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 (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although it was never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became increasingly secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.

The university comprises eleven separate academic units — ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study — with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area. Harvard's 210 acre main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3.4 mi northwest of downtown Boston. The business school and athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located across the Charles River in Allston and the medical, dental, and public health schools are located in the Longwood Medical Area.

As of 2010, Harvard employs about 2,100 faculty to teach and advise approximately 6,700 undergraduates (Harvard College) and 14,500 graduate and professional students. Eight U.S. presidents have graduated from Harvard and 75 Nobel Laureates have been affiliated with the university as students, faculty, or staff. Harvard is also the alma mater of sixty-two living billionaires, the most in the country. The Harvard University Library is the largest academic library in the United States, and the third largest library in the country.

The Harvard Crimson competes in 41 intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division I Ivy League. Harvard has an intense athletic rivalry with Yale University traditionally culminating in The Game, although the Harvard–Yale Regatta predates the football game. This rivalry, though, is put aside every two years when the Harvard and Yale Track and Field teams come together to compete against a combined Oxford University and Cambridge University team, a competition that is the oldest continuous international amateur competition in the world.

Colonial
Harvard was founded in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne", the institution was renamed Harvard College on March 13, 1639. It was named after John Harvard, a young English clergyman from Southwark, London, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge (after which Cambridge, Massachusetts is named), who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 pounds sterling, which was half of his estate. The charter creating the corporation of Harvard College came in 1650. In the early years, the College trained many Puritan ministers. The college offered a classic academic course based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended Cambridge University—but one consistent with the prevailing Puritan philosophy. The college was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches throughout New England. An early brochure, published in 1643, described the founding of the college as a response to the desire "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches".

The leading Boston divine Increase Mather served as president from 1685 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who was not also a clergyman, which marked a turning of the College toward intellectual independence from Puritanism.

Religion and philosophy
The takeover of Harvard by the Unitarians 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.

In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on the 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.

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 Channing 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.

20th century
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.

Meritocracy
James Bryant Conant (president, 1933–1953) reinvigorated creative scholarship to guarantee its preeminence among research institutions. He saw higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, so Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, he asked 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 1945–1960 admissions policies were opened up to bring in students from a more diverse applicant pool. No longer drawing mostly from rich alumni of select New England prep schools, the undergraduate college was now open to striving middle class students from public schools; many more Jews and Catholics were admitted, but few blacks, Hispanics or Asians.

Women
Women remained segregated at Radcliffe, though more and more took Harvard classes. 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-World War II period.

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.

Drew Gilpin Faust, the Dean at Radcliffe, became the first woman president of Harvard in 2007.

Liberalism
Harvard and its affiliates, like many American universities, are considered by some to be politically liberal (left of center). Conservative author William F. Buckley, Jr. quipped that he would rather be governed by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, Richard Nixon famously referred to Harvard as the "Kremlin on the Charles" around 1970, and Vice President George H.W. Bush disparaged what he saw to be Harvard's liberalism during the 1988 presidential election. Republicans remain a small minority of faculty, and the University has refused to officially recognize the Harvard Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program — forcing students to commission through nearby MIT. The Harvard College Handbook explains, "Current federal policy of excluding known lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals from admission to ROTC or of discharging them from service is inconsistent with Harvard’s values as stated in its policy on discrimination." In 2011, Harvard announced that it will reinstate the ROTC program, following the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell".

President Lawrence Summers resigned his presidency in 2006. His resignation came just one week before a second planned vote of no confidence by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Former president Derek Bok served as interim president. Members of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which instructs graduate students in GSAS and undergraduates in Harvard College, had passed an earlier motion of "lack of confidence" in Summers' leadership on March 15, 2005 by a 218–185 vote, with 18 abstentions. The 2005 motion was precipitated by comments about the causes of gender demographics in academia made at a closed academic conference and leaked to the press. In response, Summers convened two committees to study this issue: the Task Force on Women Faculty and the Task Force on Women in Science and Engineering. Summers had also pledged $50 million to support their recommendations and other proposed reforms. Drew Gilpin Faust is the 28th president of Harvard. An American historian, former dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, Faust is the first female president in the university's history.

