[1] The statement of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (ii. 22) that the
haruspices were instituted by Romulus is due to his confusing them
with the augurs.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, the oldest of American educational institutions,
established at Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1636 the General Court of
the colony voted L400 towards "a schoale or colledge," which in the next
year was ordered to be at "New Towne." In memory of the English
university where many (probably some seventy) of the leading men of the
colony had been educated, the township was named Cambridge in 1638. In
the same year John Harvard (1607-1638), a Puritan minister lately come
to America, a bachelor and master of Emmanuel college, Cambridge, dying
in Charlestown (Mass.), bequeathed to the wilderness seminary half his
estate (L780) and some three hundred books; and the college, until then
unorganized, was named Harvard College (1639) in his honour. Its history
is unbroken from 1640, and its first commencement was held in 1642. The
spirit of the founders is beautifully expressed in the words of a
contemporary letter which are carved on the college gates: "After God
had carried us safe to New-England, and wee had builded our houses,
provided necessaries for our liveli-hood, rear'd convenient places for
Gods worship, and setled the Civill Government; One of the next things
we longed for, and looked after was 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." The
college charter of 1650 dedicated it to "the advancement of all good
literature, arts, and sciences," and "the education of the English and
Indian youth ... in knowledge and godlynes." The second building (1654)
on the college grounds was called "the Indian College." In it was set up
the College press, which since 1638 had been in the president's house,
and here, it is believed, was printed the translation of the Bible
(1661-1663) by John Eliot into the language of the natives, with primer,
catechisms, grammars, tracts, &c. A fair number of Indians were
students, but only one, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, took a bachelor's degree
(1665). By generous aid received from abroad for this special object,
the college was greatly helped in its infancy.
The charter of 1650 has been in the main, and uninterruptedly since
1707, the fundamental source of authority in the administration of the
university. It created a co-optating corporation consisting of the
president, treasurer and five fellows, who formally initiate
administrative measures, control the college funds, and appoint officers
of instruction and government; subject, however, to confirmation by the
Board of Overseers (established in 1642), which has a revisory power
over all acts of the corporation. Circumstances gradually necessitated
ordinary government by the resident teachers; and to-day the various
faculties, elaborately organized, exercise immediate government and
discipline over all the students, and individually or in the general
university council consider questions of policy. The Board of Overseers
was at first jointly representative of state and church. The former, as
founder and patron, long regarded Harvard as a state institution,
controlling or aiding it through the legislature and the overseers; but
the controversies and embarrassments incident to legislative action
proved prejudicial to the best interests of the college, and its organic
connexion with the state was wholly severed in 1866. Financial aid and
practical dependence had ceased some time earlier; indeed, from the very
beginning, and with steadily increasing preponderance, Harvard has been
sustained and fostered by private munificence rather than by public
money. The last direct subsidy from the state determined in 1824,
although state aid was afterwards given to the Agassiz museum, later
united with the university. The church was naturally sponsor for the
early college. The changing composition of its Board of Overseers marked
its liberation first from clerical and later from political control;
since 1865 the board has been chosen by the alumni (non-residents of
Massachusetts being eligible since 1880), who therefore really control
the university. When the state ceased to repress effectually the rife
speculation characteristic of the first half of the seventeenth century,
in religion as in politics, and in America as in England, the unity of
Puritanism gave way to a variety of intense sectarianisms, and this, as
also the incoming of Anglican churchmen, made the old faith of the
college insecure. President Henry Dunster (c. 1612-1659), the first
president, was censured by the magistrates and removed from office for
questioning infant baptism. The conservatives, who clung to pristine and
undiluted Calvinism, sought to intrench themselves in Harvard,
especially in the Board of Overseers. The history of the college from
about 1673 to 1725 was exceedingly troubled. Increase and Cotton Mather,
forceful but bigoted, were the bulwarks of reaction and fomenters of
discord. One episode in the struggle was the foundation and
encouragement of Yale College by the reactionaries of New England as a
truer "school of the prophets" (Cotton Mather being particularly zealous
in its interests), after they had failed to secure control of the
government of Harvard. It represented conservative secession. In 1792
the first layman was chosen to the corporation; in 1805 a Unitarian
became professor of theology; in 1843 the board of overseers was opened
to clergymen of all denominations; in 1886 attendance on prayers by the
students ceased to be compulsory. Thus Harvard, in response to changing
ideas and conditions, grew away from the ideas of its founders.
