campus

The main campus is centered around 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 and the Harvard School of Public Health are located in the Longwood district of Boston.


Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the University, several academic buildings, Memorial Church, and the majority of the freshman dormitories. Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors live in twelve residential Houses, 9 of which are south of Harvard Yard along or near the Charles River and 3 of which are located in a residential neigborhood half a mile northwest of the Yard called the Quadrangle.



Residential Houses

Nearly all students at Harvard College live on campus. First-year students live in the freshman dormitories in or near Harvard Yard. Upperclass students live mainly in a system of twelve residential "Houses", which serve as administrative units of the College as well as dormitories. Each House is presided over by a "Master"—a senior faculty member who is responsible for guiding the social life and community of the House—and a "Senior Tutor", who acts as dean of the students in the House in its administrative role. 


The House system was instituted by Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell in the 1930s, although the number of Houses, their demographics, and the methods by which students are assigned to particular Houses have all changed drastically since the founding of the system. Funds for the Houses were donated by Edward Harkness, a Yale graduate, who had previously failed to persuade Yale of its merits (but which later adopted a very similar "college" system).  Lowell modeled it on the system of constituent colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, and the Houses borrow terminology from Oxford and Cambridge such as Junior Common Room (the set of undergraduates affiliated with a House) and Senior Common Room (the Master, Senior Tutor, and other faculty members, advisors, and graduate students associated with the House). Non-faculty members of the Senior Common Room of a House are given the title "Tutor".


Nine of the Houses are situated south of Harvard Yard, near the busy commercial district of Harvard Square, along or close to the northern banks of the Charles River, and so are known colloquially as the River Houses. These are:



The Quad, looking north toward Pforzheimer House

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The Quad, looking north toward Pforzheimer House






The remainder of the residential Houses are located around Harvard's Quadrangle (or "the Quad", formerly the "Radcliffe Quadrangle"), in a more suburban residential neighborhood half a mile (800 m) northwest of Harvard Yard. These housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard. They are:




There is a thirteenth House, Dudley House [link], which is nonresidential but still fulfills, for some graduate students and 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.


To the disappointment of all Harvard undergraduates, the late Harvard President Leonard Hoar (3rd president of Harvard College) has not yet had a house named after him (Hoar House).


Radcliffe Yard, the center of the campus of the former Radcliffe College (and now Radcliffe Institute), is west of Harvard Yard, 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.;
and a villa in 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 [link] major expansion southward. The university now owns approximately fifty percent more land in Allston than in Cambridge. Various proposals to connect the traditional Cambridge campus with the new Allston campus include new and enlarged bridges, a shuttle service and/or a tram.


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




"A prospect of the colleges in Cambridge in New England". Engraving by William Burgis from 1740.

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"A prospect of the colleges in Cambridge in New England". Engraving by William Burgis from 1740.






Harvard's founding in 1636 came in the form of an act of the colony's Great and General Court. By all accounts the chief impetus was to allow the training of home-grown clergy so the Puritan colony would not need to rely on immigrating graduates of England's Oxford and Cambridge universities for well-educated pastors, "dreading," as a 1643 brochure put it, "to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches."[[Citing sources citation needed]] In its first year, seven of the original nine students left to fight in the English Civil War.


Harvard was also founded as a school to educate American Indians in order to train them as ministers among their tribes.  Harvard's Charter of 1650 calls for "the education of the English and Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness."[[Citing sources citation needed]]  Indeed, Harvard and missionaries to the local tribes were intricately connected.  The first Bible to be printed in the entire North American continent was printed at Harvard in an Indian language, Massachusett.  Termed the Eliot Bible since it was translated by John Eliot, this book was used to facilitate conversion of Indians, ideally by Harvard-educated Indians themselves.  Harvard's first American Indian graduate, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck from the Wampanoag tribe, was a member of the class of 1665.[[Citing sources citation needed]]  Caleb and other students-- English and American Indian alike-- lived and studied in a dormitory known as the Indian College, which was founded in 1655 under then-President Charles Chauncy. In 1698 it was torn down owing to neglect. The bricks of the former Indian College were later used to build the first Stoughton Hall.  Today a plaque on the SE side of Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard, the approximate site of the Indian College, commemorates the first American Indian students who lived and studied at Harvard University.  





The connection to the Puritans can be seen in the fact that, for its first few centuries of existence, the Harvard Board of Overseers included, along with certain commonwealth officials, the ministers of six local congregations (Boston, Cambridge, Charlestown, Dorchester, Roxbury and Watertown), who today, although no longer so empowered, are still by custom allowed seats on the dais at commencement exercises. 


Despite the Puritan atmosphere, from the beginning the intent was to provide a full liberal education such as that offered at European universities, including the rudiments of mathematics and science ('natural philosophy') as well as classical literature and philosophy. 


In 1755, Harvard's oldest endowed lectures, the prestigious Dudleian lectures on religion, were first held. During the Revolutionary War, General Washington and the Continental Army quartered in Harvard buildings and organized military exercises in Cambridge Common.


Between 1800 and 1870 a transformation of Harvard occurred which E. Digby BaltzellBaltzell, D. E. & Schneiderman, H. G. (1994). Judgment and Sensibility: Religion and Stratification." Transaction Publishers, ISBN 1560000481. 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 0819550442. calls "privatization." Harvard had prosperred while Federalists controlled state government, but "in 1824 the federalist party was finally defeated forever in Massachusetts; the triumphant Jeffersonian-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'"Story, R. (1980). The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800-1870. Wesleyan University Press, ISBN 0819550442 (p. 50: Harvard's explosive growth from 1800 to 1850 separate it from other colleges). 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'"Story, R. (1980). op. cit. p. 97, (1815-1855 as the era when Harvard began to be perceived as socially advantageous).


