Harvard University

For alternate uses see other places called Harvard

Harvard University is a full private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Ivy League. Harvard College, its undergraduate division, was founded on September 8, 1636 by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making Harvard the oldest post-secondary school in the United States. Originally founded as New College, on March 13, 1639, the college was renamed after one of its biggest early patrons, John Harvard. In 1780, Harvard became a chartered university.

The Harvard School of Dental Medicine was established on July 17, 1867 as the first dental school in the United States.

Harvard is one of the United States' most selective universities, with an acceptance rate of around 10%. Its undergraduate and graduate schools are uniformly competitive.

A faculty of about 1200 professors serves about 6,400 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students.

Graduate schools include the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Business School, Medical School, Law School, Divinity School, Graduate School of Design, and Kennedy School of Government. There is also a Division of Continuing Education.

The school color is a shade of blood-red referred to as crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper (The Harvard Crimson).

The Harvard University Library System, centered around the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, is one of the largest in the world, with over 90 individual libraries and over 14 million volumes. Harvard also has several important 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 nineteenth-century French art), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (central and northern European art), and the Sackler Museum (ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art); the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous glass flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and the Semitic Museum.

Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson; the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine (or, as the Crimson describes it, "a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine); the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines; and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual drag musical and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies.

The main campus is located next to Harvard Square in central Cambridge, approximately two miles from the MIT campus. Virtually all undergraduates live on campus. First-year students live in dormitories in or near Harvard Yard. Upperclass students live in twelve residential Houses, which serve as administrative units of the College as well as dormitories. Nine of the Houses are situated along or close to the northern banks of the Charles River. These are Adams, Dunster, Eliot, Kirkland, Leverett, Lowell, Mather, Quincy, and Winthrop Houses. The remainder are located in the Radcliffe Quadrangle, half a mile northeast of Harvard Yard, and housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard. These are Cabot, Currier and Pforzheimer Houses. There is a thirteenth house, Dudley House, which is the House with which students living off-campus are affiliated.

The Medical School, the Business School, the university stadium and some other athletic facilities are located across the Charles River in Boston. Harvard has recently acquired more land in the Allston neighborhood of Boston and is planning to move more of its facilites there.

While the Harvard football team was one of the best in the beginning days of the sport, in more recent times Harvard fields top teams in ice hockey, crew, and squash.

Harvard College has traditionally taken many of its students from private American preparatory schools such as Phillips Exeter Academy, Groton School, St. Paul's School, Milton Academy and Phillips Academy, Andover, though most undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and globe. Harvard has traditionally had close ties to Boston Latin School, the oldest public school in the United States, founded in 1635. Early incoming Harvard classes were predominantly from Latin; even today over a dozen students each year matriculate to Harvard from this inner-city public school.

Among the famous graduates and former students are:

U.S. presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush
Poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost , T. S. Eliot, e. e. cummings, Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Robert Bly, Richard Wilbur, Adrienne Rich
Fiction writers John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer, William Gaddis, John Updike, Harold Brodkey, Horatio Alger, Jr., Alison Lurie
Philosophers William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Saul Kripke
Historians George Parkman, Bernard Bailyn, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Art historians Bernard Berenson, Paul Sachs, Alfred Barr
Scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois
Literary theorist Paul de Man
Jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, Harry Blackmun
Architect Philip Johnson
Religious figures such as William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, Jared Sparks
Scientists Benjamin Peirce, Edwin Land, E. J. Corey, E. O. Wilson, Dudley Herschbach
Economists Kenneth J. Arrow, Robert M. Solow, Robert Merton
Composers Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, John Adams, John Harbison
Musicians William Christie, Rivers Cuomo
Public advocate Ralph Nader
Business executives Charles Francis Adams, David Rockefeller, John Loeb, Bill Gates
Actors Jack Lemmon, Tommy Lee Jones, Stockard Channing, Mira Sorvino, Matt Damon
Politicians Edward Everett, Leverett Saltonstall, Edward M. Kennedy, Elizabeth H. Dole, Benazir Bhutto, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, William H. Frist, Henry Kissinger, Al Gore

40 current or former Nobel Prize laureates have been associated with the University.

Past presidents of Harvard have included notable educators such as Charles William Eliot; A. Lawrence Lowell; James Bryant Conant; Derek Curtis Bok; and Neil L. Rudenstine. The current President of the university is Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, who came to the position in 2001. There has been considerable controversy over the handling of the Afro-American studies program (as of 2003 the Department of African and African-American Studies), resulting in the departure of Cornel West for Princeton University.

Harvard was for several years the home of satirist (and mathematics instructor) Tom Lehrer, who mentioned it in the Elements Song: "These are the only ones of which the news has come to Harvard...."

External links