Harvard, her alumni, and her faculty have been very closely connected
with American letters, not only in the colonial period, when the
Mathers, Samuel Sewall and Thomas Prince were important names, or in the
revolutionary and early national epoch with the Adamses, Fisher Ames,
Joseph Dennie and Robert Treat Paine, but especially in the second third
of the 19th century, when the great New England movements of
Unitarianism and Transcendentalism were led by Harvard graduates. In
1805 Henry Ware (1764-1845) was elected the first anti-Trinitarian to be
Hollis professor of divinity, and this marked Harvard's close connexion
with Unitarianism, in the later history of which Ware, his son Henry
(1794-1843), and Andrews Norton (1786-1852), all Harvard alumni and
professors, and Joseph Buckminster (1751-1812) and William Ellery
Channing were leaders of the conservative Unitarians, and Joseph Stevens
Buckminster (1784-1812), James Freeman Clarke, and Theodore Parker were
liberal leaders. Of the "Transcendentalists," Emerson, Francis Henry
Hedge (1805-1890), Clarke, Convers Francis (1795-1863), Parker, Thoreau
and Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) were Harvard graduates.
Longfellow's professorship at Harvard identified him with it rather than
with Bowdoin; Oliver Wendell Holmes was professor of anatomy and
physiology at Harvard in 1847-1882; and Lowell, a Harvard alumnus, was
Longfellow's successor in 1855-1886 as Smith Professor of the French and
Spanish languages and literatures. Ticknor and Charles Eliot Norton are
other important names in American literary criticism. The historians
Sparks, Bancroft, Hildreth, Palfrey, Prescott, Motley and Parkman were
graduates of Harvard, as were Edward Everett, Charles Sumner and Wendell
Phillips.
In organization and scope of effort Harvard has grown, especially after
1869, under the direction of President Charles W. Eliot, to be in the
highest sense a university; but the "college" proper, whose end is the
liberal culture of undergraduates, continues to be in many ways the
centre of university life, as it is the embodiment of university
traditions. The medical school (in Boston) dates from 1782, the law
school from 1817, the divinity school[1] (though instruction in theology
was of course given from the foundation of the college) from 1819, and
the dental school (in Boston) from 1867. The Bussey Institution at
Jamaica Plain was established in 1871 as an undergraduate school of
agriculture, and reorganized in 1908 for advanced instruction and
research in subjects relating to agriculture and horticulture. The
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences dates from 1872, the Graduate
School of Applied Science (growing out of the Lawrence Scientific
School) from 1906, and the Graduate School of Business Administration
(which applies to commerce the professional methods used in
post-graduate schools of medicine, law, &c.) from 1908. The Lawrence
Scientific School, established in 1847, was practically abolished in
1907-1908, when its courses were divided between the College (which
thereafter granted a degree of S.B.) and the Graduate School of Applied
Science, which was established in 1906 and gives professional degrees in
civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, mining, metallurgy,
architecture, landscape architecture, forestry, applied physics, applied
chemistry, applied zoology and applied geology. A school of veterinary
medicine, established in 1882, was discontinued in 1901. The university
institutions comprise the botanic garden (1807) and the (Asa) Gray
herbarium (1864); the Arnold arboretum (1872), at Jamaica Plain, for the
study of arboriculture, forestry and dendrology; the university museum
of natural history, founded in 1859 by Louis Agassiz as a museum of
comparative zoology, enormously developed by his son, Alexander Agassiz,
and transferred to the university in 1876, though under an independent
faculty; the Peabody museum of American archaeology and ethnology,
founded in 1866 by George Peabody; the William Hayes Fogg art museum
(1895); the Semitic museum (1889); the Germanic Museum (1902),
containing rich gifts from Kaiser Wilhelm II., the Swiss government, and
individuals and societies of Germanic lands; the social museum (1906);
and the astronomical observatory (1843; location 42 deg. 22' 48" N. lat.,
71 deg. 8' W. long.), which since 1891 has maintained a station near
Arequipa, Peru. A permanent summer engineering camp is maintained at
Squam Lake, New Hampshire. In Petersham, Massachusetts, is the Harvard
Forest, about 2000 acres of hilly wooded country with a stand in 1908 of
10,000,000 ft. B.M. of merchantable timber (mostly white pine); this
forest was given to the university in 1907, and is an important part of
the equipment of the division of forestry. The university library is the
largest college library in the country, and from its slow and competent
selection is of exceptional value. In 1908 it numbered, including the
various special libraries, 803,800 bound volumes, about 496,600
pamphlets, and 27,450 maps. Some of its collections are of great value
from associations or special richness, such as Thomas Carlyle's
collection on Cromwell and Frederick the Great; the collection on
folk-lore and medieval romances, supposed to be the largest in existence
and including the material used by Bishop Percy in preparing his
