FCS School of the Day # 43 - Harvard

[dbackjon]

Harvard Crimson
Private
Founded 1636
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Students: 19,139
Ivy League
Colors: Crimson
Harvard Stadium (30,323)
2008 Record: 6-1, 9-1

Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States (see: first university in the United States), founded 16 years after the arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Harvard College, established in 1635 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was named for its first benefactor, British-born John Harvard of Charlestown, a young minister who, upon his death in 1638, left his library and half his estate to the new institution.The charter creating the corporation of Harvard College was signed by Massachusetts Governor Thomas Dudley in 1650. The College's original purpose was to train Puritan ministers.[10]

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 in New England. The College was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Puritan churches throughout New England. [11] 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 early motto was Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae "Truth for Christ and the Church." In a directive to its students, it laid out the purpose of all education: "Let every student be plainly instructed and consider well that the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus, which is eternal life. And therefore to lay Christ at the bottom as the only foundation of all sound learning and knowledge."

On June 11, 1685, Increase Mather became the Acting President of Harvard University (then Harvard College), on July 23, 1686 he was appointed the Rector. On June 27, 1692 he became the President of Harvard, a position which he held until September 6, 1701.


The 1708 election of John Leverett, the first president who was not also a clergyman, marked a turning of the College toward intellectual independence from Puritanism.

In the 17th century, Harvard University established the Indian College to educate Native Americans, but it was not a success and disappeared by 1693.[11]

Notable People of Harvard:

Cleets
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, Pierre Trudeau, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama; current UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; philosopher Henry David Thoreau and author Ralph Waldo Emerson; poets Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; cellist Yo Yo Ma; comedian and television show host, writer, and comedian Conan O'Brien, actors Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, Matt Damon, Rashida Jones and Tommy Lee Jones; architect Philip Johnson, Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello, Weezer singer Rivers Cuomo, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, 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, physicists Lisa Randall and Roy Glauber, Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt, writer Louis Menand, critic Helen Vendler, historian Niall Ferguson, economists Amartya Sen, N. Gregory Mankiw, Robert Barro, Stephen A. Marglin, Don M. Wilson III and Martin Feldstein, political philosophers Harvey Mansfield and Michael Sandel, political scientists Robert Putnam, Joseph Nye, Stanley Hoffman and scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.

Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university. Since 1974, nineteen Nobel Prize winners and fifteen winners of the American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have served on the Harvard faculty.

[Ivytalk]

Rivers Cuomo? Gedoudahere!

[Ivytalk]

"Who am I? Chopped liver? And that idiot Bush is a Yalie!! Don't give me that B-school crap." -- Albert Gore, Jr.