History of Harvard University
Encyclopedia
The History of Harvard tells the story of Harvard University
from 1636 to the present.
With some 17,000 Puritans migrating to New England by 1620, Harvard was founded by ministers who realized the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness." It was named for John Harvard, its first benefactor. It received its corporate charter in 1650 and became a university in 1780.
An early, anonymous description of the college, New England's First Fruits (1643) recalled:
When the college's first president Henry Dunster
abandoned Puritanism in favor of the Baptist
faith in 1653, he provoked a controversy that highlighted two distinct approaches to dealing with dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
. The colony's Puritan leaders, whose own religion was born of dissent from mainstream Church of England, generally worked for reconciliation with members who questioned matters of Puritan theology but responded much more harshly to outright rejection of Puritanism. Dunster's conflict with the colony's magistrates began when he failed to have his infant son baptized, believing, as a newly converted Baptist, that only adults should be baptized. Efforts to restore Dunster to Puritan orthodoxy failed, and his apostasy proved untenable to colony leaders who had entrusted him, in his job as Harvard's president, to uphold the colony's religious mission. Thus, he represented a threat to the stability of society. Dunster exiled himself in 1654 and moved to nearby Plymouth Colony
, where he died in 1658.
In 1692, the leading Puritan divine Increase Mather
became president of Harvard. One of his acts was replacing pagan classics with books by Christian authors in ethics classes, and maintaining a high standard of discipline. The Harvard "Lawes" of 1642 and the "Harvard College Laws of 1700" testify to its original high level of discipline. Students were required to observe rules of pious decorum inconceivable in the 19th century, and ultimately to prove their fitness for the bachelor's degree by showing that they could 'read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically.'
During Harvard's early years the town of Cambridge maintained order on campus and provided economic support; the local Puritan
minister had direct oversight of Harvard and ensured the orthodoxy of the its leadership. By 1700 Harvard was strong enough to regulate and discipline its own people, and to a large extent the direction in which support and assistance was reversed, Harvard now providing financial support for local economic expansion, improvements to public health, and construction of local roads, meetinghouses
, schools.
The early motto of Harvard was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church." In the early classes half the graduates became ministers. By the 1760s the proportion was down to 15%. Ten out of the first twelve presidents were also ministers. Systematic theological instruction was inaugurated in 1721 and by 1827 Harvard became a nucleus of theological teaching in New England.
When Mather stepped down as president in 1701 it marked the beginning of a long term struggle between orthodoxy and liberalism. Harvard's first secular president was John Leverett, who began his term in 1708. Leverett left the curriculum largely intact and sought to keep the College independent of the overwhelming influence of any single sect.
During the American Revolution, Loyalist
alumni were outnumbered seven to one by Patriots—seven alumni died in the fighting.
(Until the Blizzard of 1978
the Revolution marked the only instance that—in the judgment of Harvard officials—external events justified cancellation of classes.)
in 1805 resulted in the secularization of the American college. By 1850 Harvard was the "Unitarian Vatican." The "liberals" (Unitarians) allied themselves with high Federalists and began to create a set of private societies and institutions meant to shore up their cultural and political authority, a movement that prefigured the emergence of the Boston Brahmin class. On the other hand, the theological conservatives used print media to argue for the maintenance of open debate and democratic governance through a diverse public sphere, seeing the liberals' movement as an attempt to create a cultural oligarchy in opposition to Congregationalist tradition and republican political principles.
were acclaimed both in New York and on his campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' 'participation in the Divine Nature' and the possibility of understanding 'intellectual existences.' Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that one can grasp the 'divine plan' in all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism
derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid
and Dugald Stewart
, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time. The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to 'soar with Plato' probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John Norris, and, in a Romantic vein, Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the 'official philosophy' of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school.
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 élite — the so-called Boston Brahmin
class — and continued to be so well into the 20th century.
and Ralph Waldo Emerson
, these convictions were focused on the dignity and worth of human nature, the right and ability of each person to perceive truth, and the indwelling God in each person.
. The Law School
vied with Yale Law for preeminence, while the Business School
combined a large-scale research program with a special appeal to entrepreneurs rather than accountants. The different schools maintain their separate endowments, which are very large in the case of the College/Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Business, Law and Medical Schools, but quite modest for the Divinity and Education schools.
