Harvard University
Harvard University (in English, Harvard University), commonly known as Harvard, is a private university which is located on the east coast of the United States, in the city of Cambridge, state of Massachusetts. It was founded in 1636 and is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. If in its beginnings it only had nine students, today it has more than 371,000 living alumni, of whom 59,000 reside outside the United States, and it is one of the most influential universities in the world. It also has the largest university budget in the world: 39.2 billion dollars in 2018. Although in terms of endowment per student, it ranks third in the United States, behind Princeton and Yale.
It is ranked number one in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, in the HEEACT World University Rankings, and in the U.S. News & WorldReport. In addition, it operates several museums of art, culture and science. Its library is the world's largest private and academic library system, comprising 79 individual libraries with more than 20 million volumes.
Geographic location
The 85-hectare main campus is centered in Harvard Yard in Cambridge, a city of approximately 100,000 people adjoining Boston to the south.
Cambridge is about 300 kilometers from the Canadian border. John Harvard was the benefactor of Harvard University which bears his last name located in Massachusetts, Boston.
As you cross the Charles River from Cambridge, you enter the city of Boston, whose Allston neighborhood, populated mainly by Harvard undergraduates, is home to the Business School and athletic and sports facilities, including Harvard Stadium.
Farther still, into the city of Boston about two miles to the southeast, are located the School of Medicine, Dentistry and Public Health, in the Longwood medical area.
History
Harvard University was founded in 1636. Its original name was New College or The College at New Town and it was created without a single professor, with a single student, and not even with a single building.
In 1639, less than three years after its founding, it changed its name to Harvard College, as a token of gratitude to its benefactor John Harvard, a young clergyman who, upon his death, some months earlier, he had donated to the newly created institution a precious legacy: his library of 400 volumes and half of his considerable personal estate, a sum of £780.
Later, the institution would change its name again to start being called Harvard University. This new and definitive name appeared for the first time in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, at the height of the revolutionary era.
Evolution of Harvard University
The first cloister of the University, formed by religious congregations and Unitarian Christians, had an eminently religious character.
Later, during the 18th century, the academic curriculum and student body gradually became secularized.
By the 19th century Harvard had already become the central cultural establishment of Boston's elites.
After the American Civil War, and for forty years, between 1869 and 1909, the University was chaired by Charles William Eliot, who radically transformed the educational institution model that had prevailed until then at Harvard, turning it into a modern research center. The reform included elective courses, small classes, and the entry into force of exams. This new model influenced the educational system of the United States, both in university education and in secondary education. Eliot was also the instigator of the publication of the now famous Harvard Classics, a collection of great books on multiple disciplines (published beginning in 1909), which offered a university education "in fifteen minutes." of reading per day”. During his long and influential presidency, Eliot became so widely recognized as a public figure that after his death in 1926, his name and that of Harvard became universally synonymous with aspiration to higher learning.
Harvard was a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.
Harvard in the 20th century
A. Lawrence Lowell, who succeeded Eliot, further reshaped the undergraduate curriculum. He also undertook an expansive land acquisition campaign to expand Harvard's physical plant and student housing system.
During the Great Depression and World War II the University was led by James Bryant Conant, who after the war initiated a further reform of the curriculum. But perhaps Conant's most important reform was the one that affected the admissions system, which was to profoundly transform Harvard, which until then was synonymous with exclusivity for political and economic elites: almost all students who were admitted to Harvard they had a high socioeconomic status within the social group that we now call “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants).
Conant was anti-Semitic; before the start of World War II, he had expressed sympathy for Hitler's racist government in Germany. However, he viewed high-quality higher education not so much as a right of the children of wealthy families, but rather as a means to provide opportunities for young people with talent and ability. Thus he devised programs to identify, support, and recruit young people with talent and ability, and between 1945 and 1960 he implemented admissions policies that allowed public high school students to enter Harvard. The change came at the expense of the elite private elementary and secondary schools, which until then were virtually the only ones that had been contributing students to Harvard. The new admissions policy also opened the doors to a greater number of Jews and Catholics. Although still few blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
Since then, the situation has continued to progress regarding the socioeconomic status and religious diversity of students who are admitted to Harvard, as well as regarding the racial component. In 2017, a higher proportion of non-white students was reached for the first time in the first year. 50.8% of the total was made up of Black (15%), Ibero-American (12%), Asian (23%, mainly Mongoloid, and also to a lesser extent Caucasoid) students, as well as small representations of Australoid, native from North America, etc.
