Harvard University

Harvard University

Motto	Veritas (Truth)
Established	September 8, 1636 (OS), September 18, 1636 (NS)
Type	Private
Endowment	U.S. $29.2 billion
Staff	2,300
President	Derek Bok (interim president)
Undergraduates	6,655
Postgraduates	13,000
Location	Cambridge, Mass. U.S.
Campus	Urban, 380 acres/154 ha
Athletics	41 varsity teams
Nickname	Crimson
Mascot	John Harvard
Website	www.harvard.edu

Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning still operating in the United States. It is a member of the Ivy League.

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. The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" rather than a "college" occurred in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.

In his 1869-1909 tenure as Harvard president, 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.

In 1999, Radcliffe College, initially founded as the "Harvard Annex" for women, merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[5]

Harvard has the world's fourth largest library collection (after the Library of Congress[6], the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque Nationale), and the largest financial endowment of any academic institution, standing at $29.2 billion as of 2006 (which is also the second largest endowment for a non-profit organization, behind the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

Institution

Harvard University campus (old map)

A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 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 president, bought red bandannas 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 were 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 had reneged on its promise and continued using magenta. Fordham had adopted maroon because of this and claims that Harvard followed suit with its adoption of crimson.[7]

Although the officially stated color is crimson, the color actually used on sport uniforms and other Harvard insignia is, in fact, very different from crimson. Rather than a bright crimson, it is a dull, dark red, almost like oxblood. Harvard Student Agency guides are instructed to tell visitors that this is because the athletic flag which was used for the canonical color had become discolored through use. The de jure color remains crimson, but the de facto color, therefore, is quite different.

Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson and its rival the Harvard Lampoon, the world's oldest humor magazine; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines and the oldest current publication at Harvard; and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual burlesque and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies. 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. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality (thus making it technically older than the New York Philharmonic, which is the oldest professional orchestra in America), and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s. The school also has a number of a cappella singing groups, the oldest of which is the Harvard Krokodiloes.

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.

File:John Harvard, statue at Harvard University.JPG

The John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard is a frequent target of pranks, hacks, and humorous decorations, such as the colorful lei shown above.

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 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. The relationship and proximity between the two institutions is a remarkable phenomenon, considering their stature; according to The Times Higher Education Supplement of London, "The US has the world’s top two universities by our reckoning — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, neighbours on the Charles River."

Over its history, Harvard has graduated many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Barack Obama, and John F. Kennedy; philosopher Henry David Thoreau and author Ralph Waldo Emerson; poets Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; actor Jack Lemmon; architect Philip Johnson, and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois. Among its most famous current faculty members are biologists James D. Watson and E. O. Wilson, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, economists Gregory Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, and scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.

Another notable alumni is David Rockefeller, who in 1991 collaborated with the newly installed Harvard president, Neil Rudenstine, in the creation and co-funding of the university-wide Interfaculty Initiative, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, a leading focal point in the US for academic gatherings on all issues facing Latin America. Earlier, Rockefeller had become close friends with another president, Nathan Pusey, who was a regular visitor to his Rockefeller family estate. Rockefeller himself has sat for many years on the Harvard College Board of Overseers; was the President of the Board of Overseas Study; and currently sits on the advisory committee of the Latin American Center. Another connection to the family is that president Charles W. Eliot served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1914 to 1917, a foundation which has consistently given grants to Harvard over many decades.

Organization

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:

Harvard Yard with freshman dorms in the background

• The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its sub-faculty, the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which together serve:
  • Harvard College, the university's undergraduate portion (1636)
  • The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (organized 1872)
  • The Harvard Division of Continuing Education, including Harvard Extension School (1909) and Harvard Summer School (1871)
• The Faculty of Medicine, including the Medical School (1782) and 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)

• Forsyth Institute - Dental Research

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

Sports and athletic facilities

Harvard Stadium

Harvard has several athletic facilities, such as the Lavietes Pavilion, a multi-purpose arena and home to the Harvard basketball teams. The Malkin Athletic Center, known as the "MAC," serves both as the university's primary recreation facility and as a satellite location for several varsity sports. The five story building includes two cardio rooms, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a smaller pool for aquaerobics and other activities, a mezzanine, where all types of classes are held at all hours of the day, and an indoor cycling studio, three weight rooms, and a three-court gym floor to play basketball. The MAC also offers personal trainers and specialty classes. The MAC is also home to Harvard volleyball, fencing, and wrestling. The offices of women's field hockey, lacrosse, soccer, softball, and men's soccer are also in the MAC.