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 1920s Edward Harkness
, (1874–1940), a Yale man with oil wealth, was ignored by his alma mater and so gave $12,000,000 to Harvard to establish a house system like that of Oxford University. Yale later took his money and set up a similar system.
In addition to the usual department, specialized research centers proliferated, especially to enable interdisciplinary research projects that could not be handled at the department level. The departments, however, kept jealous control of the awarding of tenure; typically tenured professorships went to outsiders, and not as promotions to assistant professors. Older research centers include the East Asian Research Center, the Center for International Affairs, the Center for Eastern Studies, the Russian Research Center, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Joint Center for Urban Studies (with MIT). The Centers raised their own money, sometimes from endowments but most often from federal and foundation grants, making them increasingly independent entities.
During World War II
, Harvard was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program
which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
(president, 1933–1953) pledged to reinvigorate creative scholarship at Harvard and reestablish its preeminence among research institutions. Viewing higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, Conant decided that Harvard's undergraduate curriculum needed to be revised so as to place more emphasis on general education. He called on the faculty make a definitive statement about what general education ought to be, at the secondary as well as the college level. The resulting Report, published in 1945, was one of the most influential manifestos in the history of American education in the 20th century.
In the decades immediately after 1945 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
, Choate Rosemary Hall
and Milton Academy
, increasing numbers of international, minority, and working-class students had, by the late 1960s, altered the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of the college.
Not just undergraduates but the faculty became more diverse, especially in its willingness to hire Jews, Catholics and foreign scholars. The History Department was among the first to hire Jews and how it contributed to the university trend toward professionalism from 1920 to 1950. Oscar Handlin
became one of the most influential professors, training hundreds of graduate schools and later serving as head of the University Library.
During the 20th 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 1999, Radcliffe College
, founded in 1879 as the "Harvard Annex for Women", merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
.
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 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.
They include:
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
from 1636 to the present.
Colonial
With some 17,000 Puritans migrating to New England by 1620, Harvard was founded by ministers who realized the need for training clergy for the new commonwealth, a "church in the wilderness." It was named for John Harvard, its first benefactor. It received its corporate charter in 1650 and became a university in 1780.
An early, anonymous description of the college, New England's First Fruits (1643) recalled:
- "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we ... rear'd convenient places for God's worship ... dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust ... it pleased God to stir up the heart of one Mr. Harvard, a godly gentleman and a lover of learning ... to give the one half of his estate ... towards the erecting of a college and all his Library."
When the college's first president Henry Dunster
Henry Dunster
Henry Dunster was an Anglo-American Puritan clergyman and the first president of Harvard College...
abandoned Puritanism in favor of the Baptist
Baptist
Baptists comprise a group of Christian denominations and churches that subscribe to a doctrine that baptism should be performed only for professing believers , and that it must be done by immersion...
faith in 1653, he provoked a controversy that highlighted two distinct approaches to dealing with dissent in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Massachusetts Bay Colony was an English settlement on the east coast of North America in the 17th century, in New England, situated around the present-day cities of Salem and Boston. The territory administered by the colony included much of present-day central New England, including portions...
. The colony's Puritan leaders, whose own religion was born of dissent from mainstream Church of England, generally worked for reconciliation with members who questioned matters of Puritan theology but responded much more harshly to outright rejection of Puritanism. Dunster's conflict with the colony's magistrates began when he failed to have his infant son baptized, believing, as a newly converted Baptist, that only adults should be baptized. Efforts to restore Dunster to Puritan orthodoxy failed, and his apostasy proved untenable to colony leaders who had entrusted him, in his job as Harvard's president, to uphold the colony's religious mission. Thus, he represented a threat to the stability of society. Dunster exiled himself in 1654 and moved to nearby Plymouth Colony
Plymouth Colony
Plymouth Colony was an English colonial venture in North America from 1620 to 1691. The first settlement of the Plymouth Colony was at New Plymouth, a location previously surveyed and named by Captain John Smith. The settlement, which served as the capital of the colony, is today the modern town...
, where he died in 1658.