Regarding teaching by gender, the evolution has also been progressive. As early as the 19th century some Harvard faculties reluctantly accepted a small number of women into their classrooms. But in 1945, the Faculty of Medicine began to provide formally regulated university education to women. Harvard College, Harvard's undergraduate training center, would become coeducational from 1977 after Harvard's association with Radcliffe College, a sister educational institution for women ("sister") that had become founded one hundred and twenty years ago.
Recently, in 1999, Radcliffe College was fully merged with Harvard University, becoming the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Kenneth Roth, leader for 29 years of the US human rights NGO Human Rights Watch, was denied a senior research position at the Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights in 2022 for his criticism of the State of Israel. Many of the Kennedy School's major donors are strong supporters of the State of Israel.
Faculties and Schools
Harvard has twelve colleges and schools that teach official academic courses and issue degrees. The university also has the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which functions as a separate teaching center from the schools and colleges.
The following list lists the faculties and schools in chronological order from oldest to youngest. The first teaching unit was founded almost four hundred years ago, in 1636. The last one barely a decade and a half ago, in 2007.
- Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
- Includes Harvard College the oldest teaching unit in Harvard, as well as the Harvard Division of Continuing Education, founded in the centuryXX.
- Harvard Medical School
- Harvard Divinity School
- Harvard Law School
- Harvard School of Dental Medicine
- Harvard Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
- Harvard Business School
- Harvard Graduate School of Design
- Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Harvard Kennedy School
- Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard's positioning worldwide
Since its inception, the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has ranked Harvard every year as the best university in the world.
During the time when QS and Times Higher Education were jointly published as THE-QS World University Rankings, in 2004-2009, Harvard was ranked first every year.
The THE World Reputation Rankings have consecutively ranked Harvard as the most important institution among the “six super-brands” of universities in the world. The other five are Berkeley, Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, and Stanford.
Harvard is ranked the best university in the world according to the following university rankings:
- Academic classification of THE universities.
- Global classification of universities according to HEEACT.
- Academic Ranking of World Universities. In front of Stanford and Berkeley.
- Ranking Cybermetry Laboratory of the Higher Scientific Research Council. In front of MIT, Stanford and Berkeley.
Funding
Harvard, as a large research university with a high percentage of residential students, requires a high level of funding. Harvard's endowment capital in 2018 was $39.2 billion, the highest in the world.
This massive social capital comes from a number of sources. A large part is made up of gifts and testamentary bequests from alumni, usually assets or amounts of at least six figures. These alumni follow the example of the first and most famous of the University's benefactors: John Harvard.
But it also comes from national fundraising campaigns promoted by the University. In the last one, which spanned five years, between 2013 and 2018, Harvard raised nearly $10 billion.
A financial company of the University itself, the Harvard Management Company, Inc., is in charge of managing and investing the capital stock in various financial markets. Most of the expense budget is fed from the yield generated by these investments of the University, which in 2018 amounted to 5,000 million dollars.
Scholarship Program
In the mid-1940s, Harvard was an exclusive institution to which only the elites had access. American politics and economics.
Following the transformation suffered by the University between 1945 and 1960, Harvard began to include scholarship programs. Today these programs run into several hundred million dollars each year. In the 2016-2017 academic year, the amount that Harvard allocated to scholarships was 414 million dollars.
Currently (2018-2019 academic year) 20% of Harvard students come from families with incomes below $65,000 per year. These students, both American and international, receive scholarships that cover 100% of the cost of their study programs including room, board and airfare.
Families whose income is up to $150,000 per year are asked to pay between 0 and 10% of the total cost. Families earning more income are asked for a higher contribution.
70% of Harvard students receive some form of financial aid. More than 50% of them receive a scholarship. These scholarships average more than $53,000 annually. Scholarship students pay an average of $12,000 annually.
