Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded October 28, 1636, and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. Its influence, wealth, and rankings have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Harvard was founded and authorized by the Massachusetts General Court, the governing legislature of colonial-era Massachusetts Bay Colony. While never formally affiliated with any denomination, Harvard trained Congregational clergy until its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized in the 18th century.
By the 19th century, Harvard emerged as the most prominent academic and cultural institution among the Boston elite. Following the American Civil War, under Harvard president Charles William Eliot's long tenure from 1869 to 1909, Harvard developed multiple professional schools, which transformed it into a modern research university. In 1900, Harvard co-founded the Association of American Universities. James B. Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II, and liberalized admissions after the war.
The university has ten academic faculties and a faculty attached to Harvard Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate academic disciplines, and other faculties offer graduate degrees, including professional degrees. Harvard has three campuses: the main campus, a 209-acre (85 ha) in Cambridge centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston's Longwood Medical Area. Harvard's endowment, valued at $50.7 billion, makes it the wealthiest academic institution in the world. Harvard Library, with more than 20 million volumes, is the world's largest academic library.
Harvard alumni, faculty, and researchers include 188 living billionaires, eight U.S. presidents, 24 heads of state and 31 heads of government, founders of notable companies, Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, members of Congress, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Turing Award Recipients, Pulitzer Prize recipients, and Fulbright Scholars; by most metrics, Harvard University ranks among the top universities in the world in each of these categories. Harvard students and alumni have also collectively won 10 Academy Awards and 110 Olympic medals, including 46 gold medals.
Harvard was founded in 1636 during the colonial, pre-Revolutionary era by vote of the Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the original Thirteen Colonies of British America. Its first headmaster, Nathaniel Eaton, took office the following year. In 1638, the university acquired British North America's first known printing press. The same year, on his deathbed, John Harvard, a Puritan clergyman who emigrated to the colony from England, bequeathed the emerging college £780 and his library of some 320 volumes; the following year, it was named Harvard College.
In 1643, a Harvard publication defined the college's purpose: "[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." In its early years, the college trained many Puritan ministers and offered a classical curriculum based on the English university model many colonial-era Massachusetts leaders experienced at the University of Cambridge, where many of them studied prior to immigrating to British America. Harvard never formally affiliated with any particular Protestant denomination, but its curriculum conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. In 1650, the charter for Harvard Corporation, the college's governing body, was granted.
From 1681 to 1701, Increase Mather, a Puritan clergyman, served as Harvard's sixth president. In 1708, John Leverett became Harvard's seventh president and the first president who was not also a clergyman. Harvard faculty and students largely supported the Patriot cause during the American Revolution.
In the 19th century, Harvard was influenced by Enlightenment Age ideas, including reason and free will, which were widespread among Congregational ministers and which placed these ministers and their congregations at odds with more traditionalist, Calvinist pastors and clergies. Following the death of Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan in 1803 and that of Joseph Willard, Harvard's eleventh president, the following year, a struggle broke out over their replacements. In 1805, Henry Ware was elected to replace Tappan as Hollis chair. Two years later, in 1807, liberal Samuel Webber was appointed as Harvard's 13th president, representing a shift from traditional ideas at Harvard to more liberal and Arminian ideas.
In 1816, Harvard University launched new language programs in the study of French and Spanish, and appointed George Ticknor the university's first professor for these language programs.
From 1869 to 1909, Charles William Eliot, Harvard University's 21st president, decreased the historically favored position of Christianity in the curriculum, opening it to student self-direction. Though Eliot was an influential figure in the secularization of U.S. higher education, he was motivated primarily by Transcendentalist and Unitarian convictions influenced by William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, rather than secularism. In the late 19th century, Harvard University's graduate schools began admitting women in small numbers.
In 1900, Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities. For the first few decades of the 20th century, the Harvard student body was predominantly "old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians," according to sociologist and author Jerome Karabel.
Over the 20th century, as its endowment burgeoned and prominent intellectuals and professors affiliated with it, Harvard University's reputation as one of the world's most prestigious universities grew notably. The university's enrollment also underwent substantial growth, a product of both the founding of new graduate academic programs and an expansion of the undergraduate college. Radcliffe College emerged as the female counterpart of Harvard College, becoming one of the most prominent schools in the nation for women.
