11-30-09: Higher Ed Environment: A Brief History of Harvard:-

A Brief History of Harvard:-

Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units. It is also the first and oldest corporation in the United States.

Initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne", the institution was renamed Harvard College on March 13, 1639. It was named after John Harvard, a young clergyman from the London Borough of Southwark and alumnus of Cambridge University (after which Cambridge,Massachusetts is named), who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 (which was half of his estate), assuring its continued operation. The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" occurs in the newMassachusetts Constitution of 1780.

During his 40-year tenure as Harvard president (1869–1909), 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.

Harvard has the second-largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization (behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), standing at $26 billion as of September 2009.

In 1893, Baedeker's guidebook called Harvard "the oldest, richest, and most famous of American seats of learning." Harvard College was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. The college was named for its first benefactor, British-born John Harvard of Charlestown, a young minister who, upon his death in 1638, left his library and half his estate to the new institution. The charter creating thecorporation of Harvard College was signed by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Dudley in 1650. In the early years, the College trained many Puritan ministers.

During its early years, the College offered a classic academic course based on the English university model but consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy of the first colonists in New England. The College was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Puritan churches throughout New England. An early brochure, published in 1643, justified the College's existence: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches…" Harvard's early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae "Truth for Christ and the Church." In a directive to its students, it laid out the purpose of all education: "Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Iesus Christ which is eternall life, Joh. 17. 3. and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.

On June 11, 1685, Increase Mather became the Acting President of Harvard College. On July 23, 1686 he was appointed the Rector, and on June 27, 1682 he became the President of Harvard, a position which he held until September 6, 1701.

The 1708 election of John Leverett, the first president who was not also a clergyman, marked a turning of the College toward intellectual independence from Puritanism.

In the 17th century, Harvard established the Indian College to educate Native Americans, but it was not a success and disappeared by 1693.

Between 1830 and 1870 Harvard became "privatized". While the Federalists controlled state government, Harvard had prospered, but the 1824 defeat of the federalist party inMassachusetts allowed the renascent Democratic-Republicans to block state funding of private universities. By 1870, the politicians and ministers that heretofore had made up the university's board of overseers had been replaced by Harvard alumni drawn from Boston's upper-class business and professional community and funded by private endowment.

During this period, Harvard experienced unparalleled growth that securely placed it financially in a league of its own among American colleges. Ronald Story notes that in 1850, Harvard's total assets were "five times that of Amherst and Williams combined, and three times that of Yale." 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'". Under President Eliot's tenure, Harvard earned a reputation for being more liberal and democratic than either Princeton or Yale in regard to bigotry against Jews and other ethnic minorities. In 1870, one year into Eliot's term, Richard Theodore Greener became the first African-American to graduate from Harvard College. Seven years later, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, graduated from Harvard Law School.

Nevertheless, 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.

Though Harvard ended required chapel in the mid-1880s, the school remained culturally Protestant, and fears of dilution grew as enrollment of immigrants, Catholics and Jews surged at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1908, Catholics made up nine percent of the freshman class, and between 1906 and 1922, Jewish enrollment at Harvard increased from six to twenty percent. In June 1922, under President A. Lawrence 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 combating 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." 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 anti-Semitism, be recognized as a "gentleman," and be accepted into "The Pudding." Indeed, Harvard's discriminatory policies, both tacit and explicit, were partly responsible for the founding of Boston College in 1863[citation needed] and Brandeis University in nearby Waltham in 1948.

Policies of exclusion were not limited to religious minorities. In 1920, "Harvard University maliciously persecuted and harassed" those it believed to be gay via a "Secret Court" led by President Lowell. Summoned at the behest of a wealthy alumnus, the inquisitions and expulsions carried out by this tribunal, in conjunction with the "vindictive tenacity of theuniversity in ensuring that the stigmatization of the expelled students would persist throughout their productive lives" led to two suicides. Harvard President Lawrence Summers characterized the 1920 episode as "part of a past that we have rightly left behind", and "abhorrent and an affront to the values of our university". 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.

During the twentieth century, Harvard's international reputation grew as a burgeoning endowment and prominent professors expanded the university's scope. Explosive growth in the student population continued with the addition of new graduate schools and the expansion of the undergraduate program. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women inthe United States.