_Reliques_; and that on the Ottoman empire. The law library has been
described by Professor A. V. Dicey of Oxford as "the most perfect
collection of the legal records of the English people to be found in any
part of the English-speaking world." There are department libraries at
the Arnold arboretum, the Gray herbarium, the Bussey Institution, the
astronomical observatory, the dental school, the medical school, the law
school, the divinity school, the Peabody museum, and the museum of
comparative zoology. In 1878 the library published the first of a
valuable series of _Bibliographical Contributions_. Other publications
of the university (apart from annual reports of various departments)
are: the _Harvard Oriental Series_ (started 1891), _Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology_ (1890), _Harvard Theological Review_ (1907), the
_Harvard Law Review_ (1889), _Harvard Historical Studies_ (1897),
_Harvard Economic Studies_ (1906), _Harvard Psychological Studies_
(1903), the _Harvard Engineering Journal_ (1902), the _Bulletin_ (1874)
of the Bussey Institution, the _Archaeological and Ethnological Papers_
(1888) of the Peabody museum, and the Bulletin (1863), _Contributions
and Memoirs_ (1865) of the museum of comparative zoology. The students'
publications include the _Crimson_ (1873), a daily newspaper; the
_Advocate_ (1831), a literary bi-weekly; the _Lampoon_ (1876), a comic
bi-weekly; and the _Harvard Monthly_ (1885), a literary monthly. The
_Harvard Bulletin_, a weekly, and the _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_
(1892), a quarterly, are published chiefly for the alumni.
In 1908-1909 there were 743 officers of instruction and administration
(including those for Radcliffe) and 5250 students (1059 in 1869), the
latter including 2238 in the college, 1641 in the graduate and
professional schools, and 1332 in the summer school. Radcliffe College,
for women, had 449 additional students. The whole number of degrees
conferred up to 1905 was 31,805 (doctors of science and of philosophy by
examination, 408; masters of arts and of science by examination, 1759).
The conditions of the time when Harvard was a theological seminary for
boys, governed like a higher boarding school, have left traces still
discernible in the organization and discipline, though no longer in the
aims of the college. The average age of students at entrance, only 14
years so late as 1820, had risen by 1890 to 19 years, making possible
the transition to the present regime of almost entire liberty of life
and studies without detriment, but with positive improvement, to the
morals of the student body. A strong development toward the university
ideal marked the opening of the 19th century, especially in the widening
of courses, the betterment of instruction, and the suggestions of
quickening ideas of university freedom, whose realization, along with
others, has come since 1870. The elimination of the last vestiges of
sectarianism and churchly discipline, a lessening of parietal oversight,
a lopping off of various outgrown colonial customs, a complete
reconstruction of professional standards and methods, the development of
a great graduate school in arts and sciences based on and organically
connected with the undergraduate college, a great improvement in the
college standard of scholarship, the allowance of almost absolute
freedom to students in the shaping of their college course (the
"elective" system), and very remarkable material prosperity marked the
administration (1860-1909) of President Eliot. In the readjustment in
the curricula of American colleges of the elements of professional
training and liberal culture Harvard has been bold in experiment and
innovation. With Johns Hopkins University she has led the movement that
has transformed university education, and her influence upon secondary
education in America has been incomparably greater than that of any
other university. Her entrance requirements to the college and to the
schools of medicine, law, dentistry and divinity have been higher than
those of any other American university. A bachelor's degree is
requisite for entrance to the professional schools (except that of
dentistry), and the master's degree (since 1872) is given to students
only for graduate work in residence, and rarely to other persons as an
honorary degree. In scholarship and in growth of academic freedom
Germany has given the quickening impulse. This influence began with
George Ticknor and Edward Everett, who were trained in Germany, and was
continued by a number of eminent German scholars, some driven into exile
for their liberalism, who became professors in the second half of the
19th century, and above all by the many members of the faculty still
later trained in German universities. The ideas of recognizing special
students and introducing the elective system were suggested in 1824,
attaining establishment even for freshmen by 1885, the movement
characterizing particularly the years 1865-1885. The basis of the
elective system (as in force in 1910) is freedom in choice of studies
within liberal limits; and, as regards admission to college[2]
(completely established 1891), the idea that the admission is of minds
for the quality of their training and not for their knowledge of
particular subjects, and that any subject may be acceptable for such
training if followed with requisite devotion and under proper methods.