In 1923, a year after the percentage of Jewish students at Harvard reached 20%, A. Lawrence Lowell, the university's 22nd president, unsuccessfully proposed capping the admission of Jewish students to 15% of the undergraduate population. Lowell also refused to mandate forced desegregation in the university's freshman dormitories, writing that, "We owe to the colored man the same opportunities for education that we do to the white man, but we do not owe to him to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial."
Between 1933 and 1953, Harvard University was led by James B. Conant, the university's 23rd president, who reinvigorated the university's creative scholarship in an effort to guarantee Harvard's preeminence among the nation and world's emerging research institutions. Conant viewed higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, and devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1945, under Conant's leadership, an influential 268-page report, General Education in a Free Society, was published by Harvard faculty, which remains one of the most important works in curriculum studies, and women were first admitted to the medical school.
Between 1945 and 1960, admissions were standardized to open the university to a more diverse group of students. Following the end of World War II, for example, special exams were developed so veterans could be considered for admission. No longer drawing mostly from prestigious prep schools in New England, the undergraduate college became accessible to striving middle class students from public schools; many more Jews and Catholics were admitted, but Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians remained underrepresented. Over the second half of the 20th century, however, the university became incrementally more diverse.
Between 1971 and 1999, Harvard controlled undergraduate admission, instruction, and housing for Radcliffe's women; in 1999, Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard University.
On July 1, 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, was appointed Harvard's 28th and the university's first female president. On July 1, 2018, Faust retired and joined the board of Goldman Sachs, and Lawrence Bacow became Harvard's 29th president.
In February 2023, approximately 6,000 Harvard workers attempted to organize a union.
Bacow retired in June 2023, and on July 1 Claudine Gay, a Harvard professor in the Government and African American Studies departments and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, became Harvard's 30th president.
In January 2024, just six months into her presidency, Gay resigned following allegations of antisemitism and plagiarism. Gay was succeeded by Alan Garber, the university's provost, who was appointed interim president. In August 2024, the university announced that Garber would be appointed Harvard's 31st president through the end of the 2026–27 academic year.
The 209-acre (85 ha) main campus of Harvard University is centered on Harvard Yard, colloquially known as "the Yard", in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about 3 miles (5 km) west-northwest of downtown Boston, and extending to the surrounding Harvard Square neighborhood. The Yard houses several Harvard buildings, including four of the university's libraries, Houghton, Lamont, Pusey, and Widener. Also on Harvard Yard are Massachusetts Hall, built between 1718 and 1720 and the university's oldest still standing building, Memorial Church, and University Hall
Harvard Yard and adjacent areas include the main academic buildings of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including Sever Hall, Harvard Hall, and freshman dormitories. Upperclassmen live in the twelve residential houses, located south of Harvard Yard near the Charles River and on Radcliffe Quadrangle, which formerly housed Radcliffe College students. Each house is a community of undergraduates, faculty deans, and resident tutors, with its own dining hall, library, and recreational facilities.
Also on the main campus in Cambridge are the Law, Divinity (theology), Engineering and Applied Science, Design (architecture), Education, Kennedy (public policy), and Extension schools, and Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Radcliffe Yard. Harvard also has commercial real estate holdings in Cambridge.
Harvard Business School, Harvard Innovation Labs, and many athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located on a 358-acre (145 ha) campus in the Allston section of Boston across the John W. Weeks Bridge, which crosses the Charles River and connects the Allston and Cambridge campuses.
The university is actively expanding into Allston, where it now owns more land than in Cambridge. Plans include new construction and renovation for the Business School, a hotel and conference center, graduate student housing, Harvard Stadium, and other athletics facilities.
In 2021, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences expanded into the new Allston-based Science and Engineering Complex (SEC), which is more than 500,000 square feet in size. SEC is adjacent to the Enterprise Research Campus, the Business School, and Harvard Innovation Labs, and designed to encourage technology- and life science-focused startups and collaborations with mature companies.
The university's schools of Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Public Health are located on a 21-acre (8.5 ha) campus in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area in Boston, about 3.3 miles (5.3 km) south of the Cambridge campus.
Several Harvard-affiliated hospitals and research institutes are also in Longwood, including Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children's Hospital, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, Joslin Diabetes Center, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Additional affiliates, including Massachusetts General Hospital, are located throughout Greater Boston.