Weld Boathouse and Newell Boathouse house the women's and men's rowing teams, respectively. The men's crew also uses the Red Top complex in Ledyard CT, as their training camp for the annual Harvard-Yale Regatta. 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.

As of 2006, there were 41 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other NCAA Division I college in the country. As with other Ivy League universities, Harvard does not offer athletic scholarships.

Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax each fall in their annual American Football meeting, which dates to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game. Yale's victory in 2006 ended a five-year winning streak for Harvard. While Harvard's football team is no longer one of the country's best (it won the Rose Bowl in 1920) as it often was a century ago during football's early days, it, along with Yale, has influenced the way the game is played. In 1903, Harvard Stadium introduced a new era into football with the first-ever permanent reinforced concrete stadium of its kind in the country. The sport eventually adopted the forward pass (invented by Yale coach Walter Camp) because of the stadium's structure.

Older than The Game by 23 years, the Harvard-Yale Regatta was the original source of the athletic rivalry between the two schools. It is held annually in June on the Thames river in eastern Connecticut. As of 2006, Harvard has won on the Thames in every varsity race since 1999. The Harvard Crew is considered to be one of the top teams in the country in rowing.

Today, Harvard fields top teams in several other sports, such as ice hockey (with a strong rivalry against Cornell), squash, and even recently won the NCAA title in Men's and Women's Fencing. Harvard also won the Intercollegiate Sailing Association National Championships in 2003. 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). The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs and other cheers at football and hockey games.

Harvard-Radcliffe Television has footage from historical games and athletic events including the 2005 pep-rally before the Harvard-Yale Game. Harvard's official athletics website has more comprehensive information about Harvard's athletic facilities.

Library system and museums

The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 15.3 million volumes, is the fourth largest library collection in the world, after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque nationale. Harvard describes its library as the "largest academic library in the world." Cabot Science Library, Lamont Library, and Widener Library are three of the most popular libraries for undergraduates to use, with easy access and central locations. Houghton Library is the primary repository for Harvard's rare books and manuscripts. America's oldest collection of maps, gazetteers, and atlases both old and new is stored in Pusey Library and open to the public. The largest collection of East-Asian language material outside of East Asia is held in the Harvard-Yenching Library.

Harvard operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums:

• The Harvard Art Museums, including:
  • The Fogg Museum of Art, with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular strengths are in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art)
  • The Busch-Reisinger Museum, formerly the Germanic Museum, covers central and northern European art.
  • The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which includes ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art
• The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere
• The Semitic Museum.
• The Harvard Museum of Natural History complex, including:
  • The Harvard University Herbaria, which contains the famous Blaschka Glass Flowers exhibit
  • The Museum of Comparative Zoology
  • The Harvard Mineralogical Museum

Admissions

Harvard's overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2006 was 9.3%. 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. The median score on the SAT I was 1495 out of 1600 for the class of 2009. Like other schools in the Ivy League, Harvard College does not offer athletic scholarships. The Class of 2010 had an 80% yield, the highest in the nation.^{[citation needed]} The National Bureau of Economic Research study on Revealed Preference of U.S. Colleges showed that Harvard is the most preferred choice among high school seniors in matchups with other colleges.

US News and World Report listed 2006 admissions percentages of 14.3% for the school of business, 4.5% for public health, 12.5% for engineering, 11.3% for law, 14.6% for education, and 4.9% for medicine.. 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.

Harvard in fiction and popular culture

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. The novel is deeply imbued with local color. A current Harvard tradition is the annual showing of the film Love Story to incoming freshmen, during which the film is openly mocked by the Crimson Key Society, a tour-giving organization on campus.

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; most films are shot in look-alike cities, such as Toronto, and colleges such as UCLA, Wheaton and Bridgewater State, although outdoor and aerial shots of Harvard's Cambridge campus are often used. The graduation scene from With Honors was filmed in front of Foellenger Auditorium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Also set in Harvard is 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 & CEO of CNBC, has written 3 mystery novels featuring African-American Harvard economics professor Nikki Chase as the protagonist.