In 1692, the leading Puritan divine Increase Mather
Increase Mather
Increase Mather was a major figure in the early history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay . He was a Puritan minister who was involved with the government of the colony, the administration of Harvard College, and most notoriously, the Salem witch trials...
became president of Harvard. One of his acts was replacing pagan classics with books by Christian authors in ethics classes, and maintaining a high standard of discipline. The Harvard "Lawes" of 1642 and the "Harvard College Laws of 1700" testify to its original high level of discipline. Students were required to observe rules of pious decorum inconceivable in the 19th century, and ultimately to prove their fitness for the bachelor's degree by showing that they could 'read the original of the Old and New Testament into the Latin tongue, and resolve them logically.'
During Harvard's early years the town of Cambridge maintained order on campus and provided economic support; the local Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
minister had direct oversight of Harvard and ensured the orthodoxy of the its leadership. By 1700 Harvard was strong enough to regulate and discipline its own people, and to a large extent the direction in which support and assistance was reversed, Harvard now providing financial support for local economic expansion, improvements to public health, and construction of local roads, meetinghouses
Colonial meeting house
In colonial New England, there was little distinction between faith and community. Each community built a meeting house, usually but not always through taxation, and these were used for both religious worship and town business. They were the central focus of the community, and were an important...
, schools.
The early motto of Harvard was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae, meaning "Truth for Christ and the Church." In the early classes half the graduates became ministers. By the 1760s the proportion was down to 15%. Ten out of the first twelve presidents were also ministers. Systematic theological instruction was inaugurated in 1721 and by 1827 Harvard became a nucleus of theological teaching in New England.
When Mather stepped down as president in 1701 it marked the beginning of a long term struggle between orthodoxy and liberalism. Harvard's first secular president was John Leverett, who began his term in 1708. Leverett left the curriculum largely intact and sought to keep the College independent of the overwhelming influence of any single sect.
During the American Revolution, Loyalist
Loyalist (American Revolution)
Loyalists were American colonists who remained loyal to the Kingdom of Great Britain during the American Revolutionary War. At the time they were often called Tories, Royalists, or King's Men. They were opposed by the Patriots, those who supported the revolution...
alumni were outnumbered seven to one by Patriots—seven alumni died in the fighting.
(Until the Blizzard of 1978
Blizzard of 1978
Two major blizzards occurred in the United States in the year 1978:*The Great Blizzard of 1978 which struck parts of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes on January 25-27...
the Revolution marked the only instance that—in the judgment of Harvard officials—external events justified cancellation of classes.)
Unitarians
The takeover of Harvard by the UnitariansUnitarianism
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement, named for its understanding of God as one person, in direct contrast to Trinitarianism which defines God as three persons coexisting consubstantially as one in being....
in 1805 resulted in the secularization of the American college. By 1850 Harvard was the "Unitarian Vatican." The "liberals" (Unitarians) allied themselves with high Federalists and began to create a set of private societies and institutions meant to shore up their cultural and political authority, a movement that prefigured the emergence of the Boston Brahmin class. On the other hand, the theological conservatives used print media to argue for the maintenance of open debate and democratic governance through a diverse public sphere, seeing the liberals' movement as an attempt to create a cultural oligarchy in opposition to Congregationalist tradition and republican political principles.
Science
In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis AgassizLouis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
were acclaimed both in New York and on his campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' 'participation in the Divine Nature' and the possibility of understanding 'intellectual existences.' Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that one can grasp the 'divine plan' in all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism
Common Sense Realism
Common Sense Realism or Scottish Common Sense Realism is a school of philosophy that originated in the ideas of Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson and Dugald Stewart during the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment.-Teachings:...
derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid
The Reverend Thomas Reid FRSE , was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher, and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment...
and Dugald Stewart
Dugald Stewart
Dugald Stewart was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher and mathematician. His father, Matthew Stewart , was professor of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh .-Life and works:...
, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time. The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to 'soar with Plato' probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John Norris, and, in a Romantic vein, Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the 'official philosophy' of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school.
Élitism
Between 1830 and 1870 Harvard became "privatized". While the Federalists controlled state government, Harvard had prospered, but the 1824 defeat of the federalist party in Massachusetts allowed the renascent Democratic-RepublicansDemocratic-Republican Party (United States)
The Democratic-Republican Party or Republican Party was an American political party founded in the early 1790s by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Political scientists use the former name, while historians prefer the latter one; contemporaries generally called the party the "Republicans", along...
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.
