Harvard University

Harvard” redirects right here. For different makes use of, see Harvard (disambiguation).

Coat of arms
Latin: Universitas Harvardiana
Former names	Harvard College
Motto	Veritas (Latin)[1]
Motto in English	“Reality”
Sort	Private research university
Established	1636; 388 years in the past[2]
Founder	Massachusetts General Court
Accreditation	NECHE
Tutorial affiliations	AAUAICUMCOFHENAICUUArcticURASpace-grant
Endowment	$50.7 billion (2023)[3][4]
President	Alan Garber (interim)
Provost	John F. Manning (interim)[5]
Tutorial workers	~2,400 college members (and >10,400 educational appointments in affiliated instructing hospitals)[6]
College students	21,613 (Fall 2022)[7]
Undergraduates	7,240 (Fall 2022)[7]
Postgraduates	14,373 (Fall 2022)[7]
Location	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States 42°22′28″N 71°07′01″W
Campus	Midsize metropolis[8], 209 acres (85 ha)
Newspaper	The Harvard Crimson
Colors	Crimson, white, and black[9]
Nickname	Crimson
Sporting affiliations	NCAA Division I FCS – Ivy LeagueECAC HockeyNEISACWPAIRAEAWRCEARCEISA
Mascot	John Harvard
Web site	harvard.edu

Harvard College is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Based in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it’s the oldest establishment of upper studying in the USA. Its affect, wealth, and rankings have made it one of the vital prestigious universities on this planet.^[10]

Harvard’s founding was licensed by the Massachusetts colonial legislature, “dreading to go away an illiterate ministry to the church buildings”. Although by no means formally affiliated with any denomination, in its early years Harvard College primarily skilled Congregational clergy. Its curriculum and pupil physique had been progressively secularized in the course of the 18th century. By the nineteenth century, Harvard emerged as probably the most outstanding educational and cultural establishment among the many Boston elite.^[11][12] Following the American Civil War, below President Charles William Eliot‘s lengthy tenure (1869–1909), the school developed a number of affiliated skilled faculties that reworked the school into a contemporary research university. In 1900, Harvard co-founded the Association of American Universities.^[13] James B. Conant led the college via the Great Depression and World War II, and liberalized admissions after the battle.

The college consists of ten educational colleges and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences affords research in a variety of undergraduate and graduate academic disciplines, and different colleges provide solely graduate levels, together with skilled levels. Harvard has three essential campuses:^[14] the 209-acre (85 ha) Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus instantly throughout Charles River within the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area.^[15] Harvard’s endowment is valued at $50.7 billion, making it the wealthiest academic institution on this planet.^[3][4] Endowment earnings allows the undergraduate faculty to admit students regardless of financial need and supply monetary help with no loans. In accordance with the American Library Association, Harvard College has the fourth-largest library by volumes held in the USA.

Harvard alumni, college, and researchers have included 188 living billionaires, 8 U.S. presidents, quite a few heads of state, founders of notable firms, Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, members of Congress, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Turing Award Recipients, Pulitzer Prize winners, and Fulbright Scholars; by most metrics, Harvard ranks among the many high globally in every of those classes.^{[Notes 1]} Moreover, college students and alumni have gained 10 Academy Awards and 110 Olympic medals (46 gold).

Historical past

Foremost article: History of Harvard University

Colonial period

See additionally: John Harvard (clergyman)

Harvard was based in 1636 in the course of the colonial, pre-Revolutionary era by vote of the Nice and Common Court docket of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Its first headmaster, Nathaniel Eaton, took workplace the next 12 months. In 1638, the college acquired British North America‘s first identified printing press.^[16][17]

In 1639, it was named Harvard College after John Harvard, an English clergyman who had died quickly after immigrating to Massachusetts, bequeathing it £780 and his library of some 320 volumes.^[18] The constitution creating Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650.

A 1643 publication outlined the school’s goal: “to advance studying and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to go away an illiterate ministry to the church buildings when our current ministers shall lie within the mud.”^[19] The school skilled many Puritan ministers in its early years^[20] and provided a basic curriculum based mostly on the English college mannequin—many leaders within the colony had attended the University of Cambridge‍—‌conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. Harvard by no means affiliated with any specific denomination.^[21]

Increase Mather served as Harvard Faculty’s president from 1681 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett grew to become the primary president who was not additionally a priest.^[22]

nineteenth century

Within the nineteenth century, Enlightenment concepts of motive and free will had been widespread amongst Congregational ministers, inserting these ministers and their congregations at odds with extra traditionalist, Calvinist events.^{[23]: 1–4} When Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and President Joseph Willard died a 12 months later, a wrestle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected Hollis chair in 1805, and liberal Samuel Webber was appointed president two years later, signaling a shift from conventional concepts at Harvard to liberal, Arminian concepts.^{[23]: 4–5 [24]: 24}

From 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot was Harvard College’s president. He decreased the favored place of Christianity from the curriculum, and opened it to pupil self-direction. Although Eliot was an influential determine within the secularization of American larger schooling, he was motivated primarily by Transcendentalist and Unitarian convictions influenced by William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others of the time, somewhat than secularism.^[25]

In 1816, Harvard College launched new packages within the research of French and Spanish, and appointed George Ticknor the college’s first professor for these language packages.

twentieth century

Harvard’s graduate faculties started admitting girls in small numbers within the late nineteenth century. Throughout World War II, college students at Radcliffe College (which, since its 1879 founding, had been paying Harvard professors to repeat their lectures for ladies) started attending Harvard lessons alongside males.^[27] In 1945, girls had been first admitted to the medical school.^[28] Since 1971, Harvard had managed primarily all features of undergraduate admission, instruction, and housing for Radcliffe girls; in 1999, Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard.^[29]