The character Frasier Crane from the sitcoms Cheers and Frasier claimed to be a graduate of Harvard and Oxford University.

The student produced Harvard-Radcliffe Television show Ivory Tower [8] is set on the Harvard campus but is about fictional Harvard students.

The character Rory Gilmore on the CW television show Gilmore Girls wants to go to Harvard from an early age. In the third season, she is accepted to Harvard, but instead decides to attend Yale University.

Overview of the campus

The main campus is centered around 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.

Memorial Church

Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the university, several academic buildings, 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, which formerly housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard.

Radcliffe Yard, formerly the center of the campus of Radcliffe College (and now home of the Radcliffe Institute), is halfway between Harvard Yard and the Quadrangle, adjacent to the Graduate School of Education.

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.; and the Villa I Tatti research center in Florence, Italy.

Major campus expansion

Throughout the past several years, Harvard has purchased large tracts of land in Allston, a short 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.

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.

History

"A prospect of the colleges in Cambridge in New England". Engraving by William Burgis from 1740.

Harvard's founding 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."^{[citation needed]} In its first year, seven of the original nine students left to fight in the English Civil War.

Harvard was also founded as a school to educate American Indians in order to train them as ministers among their tribes. Harvard's Charter of 1650 calls for "the education of the English and Indian youth of this Country in knowledge and godliness." Indeed, Harvard and missionaries to the local tribes were intricately connected. The first Bible to be printed in the entire North American continent was printed at Harvard in an Indian language, Massachusett. Termed the Eliot Bible since it was translated by John Eliot, this book was used to facilitate conversion of Indians, ideally by Harvard-educated Indians themselves. Harvard's first American Indian graduate, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck from the Wampanoag tribe, was a member of the class of 1665. Caleb and other students— English and American Indian alike— lived and studied in a dormitory known as the Indian College, which was founded in 1655 under then-President Charles Chauncy. In 1698 it was torn down owing to neglect. The bricks of the former Indian College were later used to build the first Stoughton Hall. Today a plaque on the SE side of Matthews Hall in Harvard Yard, the approximate site of the Indian College, commemorates the first American Indian students who lived and studied at Harvard University.

A stone Rhinoceros sculpture "Bessie" in front of the Biological Laboratories.

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.

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

In 1726, Thomas Hollis III, of London, endowed Harvard's first two chairs in any American educational institution, the Hollis Professorships of Divinity and of "Mathematicks and Experimental Philosophy". He also donated a shipment of scientific apparatus.

In 1755, Harvard's oldest endowed lectures, the prestigious Dudleian lectures on religion, were first held. During the Revolutionary War, General Washington and the Continental Army quartered in Harvard buildings and organized military exercises in Cambridge Common.

Between 1800 and 1870 a transformation of Harvard occurred which E. Digby Baltzell calls "privatization." Harvard had prospered while Federalists controlled state government, but "in 1824 the federalist party was finally defeated forever in Massachusetts; the triumphant Jeffersonian-Republicans cut off all state funds." By 1870, the "magistrates and ministers" on the Board of Overseers had been completely "replaced by Harvard alumni drawn primarily from the ranks of Boston's upper-class business and professional community" and funded by private endowment.

During this period, Harvard experienced unparalleled growth that put it into a different category from other colleges. Ronald Story notes in 1850, Harvard's total assets were "five times that of Amherst and Williams combined, and three times that of Yale.... By 1850, it was a genuine university, 'unequalled in facilities,' as a budding scholar put it by any other institution in America—the 'greatest University,' said another, 'in all creation'". 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'". Harvard was also an early leader in admitting ethnic and religious minorities. Stephen Steinberg, author of The Ethnic Myth, noted that "a climate of intolerance prevailed in many eastern colleges long before discriminatory quotas were contemplated" and noted that "Jews tended to avoid such campuses as Yale and Princeton, which had reputations for bigotry.... [while] under President Eliot's administration, Harvard earned a reputation as the most liberal and democratic of the Big Three, and therefore Jews did not feel that the avenue to a prestigious college was altogether closed". 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. The social milieu of 1880s Harvard is depicted in Owen Wister's Philosophy 4, which contrasts the character and demeanor of two undergraduates who "had colonial names (Rogers, I think, and Schuyler)" with that of their tutor, one Oscar Maironi, whose "parents had come over in the steerage."

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 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 combatting 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 Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell. Summoned at the behest of a wealthy alumnus, the inquistions and expulsions carried out by this tribunal, in conjunction with the "vindictive tenacity of the university 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 in the 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 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. 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.

Today, Harvard is considered one of the premier centers of higher learning in the world. Despite periods of reactionary sentiment in the past, the politics of Harvard's affiliates, in line with most of American academia, are generally liberal (center-left): Richard Nixon famously attacked it as the "Kremlin on the Charles". 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. While Harvard has sometimes been criticized as elitist and "hostile to progressive intellectuals" (Trumpbour), there have been both prominent conservatives and liberals who have attended the school. President George W. Bush graduated from the Harvard Business School while John F. Kennedy and Al Gore graduated from Harvard College. Today, there are both prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices among the faculty of the various schools, such as Martin Feldstein, Greg Mankiw and Alan Dershowitz.

Recent developments

Destroyed by fire in the 1950s, Memorial Hall's ornate tower was rebuilt in 1999

On February 21, 2006, president Lawrence Summers announced his intention to resign the presidency, effective June 30, 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 now serves as interim president, as of July 1. 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.

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. Twenty-five students were admitted to the College, and the Law School made similar arrangements. Tuition was not charged and housing was provided. ^{[citation needed]}

Notable student organizations

A longer list of Harvard student groups can be found under Harvard College.

• The Harvard Crimson, one of the nation's oldest daily college newspapers. Founded in 1873, it counts among its many editors numerous Pulitzer Prize winners and two U.S. Presidents, John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• The Harvard Lampoon, an undergraduate humor organization and publication founded in 1876 and rival to the Harvard Crimson. The erratically produced magazine was originally modelled on the former British satirical periodical Punch, and has outlived it to become the world's second-oldest humor magazine (after the Yale Record). Conan O'Brien was president of the Lampoon for two of the four years he attended. The National Lampoon was founded as an offshoot in 1970 from the Harvard publication.

File:Lampoon.jpg

The Harvard Lampoon "castle" with its characteristic rooftop ibis and its purple and yellow door

• The Harvard Glee Club, the oldest college choir in the country, and the Harvard University Choir, the oldest university-affiliated choir in the country, as well as the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, which is technically older than the New York Philharmonic, though it has only been a symphony orchestra for about half of its existence.
• The Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a theatrical society known for its burlesque musicals and annual "Man of the Year" and "Woman of the Year" ceremonies; past members include Alan Jay Lerner, Jack Lemmon, and J.P. Morgan.
• WHRB (95.3FM Cambridge), the campus radio station, run exclusively by Harvard students, and given space on the Harvard campus in the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dorm. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its classical, jazz, underground rock and blues programming, during finals period, WHRB goes into "Orgy" format, where the entire catalog of a certain band, record, or artist is played in sequence.
• The Harvard Advocate, the oldest college literary publication in the country. Past members include T. S. Eliot and Theodore Roosevelt.
• The Harvard Institute of Politics, a living memorial to John F. Kennedy that promotes public service among undergraduates.
• The Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), a 501c3 non-profit organization which serves as the umbrella organization for 78 public service programs at Harvard. PBHA has 1600 volunteers which serve over 10,000 people in the greater Boston area. Notable alums include Franklin Delano Roosevelt, David Souter, and John F. Kennedy.
• Harvard Model Congress, the nation's oldest and largest congressional simulation conference, provides thousands of high school students from across the U.S. and abroad with the opportunity to experience American government first-hand.

People associated with Harvard University

Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university. Since 1974, nineteen Nobel Prize winners and fifteen winners of the American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have served on the Harvard faculty.

For greater information, see Nobel Prize laureates by university affiliation.