Administration and organization


A faculty of approximately 2,160 professors, lecturers, and instructors serve as of school year 2008-09, with 6,715 undergraduate and 12,424 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 21st and longest-serving president (1869–1909), bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.



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 formerly 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.

Governing bodies
Harvard is governed by two boards, one of which is the President and Fellows of Harvard College, also known as the Harvard Corporation, founded in 1650, and the other is the Harvard Board of Overseers. The President of Harvard University is the day-to-day administrator of Harvard and is appointed by and responsible to the Harvard Corporation. There are 16,000 staff and faculty.

Faculties and schools
Harvard today has the following faculties, listed below in order of foundation:


 * The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its sub-faculty, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which together serve:
 * Harvard College, the university's undergraduate portion (1636)
 * The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (organized 1872)
 * The Harvard Division of Continuing Education, including Harvard Summer School (1871) and Harvard Extension School (1910).
 * Harvard Medical School (1782)
 * Harvard School of Dental Medicine (1867).
 * Harvard Divinity School (1816)
 * Harvard Law School (1817)
 * Harvard Business School (1908)
 * Graduate School of Design (1914)
 * Harvard Graduate School of Education (1920)
 * Harvard School of Public Health (1922)
 * Harvard Kennedy School (1936)

In 1999, the former Radcliffe College was reorganized as the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

In February 2007, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers formally approved the Harvard Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences to become the 14th School of Harvard (Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences).

The Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard (Cambridge, Massachusetts): The RCC was founded in 1990 as a joint cooperative institution to foster intellectual and scientific interaction between Harvard University and Complutense, with the support of HM King Juan Carlos I, HM Queen Sofia of Spain and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It follows the tradition of the Royal Spanish College, founded in 1364 to host Spanish Visiting Scholars at the University of Bologna. The RCC accord is the only one of its sort ever to have been approved by Harvard. The institution is directed jointly by the President of Harvard and the Rector of Complutense University, with an academic council formed by 5 Harvard professors and 5 Complutense professors. It permits a select number of Complutense professors to conduct their research at Harvard as Visiting Scholars. RCC Fellows enjoy the same privileges as Harvard's non-tenured Faculty. Each year the institution hosts the RCC Fellows Lectures, a conference cycle during which the Visiting Scholars deliver lectures revealing the results of their investigations to an audience of Harvard professors and students. Finally, it also permits a small number of students to attend doctoral school at the University as Research Associates, under scholarships hosted by the Spanish Royal Family.

Endowment
Harvard has the largest university endowment in the world. At the end of June 2009, it was worth $25.7 billion, about 30% less than at the same time in 2008. In December 2008, Harvard announced that its endowment had lost 22% (approximately $8 billion) from July to October 2008, necessitating budget cuts. Later reports suggest the loss was actually more than double that figure, a reduction of nearly 50% of its endowment in the first four months alone. Forbes in March 2009 estimated the loss to be in the range of $12 billion. One of the most visible results of Harvard's attempt to re-balance its budget was their halting of construction of the $1.2 billion Allston Science Complex that had been scheduled to be completed by 2011, resulting in protests from local residents.

Campus
Harvard's 210 acre main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3.4 mi northwest of downtown Boston and extends into the surrounding Harvard Square neighborhood. Harvard Yard itself contains the central administrative offices and main libraries of the university, academic buildings including Sever Hall and University Hall, Memorial Church, and the majority of the freshman dormitories. Sophomore, junior, and senior undergraduates live in twelve residential Houses, nine of which are south of Harvard Yard along or near the Charles River. The other three are located in a residential neighborhood half a mile northwest of the Yard at the Quadrangle (commonly referred to as the Quad), which formerly housed Radcliffe College students until Radcliffe merged its residential system with Harvard. The Harvard MBTA station provides public transportation via bus service and the Red Line subway.

The Harvard Business School and many of the university's athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located on a 359 acre campus opposite the Cambridge campus in Allston. The John W. Weeks Bridge is a pedestrian bridge over the Charles River connecting both campuses. The Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health are located on a 22 acre campus in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area approximately 3.3 mi southwest of downtown Boston and 3.3 mi south of the Cambridge campus. A private shuttle bus connects the Longwood campus to the Cambridge campus via Massachusetts Avenue making stops in the Back Bay and at MIT as well.

