Harvard University

:Harvard redirects here. For information about undergraduate education at Harvard University, see Harvard College. For other uses of the name Harvard, see Harvard (disambiguation).

Institution

A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. In the faculty reputational surveys (peer assessment scores) which form a key component of the college and university rankings published annually by US News & World Report, Harvard consistently receives the highest rating of 4.9/5.0, along with Yale, Princeton, and MIT. The 2004 Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings ranked Harvard University in first place{{ref|worldrankings}}, as did the 2005 World Universities Rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm

Related Topics:
College and university rankings - US News & World Report - Yale - Princeton - MIT - Times Higher Education Supplement - Shanghai Jiao Tong University

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Admission to Harvard is extremely competitive. It had the highest selectivity score according to the 2006 US News & World Report ranking. Harvard's overall undergraduate acceptance rate for 2005 was 9.1%.{{ref|acceptancerate}} The 2006 figures from U.S. News indicated that the business school admitted 14.3% of its applicants, the engineering division admitted 12.5%, the law school admitted 11.3%, the education school admitted 11.2%, and the medical school admitted 4.9%.{{ref|usnews}}

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The school color is a shade richer than red but brighter than burgundy, referred to as 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 president, bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.

Related Topics:
Crimson - Newspaper - The Harvard Crimson - Magenta - 1875 - 1858 - Charles William Eliot

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Harvard today has nine faculties, listed below in order of foundation:

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• The Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its subfaculty, the Division 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 Extension School and Harvard Summer School
• The Faculty of Medicine, including the Medical School (1782) and the Harvard School of Dental Medicine (1867, the first U.S. dental school).
• Harvard Divinity School (1816)
• Harvard Law School (1817)
• Harvard Business School (1908)
• The Graduate School of Design (1914)
• The Graduate School of Education (1920)
• The School of Public Health (1922)
• The John F. Kennedy School of Government (1936)

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

Related Topics:
1999 - Radcliffe College - Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

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The Harvard University Library System, centered in Widener Library and comprising over 90 individual libraries and over 14.5 million volumes, is the largest university library system in the world and, after the Library of Congress, the second-largest library system in the United States. Harvard operates several art museums, including the Fogg Museum of Art (with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with particular strengths in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art); the Adolph Busch Museum (formerly Busch-Reisinger Museum, formerly Germanic Museum) (central and northern European art; and a Flentrop pipe organ, familiar from recordings by E. Power Biggs); the Sackler Museum (ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art); the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous glass flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and the Semitic Museum.

Related Topics:
Widener Library - Library of Congress - Fogg Museum of Art - Early Renaissance - Pre-Raphaelite - Adolph Busch Museum - E. Power Biggs

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Prominent student organizations at Harvard include the aforementioned Crimson; the Harvard Lampoon, a humor magazine; the Harvard Advocate, one of the nation's oldest literary magazines; and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, which produces an annual burlesque and celebrates notable actors at its Man of the Year and Woman of the Year ceremonies; and the Harvard Glee Club, the oldest college chorus in America, which is currently in the midst of festivities to celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2008. The Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s. Let's Go Travel Guides, a leading travel guide series and a division of Harvard Student Agencies, is run solely by Harvard students who research and edit new versions of the books every summer.

Related Topics:
Harvard Lampoon - Humor - Harvard Advocate - Hasty Pudding Theatricals - Man of the Year - Woman of the Year - Harvard Glee Club - 2008 - Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra - 1808 - Let's Go Travel Guides

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The radio station WHRB (95.3FM Cambridge), is run exclusively by Harvard students, and is given space on the Harvard campus in the basement of Pennypacker Hall, a freshman dormitory. Known throughout the Boston metropolitan area for its classical, jazz, underground rock and blues programming, WHRB is also home of the notorious radio "Orgy" format, where the entire catalog of a certain band, record, or artist is played in sequence.

Related Topics:
WHRB - Boston

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Harvard's athletic rivalry with Yale is intense in every sport in which they meet, coming to a climax in their annual football meeting, which dates to 1875 and is usually called simply The Game as a sign of its importance. 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, today Harvard does field top teams in several other sports, such as ice hockey, crew, and squash. As of 2003, there were 43 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than at any other college in the country.

Related Topics:
Yale - 1875 - The Game - Football - Ice hockey - Crew - Squash - Varsity - Sports

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Harvard College has traditionally drawn many of its students from private schools, though today the majority of undergraduates come from public schools across the United States and around the globe.

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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 mooted and at one point officially agreed upon (ultimately cancelled 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 Harvard-MIT Data Center and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. In addition, students at the two schools can cross-register without any additional fees, for credits toward their own school's degrees. The city of Cambridge is notable for the presence of two major research universities within two miles (3.2 km) of each other.

Related Topics:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Cross-register

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Over its history, Harvard has graduated many famous alumni, along with a few infamous ones. Among the best-known are political leaders John Hancock, John Adams, and John F. Kennedy; philosopher Henry David Thoreau and author Ralph Waldo Emerson; poets Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings; composer Leonard Bernstein; actor Jack Lemmon; architect Philip Johnson; civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois; and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Among its most famous faculty members are biologists James D. Watson and Edward Osborne Wilson.For a fuller listing of famous faculty and alumni (including all seven US Presidents with degrees from the college or one of the graduate schools), see List of Harvard University people.

Related Topics:
John Hancock - John Adams - John F. Kennedy - Henry David Thoreau - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Wallace Stevens - T. S. Eliot - E. E. Cummings - Leonard Bernstein - Jack Lemmon - Philip Johnson - W. E. B. Du Bois - Unabomber - Ted Kaczynski - James D. Watson - Edward Osborne Wilson - US Presidents - List of Harvard University people

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Harvard affiliates' politics are generally liberal (center-left): Richard Nixon famously attacked it as the "Kremlin on the Charles". In 2004, the Harvard Crimson found that Harvard undergraduates favored Kerry over Bush by 73% to 19%, consistent with Kerry's margin in major eastern cities.{{ref|uselection2004}} At the same time, Harvard has been called the "incubator for an American ruling class" (Douthat)

Related Topics:
Liberal - Richard Nixon - Kremlin - Charles - 2004 - Harvard Crimson - Kerry - Bush - Douthat

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and "hostile to progressive intellectuals". (Trumpbour)

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President George W. Bush, in fact, graduated from the Harvard Business School. Indeed, there are both prominent conservative and prominent liberal voices among the faculty of the various schools.

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Though Harvard has been featured in many films, including Legally Blonde, The Firm, Good Will Hunting, With Honors, " How High", and Harvard Man, the University has not allowed any movies to be filmed on its campus since Love Story in the 1960s. Many movies have characters identified as Harvard graduates, including A Few Good Men, American Psycho, and Two Weeks Notice.

Related Topics:
Legally Blonde - The Firm - Good Will Hunting - With Honors - How High - Harvard Man - Love Story - 1960s - A Few Good Men - American Psycho - Two Weeks Notice

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