Harvard University

Harvard University Summary

Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. 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 four hundred books in his will to form the basis of the college library collection, along with half his personal wealth worth several hundred pounds. In his 1869-1909 tenure as Harvard president, Charles William Eliot radically transformed Harvard into the pattern of the modern research university. In 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1894 as an outgrowth of the “Harvard Annex” for women, merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. 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 bandannas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta. Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson and its rival the Harvard Lampoon, the world’s most pretentious humor magazine; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation’s oldest literary magazines and the oldest current publication at Harvard; The Harvard Glee Club is the oldest college chorus in America, and the University Choir, the choir of Harvard’s Memorial Church, is the oldest choir in America affiliated with a university. 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. 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: In 1999, the former Radcliffe College was reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Harvard has several athletic facilities, such as the Lavietes Pavilion, a multi-purpose arena and home to the Harvard basketball teams. 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 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). Harvard’s official athletics website has more comprehensive information about Harvard’s athletic facilities. The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes, is considered the fourth largest library collection in the world, after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque Nationale. Harvard operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums: Harvard’s overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2007 was 8.97%. Harvard College’s student population is almost equally balanced between male and female undergraduates, with women slightly outnumbering men in several of the most recent entering classes. Like other schools in the Ivy League, Harvard College does not offer athletic scholarships. The National Bureau of Economic Research study on Revealed Preference of U.S. Colleges showed that Harvard is the most preferred choice among high-achieving high school seniors in matchups with other colleges. US News and World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges 2007” ranked Harvard as the second-best undergraduate college in the United States, one point behind Princeton University. 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. 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 and the Harvard School of Public Health are located in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston. 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. In addition, Harvard intends to relocate the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard School of Public Health to Allston. In 1920, “Harvard University maliciously persecuted and harassed” those it believed to be gay via a “Secret Court” led by Harvard President A. 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. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. Whereas Harvard undergraduates had almost exclusively been white, upper-class alumni of select New England “feeder schools” such as Andover and Groton, increasing numbers of international, minority, and working-class students had, by the late 1960s, altered the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of the college. Nonetheless, Harvard’s undergraduate population remained predominantly male, with about four men attending Harvard College for every woman studying at Radcliffe. Harvard’s graduate schools, which had accepted females and other groups in greater numbers even before the college, also became more diverse in the post-war period. In 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. 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. 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. As announced officially by Harvard University on 11 February 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust is expected to be the 28th president of Harvard, beginning her term July 1, 2007. A longer list of Harvard student groups can be found under Harvard College. 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. 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 not allowed any movies to be filmed in campus buildings since Love Story in the 1960s; Also set at Harvard is the Korean hit TV series Love Story in Harvard, 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 field exists at Harvard. Pamela Thomas-Graham, an alumna of Harvard College, Business School and Law School and the former President & The student produced Harvard-Radcliffe Television show Ivory Tower is set on the Harvard campus but is about fictional Harvard students. 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. 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). 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 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. 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. 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; In 2005, The Boston Globe