In the decades immediately after the Second World War, Harvard reformed its admissions policies as it sought students from a more diverse applicant pool. Whereas Harvard undergraduates had almost exclusively been upper-class alumni of select New England "feeder schools" such as Exeter, Hotchkiss and Andover, 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. Following the merger of Harvard and Radcliffe admissions in 1977, the proportion of female undergraduates steadily increased, mirroring a trend throughout higher education in the United States. 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 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 as the "Harvard Annex for Women", merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Harvard and its affiliates, like most American universities, are considered to be politically liberal (left of center); Richard Nixon, for example, famously referred to it as the "Kremlin on the Charles" around 1970. Republicans remain a small minority of faculty, and the University has refused to officially recognize the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program — forcing students to commission through nearby MIT.

President Lawrence Summers resigned his presidency in 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 served as interim president. 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. 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. Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th president of Harvard. An American historian, former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, Faust is the first female president in the university's history.

A faculty of about 2,400 professors serve as of school year 2006-2007, with 6,715 undergraduate and 12,424 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 21st and longest-serving president (1869-1909), bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.

The history of Harvard's color has been contested by Fordham University. Both schools were identifying with magenta, and since neither was willing to use a new color, they agreed that the winner of a baseball game would be allowed official use of magenta. Fordham emerged the winner, but Harvard reneged on its promise and continued using magenta. Fordham, which adopted maroon because of this, claims that Harvard followed suit with its adoption of crimson.

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 discussed 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 Broad Institute, 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.

Harvard is governed by two boards, one of which is the President and Fellows of Harvard College, also known as the Harvard Corporation and founded in 1650, and the other is 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. There are 16,000 staff and faculty.

Faculties and schools

Harvard today has nine faculties, listed below in order of foundation:

* The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its sub-faculty, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which together serve:
o Harvard College, the university's undergraduate portion (1636)
o The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (organized 1872)
o The Harvard Division of Continuing Education, including Harvard Summer School (1871) and Harvard Extension School (1909).
* The Faculty of Medicine, including the Medical School (1782)
* The Harvard School of Dental Medicine (1867).
* Harvard Divinity School (1816)
* Harvard Law School (1817)
* Harvard Business School (1908)
* The Graduate School of Design (1914)
* The Graduate School of Education (1920)
* The School of Public Health (1922)
* The John F. Kennedy School of Government (1936)

In 1999, the former Radcliffe College was reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

In February 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers formally approved the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences to become the 14th School of Harvard (Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences).

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 the city of Boston's Allston neighborhood, which is situated on the other side of the Charles River from Harvard Square. The Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health are located in the Longwood Medical and

Academic Area of Boston.

Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the university, academic buildings including Sever Hall and University Hall, Memorial Church, and the majority of the freshman dormitories. Sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates live in twelve residential Houses, nine of which are south of Harvard Yard along or near the Charles River. The other three are located in a residential neighborhood half a mile northwest of the Yard at the Quadrangle (commonly referred to as the Quad), which formerly housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard.

Each residential house contains rooms for undergraduates, House masters, and resident tutors, as well as a dining hall, library, and various other student facilities. The facilities were made possible by a gift from Yale University alumnus Edward Harkness.

Radcliffe Yard, formerly the center of the campus of Radcliffe College (and now home of the Radcliffe Institute), is adjacent to the Graduate School of Education and the Cambridge Common.

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.; the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts; and the Villa I Tatti research center in Florence, Italy

Throughout the past several years, Harvard has purchased large tracts of land in Allston, a walk across the Charles River from Cambridge, with the intent of 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. Ambitious plans also call for sinking part of Storrow Drive (at Harvard's expense) for replacement with park land and pedestrian access to the Charles River, as well as the construction of bike paths, and an intently planned fabric of buildings throughout the Allston campus. The institution asserts that such expansion will benefit not only the school, but surrounding community, pointing to such features as the enhanced transit infrastructure, possible shuttles open to the public, and park space which will also be publicly accessible.

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. Unfortunately the large drop in endowment has halted these plans for now.

Harvard, along with other universities, has been accused of grade inflation. 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 reforming of the test in the mid-1990s), suggesting that the quality of the student body and its motivation have also increased. 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.

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. The New York Times article also detailed that the problem was prevalent in some other Ivy League schools.

The 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings place Harvard in a first place tie with Princeton among "National Universities".[74]. As of 2009, Harvard has been ranked first among world universities every time since the publications of the THES - QS World University Rankings[75] and the Academic Ranking of World Universities.

Faculty and research

Prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices are among the faculty of the various schools, such as Martin Feldstein, Harvey Mansfield, Greg Mankiw, Baroness Shirley Williams, and Alan Dershowitz. Leftists like Michael Walzer and Stephen Thernstrom and libertarians such as Robert Nozick have in the past graced its faculty.

Between 1964 and 2009, a total of 38 faculty and staff members affiliated with Harvard or its teaching hospitals were awarded Nobel Prizes (17 during the last quarter century).

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