Harvard University ::: Project ETERNITY

name = Harvard University |

motto = Veritas (Truth) |

established = September 8, 1636 |

type = Private |

head = Lawrence H. Summers |

city = Cambridge |

state = Mass. |

country = USA |

undergrad = 6,650 |

postgrad = 13,000 |

postgrad_label = graduate |

faculty = 2,300 |

campus = Urban |

free_label = Athletics |

free = 43 varsity teams |

}}

Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. It was founded on September 8, 1636 by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Originally called simply the New College, it was named Harvard College on March 13 1639, after its first principal donor, John Harvard, a former student of Cambridge University. The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" rather than a "college" occurred in the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780.

The institution

A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. Admission to Harvard is extremely competitive, and its overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2004 was 10.3%. According to The Atlantic Monthly, it is the fifth most selective college in the United States (after MIT, Princeton, Caltech, and Yale).

Harvard recently returned from an unrestricted Early Action policy (where students can apply "early" to Harvard in addition to other schools) to a single-choice nonbinding Early Action policy (where you can apply "early" only to a single school), aligning it with the policies of Yale and Stanford, which had both recently moved from a binding single-choice Early Decision policy.

The school color is a shade richer than red but brighter than burgundy, referred to as 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 bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.

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

In 1999, the remnants of Radcliffe College were reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The Harvard University Library System, centered on Widener Library, with over 90 individual libraries and over 14.5 million volumes, is the largest university library system in the world and, after the Library of Congress, the second-largest library system in the United States. 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 19th-century French art); the Busch-Reisinger Museum (central and northern European art); 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.

The radio station WHRB (95.3FM Cambridge), is run exclusively by Harvard students, and is given space on the Harvard campus in the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dormitory. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its top-notch classical, jazz, underground rock and blues programming, WHRB is also home of the notorious radio "Orgy" format, where the entire catalog of a certain band, record, or artist is played in sequence.

While the Harvard football team was one of the best in the beginning days of the sport, today Harvard fields top teams in ice hockey, crew, and squash. As of 2003, there were 43 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other college in the country.

Harvard College has traditionally taken many of its students from private American preparatory schools such as Phillips Exeter Academy, The Lawrenceville School, Groton School, St. Paul's School, Milton Academy, and Phillips Academy, though today most undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the 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 Boston Latin; even today over a dozen students each year matriculate to Harvard from this inner-city public school.

Harvard contains many strong departments that are ranked among the best in the world. Some lesser known departments also have significant global influence. For example, the Department of African and African-American Studies is widely recognized as the foremost in the world, notwithstanding the recent departure of Cornel West for Princeton University. Another example is Harvard's Judaic Studies Department, which was headed by Professor Harry Austryn Wolfson. Harvard boasts a unique $5 million Judaica library which has identified and categorized books by ink type, font type, paper thickness, pagination style, binding method and numerous other categorizations.

Famous Harvard alumni include seven U.S. Presidents (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and George W. Bush), philosopher Henry David Thoreau, comedian Conan O'Brien, and actor Tommy Lee Jones. See also: List of Harvard University people.

Harvard is known for its liberal left-wing politics and has sometimes been called the "Kremlin on the Charles" (note that the city in which Harvard is located is sometimes called the "People's Republic of Cambridge").

Though Harvard has been featured in many films, including Legally Blonde, The Firm, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, and Harvard Man, the University has not allowed any movies to be filmed on its campus since Love Story in the 1960s. Many movies have characters identified as Harvard graduates, including A Few Good Men, American Psycho, and Two Weeks Notice.

History

Harvard's foundation 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." 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.

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

Campus

Nine of the Houses are situated along or close to the northern banks of the Charles River and so are known colloquially as the River Houses. These are:

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

Harvard's residential houses are paired with Yale's residential colleges in sister relationships; see the Harvard-Yale sister colleges article for more information.

The Medical School, the Business School, and 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 facilities there.

Concentrations

Majors at Harvard College are known as concentrations. As of 2003, Harvard College offered 41 different concentrations:

African and African American Studies Anthropology Applied Mathematics Astronomy and Astrophysics Biochemical Sciences Biology Chemistry Chemistry and Physics The Classics Computer Science Earth and Planetary Sciences East Asian Studies Economics Engineering Sciences English and American Literature and Language Environmental Science and Public Policy Folklore and Mythology Germanic Languages and Literatures Government History History and Literature

History and Science History of Art Linguistics Literature Mathematics Music Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Philosophy Physics Psychology The Comparative Study of Religion Romance Languages and Literatures Sanskrit and Indian Studies Slavic Languages and Literatures Social Studies Sociology Special Concentrations Statistics Visual and Environmental Studies Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

Harvard University people

See also

Further reading

External links

Category:Association of American Universities

Category:Harvard University

Category:Ivy League

Category:Universities and colleges in Massachusetts

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