Each residential house contains rooms for undergraduates, House masters, and resident tutors, as well as a dining hall, library, and various other student facilities. The facilities were made possible by a gift from Yale University alumnus Edward Harkness.

Radcliffe Yard, formerly the center of the campus of Radcliffe College (and now home of the Radcliffe Institute), is adjacent to the Graduate School of Education and the Cambridge Common.

From 2006 - 2008, Harvard University reported on-campus crime statistics that included 48 forcible sex offenses, 10 robberies, 15 aggravated assaults, 750 burglaries, and 12 cases of motor vehicle theft.

Satellite facilities
Apart from its major Cambridge/Allston and Longwood campuses, Harvard owns and operates Arnold Arboretum, in the Jamaica Plain area of Boston; the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, in Washington, D.C.; the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts; and the Villa I Tatti research center in Florence and the Harvard Shanghai Center in China.

Major campus expansion
Throughout the past several years, Harvard has purchased large tracts of land in Allston, a walk across the Charles River from Cambridge, with the intent of major expansion southward. The university now owns approximately fifty percent more land in Allston than in Cambridge. Various proposals to connect the traditional Cambridge campus with the new Allston campus include new and enlarged bridges, a shuttle service and/or a tram. Ambitious plans also call for sinking part of Storrow Drive (at Harvard's expense) for replacement with park land and pedestrian access to the Charles River, as well as the construction of bike paths, and an intently planned fabric of buildings throughout the Allston campus. The institution asserts that such expansion will benefit not only the school, but surrounding community, pointing to such features as the enhanced transit infrastructure, possible shuttles open to the public, and park space which will also be publicly accessible.

One of the foremost driving forces for Harvard's pending expansion is its goal of substantially increasing the scope and strength of its science and technology programs. The university plans to construct two 500,000 square foot (50,000 m²) research complexes in Allston, which would be home to several interdisciplinary programs, including the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and an enlarged Engineering department.

In addition, Harvard intends to relocate the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard School of Public Health to Allston. The university also plans to construct several new undergraduate and graduate student housing centers in Allston, and it is considering large-scale museums and performing arts complexes as well. Unfortunately the large drop in endowment has halted these plans for now.

Sustainability
In 2000, Harvard hired a full-time campus sustainability professional and launched the Harvard Green Campus Initiative, since institutionalized as the Office for Sustainability (OFS). With a full-time staff of 25, dozens of student interns, and a $12 million Loan Fund for energy and water conservation projects, OFS is one of the most advanced campus sustainability programs in the country. Harvard was one of 27 schools to receive a grade of "A-" from the Sustainable Endowments Institute on its College Sustainability Report Card 2010, the highest grade awarded.

Academics
Harvard is a large, highly residential research university. The university has been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges since 1929. The university offers 46 undergraduate concentrations (majors), 134 graduate degrees, and 32 professional degrees. For the 2008–2009 academic year, Harvard granted 1,664 baccalaureate degrees, 400 masters degrees, 512 doctoral degrees, and 4,460 professional degrees.

The four year, full-time undergraduate program comprises a minority of enrollments at the university and emphasizes instruction with an "arts & sciences focus". Between 1978 and 2008, entering students were required to complete a "Core Curriculum" of seven classes outside of their concentration. Since 2008, undergraduate students have been required to complete courses in eight General Education categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning, Ethical Reasoning, Science of Living Systems, Science of the Physical Universe, Societies of the World, and United States in the World. Harvard offers a comprehensive doctoral graduate program and there is a high level of coexistence between graduate and undergraduate degrees. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, The New York Times, and some students have criticized Harvard for its reliance on teaching fellows for some aspects of undergraduate education; they consider this to adversely affect the quality of education.