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
or Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
in regard to bigotry against Jews and other ethnic minorities. In 1870, one year into Eliot's term, Richard Theodore Greener
Richard Theodore Greener
Richard Theodore Greener was the first African-American graduate of Harvard College and dean of the Howard University School of Law....
became the first African-American to graduate from Harvard College. Seven years later, Louis Brandeis
Louis Brandeis
Louis Dembitz Brandeis ; November 13, 1856 – October 5, 1941) was an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.He was born in Louisville, Kentucky, to Jewish immigrant parents who raised him in a secular mode...
, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
, graduated from Harvard Law School.
Nevertheless, Harvard became the bastion of a distinctly Protestant élite — the so-called Boston Brahmin
Boston Brahmin
Boston Brahmins are wealthy Yankee families characterized by a highly discreet and inconspicuous life style. Based in and around Boston, they form an integral part of the historic core of the East Coast establishment...
class — and continued to be so well into the 20th century.
Eliot
Charles W. Eliot, president 1869-1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. While Eliot was the most crucial figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education, but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions. Derived from William Ellery ChanningWilliam Ellery Channing
Dr. William Ellery Channing was the foremost Unitarian preacher in the United States in the early nineteenth century and, along with Andrews Norton, one of Unitarianism's leading theologians. He was known for his articulate and impassioned sermons and public speeches, and as a prominent thinker...
and Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...
, these convictions were focused on the dignity and worth of human nature, the right and ability of each person to perceive truth, and the indwelling God in each person.
Sports
Football, originally organized by students as an extracurricular activity, was banned twice by the university for being a brutal and dangerous sport. However, by the 1880s, football became a dominant force at the college as the alumni became more involved in the sport. In 1882, the faculty formed a three-member athletic committee to oversee all intercollegiate athletics, but, due to increasing student and alumni pressure, the committee was expanded in 1885 to include three student and three alumni members. The alumni's role in the rise and commercialization of football, the leading moneymaker for athletics by the 1880s, was evident in the fundraising for the first steel-reinforced concrete stadium. The class of 1879 donated $100,000 - nearly one-third of the cost - to the construction of the 35,000-seat stadium, which was completed in 1903, with the remainder to be collected from future ticket sales.20th century
During the 20th century, Harvard's international reputation for scholarship 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. It built the largest and finest academic library in the world, and built up the labs and clinics needed to establish the reputation of its science departments and the Medical SchoolHarvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School is the graduate medical school of Harvard University. It is located in the Longwood Medical Area of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts....
. The Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
vied with Yale Law for preeminence, while the Business School
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...
combined a large-scale research program with a special appeal to entrepreneurs rather than accountants. The different schools maintain their separate endowments, which are very large in the case of the College/Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Business, Law and Medical Schools, but quite modest for the Divinity and Education schools.
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...
, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. In the 1920s Edward Harkness
Edward Harkness
Edward Stephen Harkness was an American philanthropist. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, one of four sons to Stephen V. Harkness, a harness-maker who invested in the forerunner of Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller's oil company. Harkness inherited a fortune from his father...
, (1874–1940), a Yale man with oil wealth, was ignored by his alma mater and so gave $12,000,000 to Harvard to establish a house system like that of Oxford University. Yale later took his money and set up a similar system.
In addition to the usual department, specialized research centers proliferated, especially to enable interdisciplinary research projects that could not be handled at the department level. The departments, however, kept jealous control of the awarding of tenure; typically tenured professorships went to outsiders, and not as promotions to assistant professors. Older research centers include the East Asian Research Center, the Center for International Affairs, the Center for Eastern Studies, the Russian Research Center, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and the Joint Center for Urban Studies (with MIT). The Centers raised their own money, sometimes from endowments but most often from federal and foundation grants, making them increasingly independent entities.
During World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Harvard was one of 131 colleges and universities nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program
V-12 Navy College Training Program
The V-12 Navy College Training Program was designed to supplement the force of commissioned officers in the United States Navy during World War II...
which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
Meritocracy
James Bryant ConantJames Bryant Conant
James Bryant Conant was a chemist, educational administrator, and government official. As thePresident of Harvard University he reformed it as a research institution.-Biography :...
