Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established 1636, whose history, influence and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Established originally by the Massachusetts legislature and soon thereafter named for John Harvard its first benefactor Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning, and the Harvard Corporation formally, the President and Fellows of Harvard Colleges its first chartered corporation. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early College primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century Harvard had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's long tenure 1869 1909 transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university Harvard was 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. The University is organized into eleven separate academic units ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area: its 209-acre 85 ha main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3 miles 5 km northwest of Boston; the business school and athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located across the Charles River in the Alston neighborhood of Boston and the medical, dental, and public health schools are in the Long wood Medical Area. Harvard's $37.6 billion financial endowment is the largest of any academic institution. Harvard is a large, highly residential research university. The nominal cost of attendance is high, but the University's large endowment allows it to offer generous financial aid packages' operates several arts, cultural, and scientific museums, alongside the Harvard Library, which is the world's largest academic and private library system, comprising 79 individual libraries with over 18 million volumes. Harvard's alumni include eight U.S. presidents, several foreign heads of state, 62 living billionaires, 335 Rhodes Scholars, and 242 Marshall Scholars. To date, some 150 Nobel laureates and 5 Fields Medalists when awarded have been affiliated as students, faculty, or staff

Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregationalist ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties. When the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tap pan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard Joseph Willard died a year later, in 1804, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, and the liberal Samuel Weber was appointed to the presidency of Harvard two years later, which signaled the changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Armenian ideas defined by traditionalists as Unitarian ideas. 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 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 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 Donald 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 Cud worth, 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.