Within the twentieth century, Harvard’s status grew as its endowment burgeoned and outstanding intellectuals and professors affiliated with the college. The college’s speedy enrollment development additionally was a product of each the founding of recent graduate educational packages and an enlargement of the undergraduate college. Radcliffe Faculty emerged as the feminine counterpart of Harvard Faculty, turning into one of the vital outstanding faculties for ladies in the USA. In 1900, Harvard grew to become a founding member of the Association of American Universities.^[13]

The coed physique in its first many years of the twentieth century was predominantly “old-stock, high-status Protestants, particularly Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians“, in response to sociologist and writer Jerome Karabel.^[30] In 1923, a 12 months after the proportion of Jewish college students at Harvard reached 20%, President A. Lawrence Lowell supported a coverage change that may have capped the admission of Jewish college students to fifteen% of the undergraduate inhabitants. However Lowell’s concept was rejected. Lowell additionally refused to mandate compelled desegregation within the college’s freshman dormitories, writing that, “We owe to the coloured man the identical alternatives for schooling that we do to the white man, however we don’t owe to him to power him and the white into social relations that aren’t, or is probably not, mutually congenial.”^{[31][32][33][34]}

President James B. Conant led the college from 1933 to 1953; Conant reinvigorated inventive scholarship in an effort to ensure Harvard’s preeminence among the many nation and world’s rising analysis establishments. Conant considered larger schooling as a car of alternative for the proficient somewhat than an entitlement for the rich. As such, he devised packages to determine, recruit, and help proficient youth. An influential 268-page report issued by Harvard college in 1945 below Conant’s management, General Education in a Free Society, stays one of the vital essential works in curriculum studies.^[35]

Between 1945 and 1960, admissions standardized to open the college to a extra numerous group of scholars; for instance, after World War II, particular exams had been developed so veterans may very well be thought-about for admission.^[36] Now not drawing largely from choose New England prep schools, the undergraduate college grew to become accessible to striving center class college students from public faculties; many extra Jews and Catholics had been admitted, however nonetheless few Blacks, Hispanics, or Asians versus the illustration of those teams within the common inhabitants.^[37] All through the latter half of the twentieth century, Harvard incrementally grew to become vastly extra numerous.^[38]

twenty first century

Drew Gilpin Faust, who was dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, grew to become Harvard’s first feminine president on July 1, 2007.^[39] In 2018, Faust retired and joined the board of Goldman Sachs. On July 1, 2018, Lawrence Bacow was appointed Harvard’s 29th president.^[40] Bacow retired in 2023.

In February 2023, roughly 6,000 Harvard staff tried to prepare a union.^[41]

On July 1, 2023, Claudine Gay, a Harvard professor within the Authorities and African American Research departments and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, succeeded Bacow because the college’s thirtieth president. In January 2024, Provost Alan Garber succeeded Homosexual as interim president after Homosexual resigned following allegations of antisemitism and plagiarism.^[42]

Campuses

Cambridge

See additionally: Harvard Divinity School, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute

Harvard’s 209-acre (85 ha) essential campus is centered on Harvard Yard (“the Yard”) in Cambridge, about 3 miles (5 km) west-northwest of downtown Boston, and extends into the encircling Harvard Square neighborhood. The Yard comprises administrative places of work resembling University Hall and Massachusetts Hall; libraries resembling Widener, Pusey, Houghton, and Lamont; and Memorial Church.

The Yard and adjoining areas embody the principle educational buildings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, together with the school, resembling Sever Hall and Harvard Hall.

Freshman dormitories are in, or adjoining to, the Yard. Upperclassmen dwell within the twelve residential houses – 9 south of the Yard close to the Charles River, the others half a mile northwest of the Yard on the Radcliffe Quadrangle (which previously housed Radcliffe College college students). Every home is a group of undergraduates, college deans, and resident tutors, with its personal eating corridor, library, and leisure amenities.^[43]

Additionally in Cambridge are the Law, Divinity (theology), Engineering and Applied Science, Design (structure), Education, Kennedy (public coverage), and Extension faculties, in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Radcliffe Yard.^[44] Harvard additionally has business actual property holdings in Cambridge.^[45][46]

Allston

See additionally: Harvard University’s expansion in Allston, Massachusetts

Harvard Business School, Harvard Innovation Labs, and lots of athletics amenities, together with Harvard Stadium, are situated on a 358-acre (145 ha) campus in Allston,^[47] a Boston neighborhood simply throughout the Charles River from the Cambridge campus. The John W. Weeks Bridge, a pedestrian bridge over the Charles River, connects the 2 campuses.

The college is actively increasing into Allston, the place it now owns extra land than in Cambridge.^[48] Plans embody new building and renovation for the Enterprise Faculty, a lodge and convention middle, graduate pupil housing, Harvard Stadium, and different athletics amenities.^[49]

In 2021, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences expanded into a brand new, 500,000+ sq. foot Science and Engineering Complicated (SEC) in Allston.^[50] The SEC is adjoining to the Enterprise Analysis Campus, the Enterprise Faculty, and the Harvard Innovation Labs to encourage technology- and life science-focused startups in addition to collaborations with mature firms.^[51]

Longwood

See additionally: Longwood Medical and Academic Area

The faculties of Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Public Health are situated on a 21-acre (8.5 ha) campus within the Longwood Medical and Tutorial Space in Boston, about 3.3 miles (5.3 km) south of the Cambridge campus.^[15] A number of Harvard-affiliated hospitals and analysis institutes are additionally in Longwood, together with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Joslin Diabetes Center, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Extra associates, most notably Massachusetts General Hospital, are situated all through the Better Boston space.