Harvard's academic programs operate on a semester calendar beginning in early September and ending in mid-May. Undergraduates typically take four half-courses per term and must maintain a four-course rate average to be considered full time. In many concentrations, students can elect to pursue a basic program or a honors-eligible program requiring a senior thesis and/or advanced course work. Students graduating in the top 4-5% of the class are awarded degrees summa cum laude, students in the next 15% of the class are awarded magna cum laude, and the next 30% of the class are awarded cum laude. Harvard has chapters of academic honor societies such as Phi Beta Kappa and various committees and departments also award several hundred named prizes annually. Harvard, along with other universities, has been accused of grade inflation, although there is evidence that the quality of the student body and its motivation have also increased. Harvard College reduced the number of students who receive Latin honors from 90% in 2004 to 60% in 2005. Moreover, the honors of "John Harvard Scholar" and "Harvard College Scholar" will now be given only to the top 5 percent and the next 5 percent of each class.

Undergraduate tuition for the 2009–2010 school year was $33,696 and the total cost with fees, room, and board was $48,868. Under financial aid guidelines adopted in 2007, parents in families with incomes of less than $60,000 will no longer be expected to contribute any money to the cost of attending Harvard for their children, including room and board. Families with incomes in the $60,000 to $80,000 range contribute an amount of only a few thousand dollars a year. In December 2007, Harvard announced that families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 will only have to pay up to 10% of their annual household income towards tuition. In 2009, Harvard offered grants totaling $414.1 million across all 11 divisions; $339.5 million came from institutional funds, $35.3 million from federal support, and $39.2 million from other outside support. Grants total 87.7% of Harvard's aid for undergraduate students, with aid also provided by loans (8.4%) and work-study (3.9%).

Rankings
Harvard's undergraduate program is ranked first among "National Universities" by U.S. News & World Report and sixth by Forbes. The university is ranked sixth nationally by The Washington Monthly.

Internationally, Harvard is ranked first in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings and second in the QS World University Rankings. When the two lists were published in partnership between 2004 and 2009 as the Times Higher Education-QS World University Rankings, Harvard was ranked first each year. Harvard is ranked first by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), a position it has held since the first ARWU rankings were released in 2003. In its individual subject tables, ARWU ranked Harvard first in natural sciences and mathematics, life and agricultural sciences, clinical medicine and pharmacy, social sciences, and 42nd in engineering/technology and computer sciences. In individual fields in 2010, Harvard is ranked first in Physics and Economics/Business, second in Chemistry, third in Mathematics, and ninth in Computer Science in the world.

In the 2009 QS Global 200 Business Schools Report, Harvard was ranked first in North America.

In 2010, according to University Ranking by Academic Performance (URAP), Harvard is the best overall university in the world.

Research

 * Berkman Center for Internet & Society
 * Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
 * Harvard Clinical Research Institute
 * Harvard Institute of Economic Research
 * Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute
 * Institute for Quantitative Social Science
 * Laboratory for Nanomedicine (at the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital)
 * Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (one of Harvard's 14 schools)
 * Schepens Eye Research Institute
 * W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research
 * Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering
 * Research centers attached to schools and departments
 * Department of Psychology: Prosopagnosia Research Centers at Harvard University and University College London
 * Graduate School of Design: Center for Alternative Futures, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Center for Technology & the Environment
 * Harvard Law School: Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, Institute for Global Law & Policy (former European Law Research Center), John M. Olin Center of Law, Economics and Business
 * Independent organizations affiliated to the university
 * The Forsyth Institute

Libraries and museums
The Harvard University Library System is centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard and comprises over 80 individual libraries and over 15 million volumes. According to the American Library Association, this makes it the largest academic library in the United States, and the third largest library in the country. Harvard describes its library as the "largest academic library in the world".

Cabot Science Library, Lamont Library, and Widener Library are three of the most popular libraries for undergraduates to use, with easy access and central locations. There are rare books, manuscripts and other special collections throughout Harvard's libraries; Houghton Library, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the Harvard University Archives consist principally of rare and unique materials. America's oldest collection of maps, gazetteers, and atlases both old and new is stored in Pusey Library and open to the public. The largest collection of East-Asian language material outside of East Asia is held in the Harvard-Yenching Library.



Harvard operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums:
 * The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier, is home to the University's film archive and the department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
 * The Harvard Art Museums, including:
 * The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, which includes ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art
 * The Busch-Reisinger Museum, formerly the Germanic Museum, covers central and northern European art.
 * The Fogg Museum of Art, with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular strengths are in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th century French art
 * The Harvard Museum of Natural History complex, including:
 * The Harvard Mineralogical Museum
 * The Harvard University Herbaria, which contains the famous Blaschka Glass Flowers exhibit
 * The Museum of Comparative Zoology
 * The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere
 * The Semitic Museum.