Steinberg notes 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.... 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"Steinberg, S. (2001). The Ethnic Myth. Beacon Press, ISBN 080704153X. (Harvard most democratic of the Big Three under Eliot, p. 234). 


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 term Brahmin comes from the Indian caste system, of which the Brahmins are the highest caste. The assertion that they are "Brahmin" is not just a claim of high social class, but also of cultural, intellectual, and spiritual leadership; these roles were performed by the namesake caste that exists in India.-- Its discriminatory policies against immigrants, Catholics and Jews were partly responsible for the founding of Boston College in 1863[[Citing sources citation needed]] and Brandeis University in 1948.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." 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.", 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." [Free eBook: Philosophy 4, by Owen Wister] at Project Gutenberg


Between 1906 and 1922, Jewish enrollment at Harvard increased from 6% to 20%, and 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." 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.  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 antisemitism, be recognized as a "gentleman," and be accepted into "The Pudding."


In 2002, it was revealed by The Crimson that in 1920 "Harvard University maliciously persecuted and harassed" those it believed to be gay via a "Secret Court" led by former Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. 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. After the article was published, Harvard President Lawrence Summers characterized the episode as "part of a past that we have rightly left behind", and "abhorrent and an affront to the values of our university".Wright, W. (2005). Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, St. Martin's Press, New York. ISBN 0312322712.



Recent developments




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

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






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 now serves as interim president, as of July 1. 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.Bombardieri, M.  (2005). [Summers' remarks on women draw fire]. The Boston Globe, January 17 2005. 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. [[Citing sources citation needed]]



Notable student organizations





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

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









People associated with Harvard University


Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university.  Since 1974, nineteen Nobel Prize winners and fifteen Pulitzer Prize winners have served on the Harvard faculty. For greater detail, see Nobel Prize laureates by university affiliation.	 



Views of Harvard


In 1893, Baedeker's guidebook called Harvard "the oldest, richest, and most famous of American seats of learning.", p. 83. (Facsimile reprint of original, published in Leipzig and New York) The first two facts remain true today; the third is also arguably true. As of 2005, Harvard was ranked first among world universities by Times Higher Education Supplement and the Academic Ranking of World Universities and shared the first spot with Princeton in US News and World Report rankings.


Perhaps because of this prominence, Harvard is the target of a number of criticisms, some of them leveled at other research-based American universities. It has been accused of grade inflation, as have other colleges and universities.Rosane, O. (2006). [College Administrators Take On Inflated Grade Averages]. Columbia Spectator, March 20 2006. In the 2004-2005 school year, about half of all grades awarded at Harvard were A or A-minuses (Harvard does not award A-plus grades). In 2006 Dean Benedict Gross noted that "grade inflation continues to be a problem," and praised Princeton's new policy limiting A grades to 35 percent in most undergraduate classes and 55 percent for junior and senior independent work (the percentage of grades of A-minus or above for undergraduate courses after its adoption dropped to 40.9 in 2004-05). However, 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 virtually 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.Kohn, A. (2002). [The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation]. The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8 2002. 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.No author given. (2003). [Brevia]. Harvard Magazine, January-February 2003.Milzoff, R. M., Paley, A. R., & Reed, B. J. (2001). [Grade Inflation is Real]. Fifteen Minutes March 1 2001.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.").Associated Press. (2004). [Princeton becomes first to formally combat grade inflation]. USA Today, April 26 2004.


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.Hicks, D. L. (2002). [Should Our Colleges Be Ranked?]. Letter to [The New York Times, September 20,2002.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. The New York Times article also detailed that the problem was prevalent in 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.Bombardieri, M. (2005). [Student life at Harvard lags peer schools, poll finds]. The Boston Globe, March 29 2005. The Harvard internal memorandum noted that: "Harvard students are less satisfied with their undergraduate educations than the students at almost all of the other COFHE schools. Harvard student satisfaction compares even less favorably to satisfaction at our closest peer institutions." While the actual survey results as reported by the Globe are open to interpretation, the Harvard Crimson editorial board opined that "we believe the implications of this survey are significant, and the administration ought to make satisfying undergraduates a top priority for the near future." Anonymous. (2005). [Unhappy Harvard]. The Harvard Crimson, April 5 2005. The Globe quoted Lawrence Buell, former Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education, as saying "I think we have to concede that we are letting our students down."


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.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.Feinstein, B., Schneider, A. P., Thompson, A. H., & Wasserstein, S. A. (2003). [The Cult of Yale, Part II]. The Harvard Crimson, November 20 2003. The Harvard Crimson quoted Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross as being aware of and committed to improving the issues raised by the COFHE survey.Ho, M. W. & Rogers, J. P. (2005). [Harvard Students Less Satisfied Than Peers With Undergraduate Experience, Survey Finds]. The Harvard Crimson, March 31 2005. However, in the same article, Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield expressed skepticism at the willingness of faculty to improve the undergraduate experience: "I think the administration has a commitment to improving Harvard, but I don't think the majority of the faculty does. They are the ones who are complacent and deserve most of the criticism."


Outgoing 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." [link]


The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni and affirmative action policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate.Shapiro, J. (1997). [A Second Look]. 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,"Steinberger, M. (2005). [A Flood of Crimson Ink]. Wall Street Journal, April 29 2005. 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."



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See also




 Schools of Harvard University


Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences>Faculty of Arts and Sciences:  College • Graduate School of Arts and Sciences • Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences • Continuing Education


Faculty of Medicine:  Harvard Medical School>Medical School • School of Dental Medicine


Harvard Divinity School>Divinity School • Law School • Business School • Graduate School of Design


Harvard Graduate School of Education>Graduate School of Education • School of Public Health • Kennedy School of Government


Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (successor to Radcliffe College)






 













































































 




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