The result of this scholarship program is that for 90% of American families, studying at Harvard today is cheaper than studying at any public university in the United States.
Scholarship students contribute a few hours of work a week and during the summer to pay for their studies at the University. Jobs as lab assistant, library assistant, research assistant, etc.
Admission
Application intake is the second lowest in the United States: for the 2021 course, of the approximately 40,000 applications, only 5.2% have been accepted. The selection is made based on three general criteria, aimed at recruiting exceptional students:
- Academic performance, curriculum skills.
- Activities, talents and extracurricular interests, including community service.
- Personality traits of the applicant.
The University reserves a quota of places for children of alumni, which arouses criticism from its detractors, who accuse the University of favoring wealthy white students in this way.
The proportion of international students admitted is remarkable, around 23% of the total, including those who are studying master's degrees and postgraduate training in general. More than half of international students, 56%, come from Commonwealth countries, mainly from the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa.
Students residing in the United States who lack proper documentation and who are admitted to Harvard are considered international students by this University.
Library
The Library contains more than 20 million volumes, making it the largest academic library in the United States, and fourth among the world's five "mega-libraries" (after the Library of Congress, the Library British, and the National Library of France, and ahead of the New York Public Library).
Sports
The Harvard Crimson is the team that represents the University in university competitions, organized by the NCAA, where it is part of the Ivy League Conference.
The team has Harvard Stadium, a stadium for American football that seats 30,898, the Lavietes Pavilion or the basketball stadium that seats 2,195, and the Bright Hockey Center, a sports hall for ice that holds 2850 spectators. The University's mascot is named John Harvard. It is noteworthy that the University does not offer sports scholarships.
Harvard's main sports rivals are Yale and Cornell.
The Harvard Crimson have official teams in 21 different sports. They include a total of 41 official teams, more than any other American university: 20 men's teams and 21 women's teams.
In addition, Harvard has other sports clubs, such as Harvard Shotokan Karate, etc.
Notable Alumni
Former students/alumni include:
- 161 Nobel Prizes.
- 18 Fields Medal winners.
- 14 Turing Prize winners.
- 359 Rhodes fellows and 242 Marshall fellows.
- 10 Academy Awards.
- 48 Pulitzer Awards.
- 108 Olympic medals (46 gold, 41 silver and 21 bronze).
- 8 presidents of the United States.
- 30 foreign heads of State.
Harvard's impact on popular culture
The perception of the old Harvard as a center reserved for the political and economic elites of the United States, as well as the perception of the new, more open and supportive Harvard of today, have been recurring literary and film motifs.
As the world's leading institution, Harvard has had a notable impact on popular culture, literature, and film.
Literature
- The noise and fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), both works written by William Faulkner, are immersed in Harvard's 20th and 30th century student life.XX..
- Of Time and the River (1935), Thomas Wolfe's fictitious autobiography, includes the student days of his alter ego at Harvard.
- The Late George Apley (1937, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), by John P. Marquand, parody to Harvard students at the beginning of the centuryXX..
- The Second Happiest Day (1953), by John P. Marquand, Jr., represents the Harvard generation of World War II.
Cinema
- Brown of Harvard (1926)
- Love Story (1970), by Erich Segal that narrates the romance between a rich player of Harvard hockey team (Ryan O'Neal) and a brilliant and modest social class student of Radcliffe (Ali MacGraw). This film is projected annually for new students arriving at Harvard University (Harvard-Radcliffe).
- Life of a student (1973)
- Soul Man (1986) a comedy that talks about a white student (Christopher Thomas Howell) who, not being able to pay his BA at Harvard, decides to pretend to be a color student to get a scholarship.
- With honours (1994)
- Good Will Hunting (1997), written by Matt Damon as a student in a kind of dramaturgy and with the participation of Robin Williams.
- Prozac Nation (2001)
- Legally Blonde (2001)
- Stealing Harvard (2002)
- 21 (2008)
- Angels and Devils (2009)
- The Social Network. David Fincher (2010)
- Professor Marston and Wonder Woman (2017)
Series
- Gilmore Girls
- Suits
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