Harvard owns Dumbarton Oaks, a research library in Washington, D.C., Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, Concord Field Station in Estabrook Woods in Concord, Massachusetts, the Villa I Tatti research center in Florence, Italy, and the Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece. The Harvard Shanghai Center in Shanghai, China, and Arnold Arboretum in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.
Harvard is governed by a combination of its Board of Overseers and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, which is also known as the Harvard Corporation. These two bodies, in turn, appoint the President of Harvard University.
There are 16,000 staff and faculty, including 2,400 professors, lecturers, and instructors.
As of 2025, Harvard differs radically from its peer universities in two important ways. First, Harvard does not make its governing statutes publicly available, meaning that members of the Harvard community interested in reform must first persuade the university to give them a copy of those documents. Second, Harvard does not have an academic senate like most of its peers, although it is currently attempting to create one.
Harvard has the largest university endowment in the world, valued at about $50.7 billion as of 2023.
During the recession of 2007–2009, it suffered significant losses that forced large budget cuts, in particular temporarily halting construction on the Allston Science Complex. The endowment has since recovered.
About $2 billion of investment income is annually distributed to fund operations. Harvard's ability to fund its degree and financial aid programs depends on the performance of its endowment; a poor performance in fiscal year 2016 forced a 4.4% cut in the number of graduate students funded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Endowment income is critical, as only 22% of revenue is from students' tuition, fees, room, and board.
Since the 1970s, several student-led campaigns have advocated divesting Harvard's endowment from controversial holdings, including investments in South Africa during apartheid, Sudan during the Darfur genocide, and tobacco, fossil fuel, and private prison industries.
In the late 1980s, during the disinvestment from South Africa movement, student activists erected a symbolic shanty town on Harvard Yard and blockaded a speech by South African Vice Consul Duke Kent-Brown.
In response to pressure, the university eventually reduced its South African holdings by $230 million out of a total of $400 million between 1986 and 1987.
Harvard is a large, highly residential research university offering 50 undergraduate majors, 134 graduate degrees, and 32 professional degrees. During the 2018–2019 academic year, Harvard granted 1,665 baccalaureate degrees, 1,013 graduate degrees, and 5,695 professional degrees.
Harvard College, the four-year, full-time undergraduate program, has a liberal arts and sciences focus. To graduate in the usual four years, undergraduates normally take four courses per semester. In most majors, an honors degree requires advanced coursework and a senior thesis.
Though some introductory courses have large enrollments, the median class size is 12 students.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, with an academic staff of 1,211 as of 2019, is the largest Harvard faculty, and has primary responsibility for instruction in Harvard College, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and the Division of Continuing Education, which includes Harvard Summer School and Harvard Extension School. There are nine other graduate and professional faculties and a faculty attached to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
There are four Harvard joint programs with MIT, which include the Harvard–MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, the Broad Institute, The Observatory of Economic Complexity, and edX.
The university maintains 12 schools, which include:
Harvard is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and a preeminent research university with "very high" research activity (R1) and comprehensive doctoral programs across the arts, sciences, engineering, and medicine, according to the Carnegie Classification.
The medical school consistently ranks first among medical schools for research, and biomedical research is an area of particular strength for the university. More than 11,000 faculty and 1,600 graduate students conduct research at the medical school and its 15 affiliated hospitals and research institutes. In 2019, the medical school and its affiliates attracted $1.65 billion in competitive research grants from the National Institutes of Health, more than twice that of any other university.
Harvard Library, the largest academic library in the world with 20.4 million holdings, is centered in Widener Library in Harvard Yard. It includes 25 individual Harvard libraries around the world with a combined staff of more than 800 librarians and personnel.
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. The nation's oldest collection of maps, gazetteers, and atlases is stored in Pusey Library on Harvard Yard, which is open to the public. The largest collection of East-Asian language material outside of East Asia is held in Harvard-Yenching Library.
Other major libraries in the Harvard Library system include Baker Library/Bloomberg Center at Harvard Business School, Cabot Science Library at Harvard Science Center, Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard Film Archive at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Houghton Library, and Lamont Library.
Harvard Art Museums includes three museums, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum covers Asian, Mediterranean, and Islamic art; the Busch–Reisinger Museum (formerly the Germanic Museum) covers central and northern European art; and the Fogg Museum covers Western art from the Middle Ages to the present emphasizing Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art.
