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Harvard University

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Alternate uses: Harvard (disambiguation)
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Memorial Hall, Harvard University



Harvard University is a full private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Ivy League. Harvard College, its undergraduate division, was founded on September 8 1636 by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making Harvard the oldest post-secondary school in the United States. Originally called simply the New College, it was renamed on March 13 1639, after its first principal donor, John Harvard. Harvard was first referred to as a "university" rather than a "college" by the new Massachusetts constitution of 1780.

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Annenberg Hall - Freshman Dining Hall
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Memorial Hall Contains Annenberg Hall, Sanders Theatre, and Loker Commons


About Harvard

Considered by many to be the world's most prestigious universities, Harvard also has the largest endowment of any private university in the world, amounting to $19.3 billion as of 2003 [1]. A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. Harvard is among the most selective universities in the United States: its overall undergraduate acceptance rate is around 9%, and its graduate schools are also extremely competitive. Harvard recently moved from a unrestricted early action policy (where you can apply early action to Harvard in addition to other schools) to a single-choice early action policy (where you can only apply early only to a single school), aligning itself with the policies of Yale and Stanford, which both moved from a binding single-choice early decision policy.

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North Harvard Yard - Thayer and Hollis Halls

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. This was started in the term of Harvard President Charles William Eliot.

Gore Hall, the former Library (no longer standing)

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.

Memorial Church - From Canaday Yard

The Harvard University Library System, centered around the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial 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 nineteenth-century French art), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (central and northern European art), and 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.


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Science Center


Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson; the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine (or, as the Crimson describes it, "a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine"); the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines; and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual drag musical and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed of talented musical undergraduates, was founded in 1808 and is the oldest continuously-performing orchestra in the United States. Let's Go Travel Guides, a leading travel guide company worldwide, is run solely by Harvard students, who research and edit improved versions of the books every summer.

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Weld Hall, a freshman residence dormitory in Harvard Yard

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 label/artist is played in sequence.

While the Harvard football team was one of the best in the beginning days of the sport, in more recent times 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, Groton School, St. Paul's School, Milton Academy, and Phillips Academy, Andover, though most undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and 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 world-famous departments, ranked the top in their respective fields. The Natural Sciences, including Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Molecular and Cellular Biology, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Physics and Mathematics, are consistently ranked first in the world. Harvard's funding from the National Institutes of Health annually top $900 million, making it by far the largest of NIH's beneficiaries. The Social Sciences, from Economics to Political Science, are also world-renowned for the expertise of their faculty and the research. There are also some lesser known departments which 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 five million dollar Judaica library which has the ability to identify and categorize books by ink type, font type, paper thickness, pagination style, binding method and numerous other categorizations.

Harvard Stadium

Campus

The main campus is located next to Harvard Square in central Cambridge, approximately two miles from the MIT campus. Virtually all undergraduates live on campus. First-year students live in dormitories in or near Harvard Yard. Upperclass students live in twelve residential Houses, which serve as administrative units of the College as well as dormitories.

Nine of the Houses are situated along or close to the northern banks of the Charles River. These are:

The remainder of the houses are located in the Radcliffe Quadrangle, half a mile northeast of Harvard Yard, and housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard. These are:

  • Cabot House, previously called South House, renamed in 1983 for Harvard donors Thomas Dudley Cabot and Virginia Cabot
  • Currier House, named for Radcliffe alumna Audrey Bruce Currier
  • Pforzheimer House, previously called North House, renamed in 1995 for Harvard donors Carl and Carol Pforzheimer

There is a thirteenth house, Dudley House, which is the House that some graduate students and some off-campus undergraduates are affiliated with. It is named after Thomas Dudley, who signed the charter of Harvard College when he was Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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:

Famous alumni

Main article: Harvard University people

See also

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