Except for one course in English in the Freshman year, and one course in
French or German for those who do not on entrance present both of these
languages, no study is prescribed, but the student is compelled to
select a certain number of courses in some one department or field of
learning, and to distribute the remainder among other departments, the
object being to secure a systematic education, based on the principle of
knowing a little of everything and something well.
The material equipment of Harvard is very rich. In 1909 it included
invested funds of $22,716,760 ($2,257,990 in 1869) and lands and
buildings valued at $12,000,000 at least. In 1908-1909 an income of more
than $130,000 was distributed in scholarships, fellowships, prizes and
other aids to students. The yearly income available for immediate use
from all sources in 1899-1904 averaged $1,074,229, of which $452,760
yearly represented gifts. The total gifts, for funds and for current
use, in the same years aggregated $6,152,988. The income in 1907-1908
was $1,846,976; $241,924 was given for immediate use, and $449,822 was
given for capital. The medical school is well endowed and is housed in
buildings (1906) on Longwood Avenue, Boston; the gifts for its buildings
and endowments made in 1901-1902 aggregate $5,000,000. Among the
university buildings are two dining-balls accommodating some 2500
students, a theatre for public ceremonies, a chapel, a home for
religious societies, a club-home (the Harvard Union) for graduates and
undergraduates, an infirmary, gymnasium, boat houses and large
playgrounds, with a concrete stadium capable of seating 27,000
spectators. Massachusetts Hall (1720) is the oldest building. University
Hall (1815), the administration building, dignified, of excellent
proportions and simple lines, is a good example of the work of Charles
Bulfinch. Memorial Hall (1874), an ambitious building of cathedral
suggestion, commemorates the Harvard men who fell in the Civil War, and
near it is an ideal statue (1884) of John Harvard by Daniel C. French.
The medical and dental schools are in Boston, and the Bussey Institution
and Arnold Arboretum are at Jamaica Plain.
RADCLIFFE COLLEGE, essentially a part of Harvard, dates from the
beginning of systematic instruction of women by members of the Harvard
faculty in 1879, the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women
being formally organized in 1882. The present name was adopted in 1894
in honour of Ann Radcliffe, Lady Mowlson (_ob. c._ 1661), widow of Sir
Thomas Mowlson, alderman and (1634) lord mayor of London, who in 1643
founded the first scholarship in Harvard College. From 1894 also dates
the present official connexion of Radcliffe with Harvard. The
requirements for admission and for degrees are the same as in Harvard
(whose president countersigns all diplomas), and the president and
fellows of Harvard control absolutely the administration of the college,
although it has for immediate administration a separate government.
Instruction is given by members of the university teaching force, who
repeat in Radcliffe many of the Harvard courses. Many advanced courses
in Harvard, and to a certain extent laboratory facilities, are directly
accessible to Radcliffe students, and they have unrestricted access to
the library.
The presidents of Harvard have been: Henry Dunster (1640-1654); Charles
Chauncy (1654-1672); Leonard Hoar (1672-1675); Urian Oakes (1675-1681);
John Rogers (1682-1684); Increase Mather (1685-1701); Charles Morton
(vice-president) (1697-1698); Samuel Willard (1700-1707); John Leverett
(1708-1724); Benjamin Wadsworth (1725-1737); Edward Holyoke (1737-1769);
Samuel Locke (1770-1773); Samuel Langdon (1774-1780); Joseph Willard
(1781-1804); Samuel Webber (1806-1810); John Thornton Kirkland
(1810-1828); Josiah Quincy (1829-1845); Edward Everett (1846-1849);
Jared Sparks (1849-1853); James Walker (1853-1860); Cornelius Conway
Felton (1860-1862); Thomas Hill (1862-1868); Charles William Eliot
(1869-1909); Abbott Lawrence Lowell (appointed 1909).
AUTHORITIES.--Benjamin Peirce, _A History of Harvard University_
1636-1775 (Boston, 1883); Josiah Quincy, _A History of Harvard
University_ (2 vols., Boston, 1840); Samuel A. Eliot, _Harvard College
and its Benefactors_ (Boston, 1848); H. C. Shelley, _John Harvard and
his Times_ (Boston, 1907); _The Harvard Book_ (2 vols., Cambridge,
1874); G. Birkbeck Hill, _Harvard College, by an Oxonian_ (New York,
1894); William R. Thayer, "History and Customs of Harvard University,"
in _Universities and their Sons_, vol. i. (Boston, 1898); _Official
Guide to Harvard_, and the various other publications of the
university; also the _Harvard Graduates' Magazine_ (1892 sqq.).