Students
In the last six years, Harvard's student population ranged between 19,000 and 21,000, across all programs. Harvard enrolled 6,655 students in undergraduate programs, 3,738 students in graduate programs, and 10,722 students in professional programs. The undergraduate population is 51% female, the graduate population is 48% female, and the professional population is 49% female.

Undergraduate admission to Harvard is characterized by the Carnegie Foundation as "more selective, lower transfer-in". Harvard College received 27,462 applications for admission to the Class of 2013, 2,175 were admitted (7.9%), and 1,658 enrolled (76.2%). The interquartile range on the SAT was 2080–2370 and 95% of first year students graduated in the top tenth of their high school class. Harvard also enrolled 266 National Merit Scholars, the most in the nation. 88% of students graduate within 4 years and 98% graduate within 6 years.

Harvard College accepted 6.9% of applicants for the class of 2014, a record low for the school's entire history. The number of acceptances was lower for the class of 2013 partially because the university anticipated increased rates of enrollment after announcing a large increase in financial aid in 2008. Harvard College ended its early admissions program in 2007 as the program was believed to disadvantage low-income and under-represented minority applicants applying to selective universities. However, undergraduate admissions office's preference for children of alumni policies have been the subject of scrutiny and debate as it primarily aids whites and the wealthy.

Athletics
Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax each fall in their annual football meeting, which dates back to 1875 and is usually called simply "The Game". While Harvard's football team is no longer one of the country's best as it often was a century ago during football's early days (it won the Rose Bowl in 1920), both it and Yale have influenced the way the game is played. In 1903, Harvard Stadium introduced a new era into football with the first-ever permanent reinforced concrete stadium of its kind in the country. The stadium's structure actually played a role in the evolution of the college game. Seeking to reduce the alarming number of deaths and serious injuries in the sport, the Father of Football, Walter Camp (former captain of the Yale football team), suggested widening the field to open up the game. But the state-of-the-art Harvard Stadium was too narrow to accommodate a wider playing surface. So, other steps had to be taken. Camp would instead support revolutionary new rules for the 1906 season. These included legalizing the forward pass, perhaps the most significant rule change in the sport's history.

Harvard has several athletic facilities, such as the Lavietes Pavilion, a multi-purpose arena and home to the Harvard basketball teams. The Malkin Athletic Center, known as the "MAC", serves both as the university's primary recreation facility and as a satellite location for several varsity sports. The five story building includes two cardio rooms, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a smaller pool for aquaerobics and other activities, a mezzanine, where all types of classes are held at all hours of the day, and an indoor cycling studio, three weight rooms, and a three-court gym floor to play basketball. The MAC also offers personal trainers and specialty classes. The MAC is also home to Harvard volleyball, fencing, and wrestling. The offices of several of the school's varsity coaches are also in the MAC.

Weld Boathouse and Newell Boathouse house the women's and men's rowing teams, respectively. The men's crew also uses the Red Top complex in Ledyard, Connecticut, as their training camp for the annual Harvard-Yale Regatta. The Bright Hockey Center hosts the Harvard hockey teams, and the Murr Center serves both as a home for Harvard's squash and tennis teams as well as a strength and conditioning center for all athletic sports.

As of 2006, there were 41 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other NCAA Division I college in the country. As with other Ivy League universities, Harvard does not offer athletic scholarships.

Older than The Game by 23 years, the Harvard-Yale Regatta was the original source of the athletic rivalry between the two schools. It is held annually in June on the Thames river in eastern Connecticut. The Harvard crew is typically considered to be one of the top teams in the country in rowing. Today, Harvard fields top teams in several other sports, such as the Harvard Crimson men's ice hockey team (with a strong rivalry against Cornell), squash, and even recently won NCAA titles in Men's and Women's Fencing. Harvard also won the Intercollegiate Sailing Association National Championships in 2003.