Harvard Museums of Science and Culture include the Harvard Museum of Natural History, which itself includes the Harvard Mineralogical and Geological Museum, the Harvard University Herbaria featuring the Blaschka Glass Flowers exhibit, and the Museum of Comparative Zoology. Others include the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard Science Center, the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East featuring artifacts from excavations in the Middle East, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, specializing in the cultural history and civilizations of the Western Hemisphere, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, designed by Le Corbusier and housing the Harvard Film Archive, the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School's Center for the History of Medicine, and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Harvard University is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. Since its founding in 2003, the Academic Ranking of World Universities has ranked Harvard first in each of its annual rankings of the world's colleges and universities. Similarly, the Times Higher Education–QS World University Rankings, which was published from 2004 to 2009, ranked Harvard first in the world in each of its annual rankings. Since then, Harvard has been ranked first in the world each year since 2011 by its successor, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
Harvard was also ranked in the first tier of American research universities, along with Columbia, MIT, and Stanford, in the 2023 report from the Center for Measuring University Performance.
Among rankings of specific indicators, Harvard topped both the University Ranking by Academic Performance in 2019–20 and Mines ParisTech: Professional Ranking of World Universities in 2011, which measured universities' numbers of alumni holding CEO positions in Fortune Global 500 companies. According to annual polls done by The Princeton Review, Harvard is consistently among the top two most commonly named dream colleges in the United States for both students and their parents
In 2019, Harvard's engineering school was ranked the third-best school in the world for engineering and technology by Times Higher Education.
In international relations, Foreign Policy magazine ranks Harvard best in the world at the undergraduate level and second in the world at the graduate level, behind the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
The Undergraduate Council represented Harvard College undergraduate students until it was dissolved in 2022, and replaced by the Undergraduate Association. The Graduate Council represents students at all twelve graduate and professional schools, most of which also have their own student government.
The Harvard Crimson, founded in 1873 and run entirely by Harvard undergraduate students, is the university's primary student newspaper. Many notable alumni have worked at the Crimson, including two U.S. presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt (AB, 1903) and John F. Kennedy (AB 1940).
Harvard College competes in the NCAA Division I Ivy League conference. The school fields 42 intercollegiate sports teams, more than any other college in the country.
Harvard and the other seven Ivy League universities are prohibited from offering athletic scholarships. The school color is crimson.
In the NCAA Division I era, which began in 1973, Harvard Crimson teams have won five NCAA Division I championships as of 2024: men's ice hockey in 1989, women's lacrosse in 1990, women's rowing in 2003, and men's fencing in 2006 and 2024. Including the pre-NCAA era, Harvard has won 159 national championships across all sports. Its men's squash team holds the record for the most national collegiate championships in the sport. Harvard's first national championship came in 1880, when its track and field team won the national championship.
Harvard's athletic programs maintain a long-standing rivalry with Yale in all sports, especially in college football, where Harvard and Yale compete in an annual football rivalry, which has played 139 times as of 2024, dating back to its first meeting in 1875.
Every two years, Harvard and Yale track and field teams come together to compete against a combined Oxford and Cambridge team in the oldest continuous international amateur competition in the world.
In men's ice hockey, Harvard maintains a historic rivalry with Cornell, which dates back to their first meeting in 1910. The two teams play twice annually.
In men's rugby, Harvard maintains a rivalry with McGill, as demonstrated by the biennial Harvard-McGill rugby games, alternately played in Montreal and Cambridge.
Since its founding nearly four centuries ago, Harvard alumni have distinguished themselves in academia, activism, arts, athletics, business, entrepreneurship, government, international affairs, journalism, media, music, non-profit organizations, politics, public policy, science, technology, writing, and other industries and fields.
Among the world's universities and colleges, Harvard has the most U.S. presidents (eight), living billionaires (188), Nobel laureates (162), Pulitzer Prize winners (48), Fields Medal recipients (seven), Marshall scholars (252), and Rhodes Scholars (369) among its alumni. Harvard alumni also include nine Turing Award laureates, ten Academy Awards winners, and 108 Olympic medalists, including 46 gold medal winners.
Harvard's reputation as a center of elite achievement or elitist privilege has made it a frequent literary and cinematic backdrop. "In the grammar of film, Harvard has come to mean both tradition, and a certain amount of stuffiness," film critic Paul Sherman said in 2010.
In contemporary literature, Harvard University features prominently in multiple novels, including:
Harvard University features prominently in the plots of multiple major films, including: