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Harvard University

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  - Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
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Harvard was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, it obtained British North America's first known printing press. [23][24] At 1639 it was named Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard an alumnus of the University of Cambridge who'd left the school #779 and his scholar's library of some 400 volumes. [25] The charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650.

A 1643 publication gave the school's purpose as "to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust";[26] in its early years trained many Puritan ministers. [27] It provided a traditional curriculum on the English university version‍‍--‌‌many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge‍--‌but conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. It was never affiliated with any particular denomination, but many of its oldest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches. [28]

The top Boston divine Growth Mather served as president from 1685 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who wasn't also a clergyman, marking a turning of their faculty from Puritanism and toward intellectual independence.

Through the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties. [29]:1--4 When the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard Joseph Willard expired a year later, in 1804, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, and also the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency of Harvard two years afterwards, which signaled the changing of the wave from the dominance of classic notions at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian notions (defined by traditionalists as Unitarian notions).

Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' "engagement in the Divine Nature" and the possibility of understanding "intellectual existences". Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that a person 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 because of 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 functions were part of the Harvard curriculum at the moment. The library records at Harvard show the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as frequently read throughout the 19th century since those of the "official philosophy" of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school. [31]

Charles W. Eliot, president 1869--1909, eliminated the preferred place of Christianity in the curriculum whilst opening it to pupil self-direction. While Eliot was the most crucial figure in the secularization of American higher schooling, he was motivated not by a urge to secularize schooling, but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions. Derived from William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson, these convictions were centered on the dignity and worth of human nature, the right and ability of every individual to perceive reality, and the indwelling God in every individual.

During the 20th century, Harvard's international reputation grew as a burgeoning endowment and dominant academics expanded the university's scope. Rapid enrollment growth continued as new grad schools were started and the undergraduate College expanded. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became among the most prominent schools for women in america. Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. [11]

At the first 20th century, the student body was predominately "old-stock, high-status Protestants, particularly Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians"--a group later called "WASPs" (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). From the 1970s it was far more diversified. [34]

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 to get the affluent, 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 and the college level. The consequent Report, published in 1945, was among the most influential manifestos in the history of American education in the 20th century. [35]

In 1945--1960 admissions policies were opened to bring in students from a diverse applicant pool. No longer drawing mainly from wealthy alumni of select New England prep schools, the undergraduate college was now open to striving middle class pupils from public schools; many more Jews and Catholics were admitted, but few blacks, Hispanics or Asians. [36]

Harvard graduate schools began admitting women in small numbers from the late 19th century, and during World War II, students in Radcliffe College (that since 1879 had been paying Harvard academics to repeat their assignments for women students) started attending Harvard classes alongside men,[37] The first class of women was admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1945. [38] Since the 1970s Harvard has been responsible for essentially all aspects of admission, education, and undergraduate life for girls, and Radcliffe was officially merged into Harvard in 1999. Drew Gilpin Faust, the Dean at Radcliffe, became the first female president of Harvard in 2007.

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- Campbell, Chuck C (June 1979 - January 1982)
- Ganssle, Monica (September 1988 - June 1990)
- Johnson, Daniel Kent Neil (May 1999 - Present)
- Martin, Bruce R (January 2002 - Present)
- Orlando, Marianne Francesca (November 1971 - May 1976)
- Pp, Aa (January 1996 - Present)
- Santos, Esperanza (September 2003 - June 2004)
- Wijayanti, Eva (May 2000 - April 2005)
- Williams, Thornell (February 2001 - March 2002)
- Wilson, S (July 2004 - Present)
- Zhu, Xian Yi (April 1999 - Present)
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