Harvard University: history and prestige

Party at Harvard Square
Originally uploaded by Dennisworld

Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature,[2] Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is also the first and oldest corporation in North America.[4]

The institution was named Harvard College after a young clergyman named John Harvard—a graduate of England's Emmanuel College, Cambridge — who bequeathed the College his library of four hundred books and £779 (which was half of his estate).

Harvard's library collection contains more than 15 million volumes,[6] making it the largest academic library in the United States, and the fourth among the five "mega-libraries" of the world (after the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the French Bibliothèque nationale, but ahead of the New York Public Library).[7][8] Harvard is consistently ranked number one in international college and university rankings,[9][10][11][12][13] and has the largest financial endowment of any non-profit organization except for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, standing at $38.7 billion as of 2008.

In 1999, Radcliffe College, founded in 1879 as the "Harvard Annex for Women",[5] merged formally with Harvard University.

In the mid 1800's parents began 'sending their children to Harvard College for the sake of its social advantages'".[17] Harvard was also an early leader in admitting ethnic and religious minorities. Stephen Steinberg, author of The Ethnic Myth, noted that "a climate of intolerance prevailed in many Eastern colleges long before discriminatory quotas were contemplated" and noted that "Jews tended to avoid such campuses as Yale and Princeton, which had reputations for bigotry.... [while] under President Eliot's administration, Harvard earned a reputation as the most liberal and democratic of the Big Three, and therefore Jews did not feel that the avenue to a prestigious college was altogether closed".[18] In 1870, one year into Eliot's term, Richard Theodore Greener became the first African-American to graduate from Harvard College. Seven years later, Louis Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court, graduated from Harvard Law School.

Nevertheless, Harvard became the bastion of a distinctly Protestant elite — the so-called Boston Brahmin class — and continued to be so well into the 20th century.