(president, 1933–1953) pledged to reinvigorate creative scholarship at Harvard and reestablish its preeminence among research institutions. Viewing higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, Conant decided that Harvard's undergraduate curriculum needed to be revised so as to place more emphasis on general education. He called on the faculty make a definitive statement about what general education ought to be, at the secondary as well as the college level. The resulting Report, published in 1945, was one of the most influential manifestos in the history of American education in the 20th century.
In the decades immediately after 1945 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
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...
, Hotchkiss
Hotchkiss School
The Hotchkiss School is an independent, coeducational American college preparatory boarding school located in Lakeville, Connecticut. Founded in 1891, the school enrolls students in grades 9 through 12 and a small number of postgraduates...
, Choate Rosemary Hall
Choate Rosemary Hall
Choate Rosemary Hall is a private, college-preparatory, coeducational boarding school located in Wallingford, Connecticut...
and Milton Academy
Milton Academy
Milton Academy is a coeducational, independent preparatory, boarding and day school in Milton, Massachusetts consisting of a grade 9–12 Upper School and a grade K–8 Lower School. Boarding is offered starting in 9th grade...
, increasing numbers of international, minority, and working-class students had, by the late 1960s, altered the ethnic and socio-economic makeup of the college.
Not just undergraduates but the faculty became more diverse, especially in its willingness to hire Jews, Catholics and foreign scholars. The History Department was among the first to hire Jews and how it contributed to the university trend toward professionalism from 1920 to 1950. Oscar Handlin
Oscar Handlin
Oscar Handlin was an American historian. As a professor of history at Harvard University for over 50 years, he directed 80 PhD dissertations and helped promote social and ethnic history...
became one of the most influential professors, training hundreds of graduate schools and later serving as head of the University Library.
During the 20th 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
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...
, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States.
Women
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
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...
, founded in 1879 as the "Harvard Annex for Women", merged formally with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard is an educational institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the semiautonomous components of Harvard University. It is heir to the name and buildings of Radcliffe College, but unlike that historical institution, its focus is directed...
.
Minorities
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 20th 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 25%. President A. Lawrence Lowell tried to impose a 12% quota on Jews; the faculty rejected it but he managed to cut the numbers in half anyway. By the end of World War II the quotas and most of the latent anti-semitism had faded away.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 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
Lawrence Summers
Lawrence Henry Summers is an American economist. He served as the 71st United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama until November 2010.Summers is the...
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.
Expansion
Over the years, Harvard has grown to include a number of major schools.They include:
- Arts and Sciences
- Engineering and Applied Sciences
- Harvard Extension SchoolHarvard Extension SchoolHarvard University Extension School, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is one of the thirteen degree-granting schools of Harvard University and is part of the Division of Continuing Education.-Origins:...
- Harvard Medical School
- Harvard School of Dental Medicine
- Harvard Business SchoolHarvard Business SchoolHarvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...
(Founded in 1908, HBS was originally located in Harvard Yard. The present campus, with its stately Georgian buildings following the gentle curve on the Boston side of the Charles River, was dedicated in June 1927.) - Graduate School of Design
- Harvard Divinity SchoolHarvard Divinity SchoolHarvard Divinity School is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States. The School's mission is to train and educate its students either in the academic study of religion, or for the practice of a religious ministry or other public...
- Graduate School of Education
- John F. Kennedy School of Government
- Harvard Law SchoolHarvard Law SchoolHarvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
- Radcliffe Institute for Advanced StudyRadcliffe Institute for Advanced StudyThe Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard is an educational institution in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one of the semiautonomous components of Harvard University. It is heir to the name and buildings of Radcliffe College, but unlike that historical institution, its focus is directed...
- Harvard School of Public Health
Further reading
- Abelmann, Walter H., ed. The Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology: The First 25 Years, 1970-1995 (2004). 346 pp.
- Bailyn, Bernard, et al. Glimpses of the Harvard Past (1986). 149 pp.
- Beecher, Henry K. and Altschule, Mark D. Medicine at Harvard: The First 300 Years (1977). 569 pp.
- Bentinck-Smith, William, ed. The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries (2d ed.1982). 499 pp.
- Bentinck-Smith, William. Building a Great Library: The Coolidge Years at Harvard (1976). 218 pp.
- Bethell, John T.; Hunt, Richard M.; and Shenton, Robert. Harvard A to Z (2004). 396 pp. excerpt and text search
- Bethell, John T. Harvard Observed: An Illustrated History of the University in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-674-37733-8
- Bunting, Bainbridge. Harvard: An Architectural History (1985). 350 pp.
- Carpenter, Kenneth E. The First 350 Years of the Harvard University Library: Description of an Exhibition (1986). 216 pp.
- Cruikshank, Jeffrey L. A Delicate Experiment: The Harvard Business School. 1908-1945 (1987). 303 pp.
- Cuno, James et al. Harvard's Art Museums: 100 Years of Collecting (1996). 364 pp.
- Elliott, Clark A. and Rossiter, Margaret W., eds. Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives (1992). 380 pp.
- Hall, Max. Harvard University Press: A History (1986). 257 pp.
- Harvard U. Education, Bricks and Mortar: Harvard Buildings and Their Contribution to the Advancement of Learning (1949) online edition
- Hawkins, Hugh. Between Harvard and America: The Educational Leadership of Charles W. Eliot (1972). 404 pp.
- Hay, Ida. Science in the Pleasure Ground: A History of the Arnold Arboretum (1995). 349 pp.
- Hoerr, John, We Can't Eat Prestige: The Women Who Organized Harvard; Temple University PressTemple University PressTemple University Press is a university press publishing house that is part of Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The press was founded in 1969....
, 1997, ISBN 1-56639-535-6 - Howells, Dorothy Elia. A Century to Celebrate: Radcliffe College, 1879-1979 (1978). 152 pp.
- James, Henry. Charles W. Eliot: President of Harvard University, 1869-1909 (1930) online edition
- Keller, Morton, and Phyllis Keller. Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America's University (2001), major history covers 1933 to 2002 online edition
- King, MosesMoses KingMoses King , editor and publisher, published numerous guidebooks to travel destinations in the United States, including Boston, Massachusetts, New York City, and Springfield, Massachusetts.- Brief biography :...
, Harvard and its surroundings, Cambridge, Massachusetts : Moses King, 1884 - Kuklick, Bruce. The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (1977). 674 pp.
- LaPiana, William P. Logic and Experience: The Origin of Modern American Legal Education, (1994). 254 pp. on reforms by Christopher Columbus LangdellChristopher Columbus LangdellChristopher Columbus Langdell , American jurist, was born in the town of New Boston, New Hampshire, of English and Scots-Irish ancestry....
, at he law school - Lawless, Greg. The Harvard Crimson Anthology: 100 Years at Harvard (1980).
- Lewis, Harry R.Harry R. LewisHarry Roy Lewis is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Computer Science at Harvard University. He is also a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard...
Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot EducationExcellence Without a SoulExcellence Without a Soul is a book by Harry R. Lewis, the former Dean of Harvard College, that examines the state of America's universities and colleges with particular reference to Harvard...
(2006) ISBN 1586483935 - Lipset, Seymour Martin and Riesman, David. Education and Politics at Harvard (1975). 440 pp.
- Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636-1936 (1986) 512pp; excerpt and text search
- Powell, Arthur G. The Uncertain Profession: Harvard and the Search for Educational Authority (1980). 341 pp.
- Reid, Robert. Year One: An Intimate Look inside Harvard Business School (1994). 331 pp.
- Rosenblatt, Roger. Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (1997). 234 pp. student unrest
- Rosovsky, Nitza. The Jewish Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1986). 108 pp.
- Seligman, Joel. The High Citadel: The Influence of Harvard Law School (1978). 262 pp.
- Shipton, Clifford K. Sibley's Harvard Graduates: Biographical Sketches of Those Who Attended Harvard College. (1999) 19 vol to the class of 1774
- Sollors, Werner; Titcomb, Caldwell; and Underwood, Thomas A., eds. Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (1993). 548 pp.
- Story, R. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class,1800-1870, Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University PressWesleyan University PressWesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The Press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist...
, 1981 - Townsend, Kim. Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (1996). 318 pp.
- Trumpbour, John, ed., How Harvard Rules. Reason in the Service of Empire, Boston: South End Press, 1989, ISBN 0-89608-283-0
- Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, ed. Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History (2004). 337 pp.
- Whitehead, John S. The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, 1776-1876 (1973). 262 pp.
- Winsor, Mary P. Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (1991). 324 pp.
- Wright, Conrad Edick. Revolutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (2005). 298 pp.