About Harvard University
Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.
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, founded in 1894 as an outgrowth of the "Harvard Annex" for women, merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes, making it the largest academic library in the world, and the fourth among the five "mega-libraries" of the world (after the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the French Bibliothèque Nationale, but ahead of the New York Public Library). Harvard has 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).
A faculty of about 2,400 professors serves about 6,700 undergraduate and 12,400 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 (beginning a tradition), 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 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.
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 of a duller, darker hue, resembling that of oxblood.
Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson and its rival the Harvard Lampoon, a noted 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 official choir of the Harvard 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 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. 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, neighbors on the Charles River."
Harvard has produced many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Pierre Elliot Trudeau; 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, ex-Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, author and screenwriter Jeremy Leven, 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, writer Louis Menand, economists Gregory Mankiw and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, and scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.
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