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Harvard University, which celebrated its 350th anniversary in 1986, is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Founded 16 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment of more than 18,000 degree candidates, including undergraduates and students in 10 principal academic units. An additional 13,000 students are enrolled in one or more courses in the Harvard Extension School. Over 14,000 people work at Harvard, including more than 2,000 faculty. There are also 7,000 faculty appointments in affiliated teaching hospitals.
Seven presidents of the United States – John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Rutherford B. Hayes, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and George W. Bush – were graduates of Harvard. Its faculty have produced more than 40 Nobel laureates.
Harvard College was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and was named for its first benefactor, John Harvard of Charlestown, a young minister who, upon his death in 1638, left his library and half his estate to the new institution. Harvard's first scholarship fund was created in 1643 with a gift from Ann Radcliffe, Lady Mowlson.
During its early years, the College offered a classic academic course based on the English university model but consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy of the first colonists. Although many of its early graduates became ministers in Puritan congregations throughout New England, the College was never formally affiliated with a specific religious denomination. An early brochure, published in 1643, justified the College's existence: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches."
Harvard's Faculty
In appointing professors to tenured positions, Harvard conducts nationwide - and, in many cases, worldwide - searches to identify men and women who are the leading scholars and teachers in their fields. Although the process leading to tenured appointments varies from School to School, in each case the final appointment is subject to approval by the President and the Governing Boards of the University.
Students at Harvard University
Visitors often ask: Who is the typical Harvard student? The answer is that there is no such person. Each student is a unique individual, and the student body is incredibly diverse.
Harvard men and women represent an array of ethnic groups, religious traditions, and political persuasions. They come from every region of the United States and more than 100 other countries. They include undergraduates and graduate, continuing education, and Summer School students. They range from pre-teens to octogenarians; in 1997, Mary Fasano became the oldest person ever to earn a Harvard degree when she graduated from the Extension School at the age of 89.
Harvard College students have a remarkable range of backgrounds and academic and extracurricular interests. Two-thirds come from public schools, and about two-thirds receive some form of financial aid.
Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature,op. cit. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest corporation in North America.
Initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne", the institution was named Harvard College on March 13, 1639, after a young clergyman named John Harvard—a graduate of England's Emmanuel College, Cambridge (a college of the University of Cambridge) and St Olave's Grammar School, Orpington in the United Kingdom—who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 (which was half of his estate). The earliest known official reference to Harvard as a "university" occurs in the new Massachusetts Constitution of 1780.
During his 40-year tenure as Harvard president (1869–1909), 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. Eliot also was responsible for publication of the now-famous "Harvard Classics", a collection of "great books" from multiple disciplines, published by P. F. Collier and Sons beginning in 1909, that offered a college education "in fifteen minutes a day of reading." The collection soon became known as "Dr. Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf." During his unprecedentedly influential presidency, Eliot, a prolific book and magazine writer and widely traveled speaker in the pre-radio age, became so widely recognized a public figure that by his death in 1926, his name (and, not coincidentally, Harvard's) had become synonymous with the universal aspirations of American higher education.
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.
Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes,See the FAQ on the Harvard-Google partnership. making it the largest academic library in the United States, and the fourth among the five "mega-libraries" of the world (after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque nationale, but ahead of the New York Public Library). See the ranked list of U.S. libraries from the American Library Association. Harvard is consistently ranked number one in international college and university rankings, and has the largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization except for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, standing at $38.7 billion as of 2008.
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