• People associated with Harvard University
• Presidents of Harvard
• Notable non-graduate alumni of Harvard

Views of Harvard

In 1893, Baedeker's guidebook called Harvard "the oldest, richest, and most famous of American seats of learning." The first two facts remain true today; the third is also arguably true. As of 2006, Harvard was ranked first among world universities by The Times Higher Education Supplement and the Academic Ranking of World Universities. The 2007 U.S. News & World Report rankings place Harvard in second place among "National Universities."

Perhaps because of this prominence, Harvard is the target of a number of criticisms, some of them leveled at other research-based American universities. It has been accused of grade inflation, as have other colleges and universities. 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). In 2006 Dean Benedict Gross noted that "grade inflation continues to be a problem," and praised Princeton's new policy limiting A grades to 35 percent in most undergraduate classes and 55 percent for junior and senior independent work (the percentage of grades of A-minus or above for undergraduate courses after its adoption dropped to 40.9 in 2004-05). 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 virtually 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. Regardless, after media criticism, 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—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; they consider this to adversely affect the quality of education. The New York Times article also detailed that the problem was prevalent in other Ivy League schools.

In 2005, The Boston Globe reported obtaining a 21-page Harvard internal memorandum that expressed concern about undergraduate student satisfaction based on a 2002 Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) survey of 31 top universities. The Harvard internal memorandum noted that: "Harvard students are less satisfied with their undergraduate educations than the students at almost all of the other COFHE schools. Harvard student satisfaction compares even less favorably to satisfaction at our closest peer institutions." While the actual survey results as reported by the Globe are open to interpretation, the Harvard Crimson editorial board opined that "we believe the implications of this survey are significant, and the administration ought to make satisfying undergraduates a top priority for the near future." The Globe quoted Lawrence Buell, former Harvard Dean of Undergraduate Education, as saying "I think we have to concede that we are letting our students down."

The Globe presented COFHE survey results and quotes from Harvard students that suggest problems with faculty availability, quality of instruction, quality of advising, social life on campus, and sense of community dating back to at least 1994. The magazine section of the Harvard Crimson echoed similar academic and social criticisms. The Harvard Crimson quoted Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross as being aware of and committed to improving the issues raised by the COFHE survey. However, in the same article, Harvard Professor Harvey C. Mansfield expressed skepticism at the willingness of faculty to improve the undergraduate experience: "I think the administration has a commitment to improving Harvard, but I don't think the majority of the faculty does. They are the ones who are complacent and deserve most of the criticism."

Former Harvard President Larry Summers stated: "I think the single most important issue is faculty-student engagement, where there is too large a fraction of our teaching that takes place in sections taught by graduate students. Too much of it takes place in large lectures, where faculty members don't know students' names. And too little of it involves the kind of active learning experience, whether it's in a laboratory, a debate in a class, or whether it's a seminar dialogue, or whether it's joint work in an archives." [9].

Similar types of criticism have been directed at some other large research universities. In addition, some observers do not consider large class sizes in Core Curriculum courses to be an impediment to learning. Professor of Government Michael Sandel, who teaches a popular course called "Justice" with nearly 900 students has stated that "the large class size actually helps foster learning. So many students are reading the same texts and wrestling with the same moral dilemmas, the discussion continues outside the classroom." [10]

Harvard also generally has one of the highest alumni giving rates [11], sometimes considered a measure of alumni satisfaction.

The undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni and affirmative action policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate. Under new financial aid guidelines, parents in families with incomes of less than $60,000 will no longer be expected to contribute any money to the cost of attending Harvard for their children, including room and board. Families with incomes in the $60,000 to $80,000 range contribute an amount of only a few thousand dollars a year.

Harvard and its students have also been criticized for self-promotion in various forms. In "A Flood of Crimson Ink," Steinberger asserts that one reason Harvard receives much attention from the press is because "Harvard graduates are disproportionately represented in the upper echelons of American journalism."

In 2006, Time featured a cover story titled "Who Needs Harvard?", discussed how many students were happier in smaller, lesser-known colleges.

Further reading

• John T. Bethell, Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-674-37733-8
• John Trumpbour, ed., How Harvard Rules, Boston: South End Press, 1989, ISBN 0-89608-283-0
• Hoerr, John, We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard; Temple University Press, 1997, ISBN 1-56639-535-6

See also

• Harvard College
• Radcliffe College

External links

• Harvard University

• Maps and aerial photos

References

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