Harvard's men's ice hockey team won the school's first NCAA Championship in any team sport in 1989. Harvard was also the first Ivy League institution to win a NCAA championship title in a women's sport when its women's lacrosse team won the NCAA Championship in 1990.

Harvard Undergraduate Television has footage from historical games and athletic events including the 2005 pep-rally before the Harvard-Yale Game. Harvard's official athletics website has more comprehensive information about Harvard's athletic facilities.

Song
Harvard has several fight songs, the most played of which, especially at football, are "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" and "Harvardiana." While "Fair Harvard" is actually the alma mater, "Ten Thousand Men" is better known outside the university. The Harvard University Band performs these fight songs, and other cheers, at football and hockey games. These were parodied by Harvard alumnus Tom Lehrer in his song "Fight Fiercely, Harvard," which he composed while an undergraduate.

Faculty and staff
Prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices are among the faculty of the various schools, such as Martin Feldstein, Harvey Mansfield, Greg Mankiw, Baroness Shirley Williams, and Alan Dershowitz. Leftists like Michael Walzer and Stephen Thernstrom and libertarians such as Robert Nozick have in the past graced its faculty. Between 1964 and 2009, a total of 38 faculty and staff members affiliated with Harvard or its teaching hospitals were awarded Nobel Prizes (17 during the last quarter century, 6 the last 25 years).

Alumni


Among the best-known people who have attended Harvard University are American political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Al Gore, George W. Bush and Barack Obama; Canadian Governor General David Lloyd Johnston, Canadian Prime Ministers Mackenzie King and Pierre Trudeau, and Canadian political leader Michael Ignatieff; Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan; religious leader, businessman & philanthropist Aga Khan IV; businessman & philanthropist Bill Gates; philanthropist Huntington Hartford; Mexican Presidents Felipe Calderón, Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Miguel de la Madrid; Chilean President Sebastian Piñera; Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos; Costa Rican President José María Figueres; Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Supreme Court President Aharon Barak; Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo; Albanian Prime Minister Fan S. Noli; UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon; philosopher Henry David Thoreau; authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and William S. Burroughs; educator Harlan Hanson; poets Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; conductor Leonard Bernstein; cellist Yo Yo Ma; comedian and television show host and writer Conan O'Brien; actors Jack Lemmon, Natalie Portman, Mira Sorvino, Ashley Judd, Tatyana Ali, Elisabeth Shue, Rashida Jones, Scottie Thompson, Hill Harper, Matt Damon and Tommy Lee Jones; film directors Darren Aronofsky, Mira Nair, Whit Stillman, and Terrence Malick; television executive Brian Graden; architect Philip Johnson; musicians Rivers Cuomo, Tom Morello, and Gram Parsons; musician, producer and composer Ryan Leslie; Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg; unabomber Ted Kaczynski; programmer and activist Richard Stallman; NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick; and civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois.

Among its most famous current faculty members are biologist E. O. Wilson, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, physicists Lisa Randall and Roy Glauber, chemists Elias Corey, Dudley R. Herschbach and George M. Whitesides, 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, and Stanley Hoffmann, scholar/composers Robert Levin and Bernard Rands.

Seventy-five Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with the university. Since 1974, 19 Nobel Prize winners and 15 winners of the American literary award, the Pulitzer Prize, have served on the Harvard faculty.

In fiction and popular culture
Harvard's central place in American elite circles has made it the setting for many novels, plays, films and other cultural works.

In literature
Numerous novels are set at Harvard or feature characters with Harvard connections.


 * Books
 * The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich is a narrative account of Facebook's founding set partially at Harvard
 * Hacking Harvard is novel by Robin Wasserman, a Harvard University alumna.
 * In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's post-apocalyptic novel, much of the action takes place in Cambridge, with vaguely recognizable Harvard landmarks occasionally making their way into the narrator's place descriptions.
 * Love Story (1970), by Harvard alumnus (and Yale classics professor) Erich Segal, concerns a romance between a wealthy Harvard pre-law hockey player (Ryan O'Neal) and a brilliant Radcliffe student of musicology on scholarship (Ali MacGraw). Both novel and movie are deeply infused with Cambridge color. One enduring Harvard tradition in recent years has been the annual screening of Love Story to incoming freshmen, during which members of the Crimson Key Society, the tour-giving organization on campus, make catcalls and other offerings of mock abuse. Other works of Erich Segal, The Class (1985) and Doctors (1988) also featured the leading characters as Harvard students.
 * The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, a 2009 bestselling novel by Katherine Howe, prominently features the university and several of its buildings.
 * Prozac Nation is an autobiography by Harvard College graduate, Elizabeth Wurtzel.
 * The Second Happiest Day (1953) by "John Phillips" (John P. Marquand, Jr.) depicts the Harvard of the generation of World War II.
 * The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, features Quentin Compson's experiences at Harvard.
 * Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose (1948), by Dr. Seuss, remarks on "Harvard Club Wall".
 * The Women's Room, by Marilyn French, largely features protgonist Mira's experiences at Harvard University


 * Series
 * In Dan Brown's novels (The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons), main character Robert Langdon is described as a Harvard "professor of symbology", (although "symbology" is not the name of an actual academic discipline).
 * Pamela Thomas-Graham's series of mystery novels (Blue Blood, Orange Crushed, and A Darker Shade Of Crimson), protagonist Nikki Chase is an African-American Harvard economics professor.
 * Douglas Preston's ex-CIA agent, Wyman Ford, is a Harvard alumnus. Ford appears in the novels Tyrannosaur Canyon and Blasphemy.
 * Cecilia Tan's romance novel series, commonly known as the "Magic University series" and including the books The Siren and the Sword and The Tower and the Tears, is set at the magical university hidden inside Harvard known as "Veritas".

In music

 * Mariah Carey, in her 2009 song "Up Out My Face", sings: "Even the Harvard University graduating class of 2010 couldn't put us back together again."

Onscreen
Harvard has been featured in many U.S. film and television productions. Since the filming of Love Story in the 1960s the university, until the summer of 2007 filming of The Great Debaters, did not allow any movies to be filmed in campus buildings; most films are shot in look-alike cities, such as Toronto, and at colleges such as UCLA, Wheaton, and Bridgewater State, although outdoor and aerial shots of Harvard's Cambridge campus are often used.


 * 21 (2008 film) - filming took place, in part, at Harvard Medical School
 * Ally McBeal, of the eponymous series, is a Harvard Law School alumna
 * Cheers and Frasier co-star, Dr. Frasier Crane, is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School
 * The Firm (1993 film) - features Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) as a young man with a promising future in law who, about to graduate from Harvard Law School, is made an offer he can't refuse by Memphis firm Bendini, Lambert & Locke, 'The Firm'
 * Fringe (TV series) - the university was prominently featured in the 2008 television series pilot. Although Fringe portrays its setting as Harvard, the visible campus buildings are at Yale University.
 * Gilligan's Island 's resident aristocrat Thurston Howell, III (played by Jim Backus), is a Harvard graduate
 * Gilmore Girls
 * Good Will Hunting
 * Gossip Girl (TV series) - the university was prominently featured in the second series.
 * Harvard Man
 * Heaven's Gate The film opens with the main characters graduating from the college in 1870.
 * How High
 * Ivory Tower - a student-produced Harvard Undergraduate Television show about fictional Harvard students.
 * Legally Blonde
 * Love Story in Harvard - a Korean hit TV series set at Harvard but filmed at the University of Southern California
 * M*A*S*H's pompous Boston Brahmin, Major Charles Emerson Winchester III (played by David Ogden Stiers), is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School)
 * Matlock principal character, Ben Matlock, is a Harvard Law School graduate
 * The Paper Chase
 * Queer as Folk (North American TV series)
 * Sex and the City character, Miranda Hobbes, is a Harvard Law School graduate
 * The Social Network
 * Soul Man (film)
 * Stealing Harvard
 * Sugar & Spice
 * The Suite Life on Deck (Disney Channel show) - In Season 1, Cody Martin hopes to get into Harvard
 * With Honors (film) - The graduation scene was filmed in front of Foellinger Auditorium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Other

 * Professors Dr. Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, and Dr. Timothy Leary were fired from Harvard in May 1963. Popular opinion attributes their discharge to their activism involving psychedelics, and the popularization and dispensation of psilocybin to students.