Harvard University

Harvard University may be a non-public Ivy League analysis university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established 1636, whose history, influence and wealth have created it one in every of the foremost prestigious universities within the world.

Established originally by the Massachusetts law-makers and shortly thenceforth named for John Harvard (its initial benefactor), Harvard is that the United States' oldest establishment of upper learning, and therefore the Harvard Corporation (formally, the President and Fellows of Harvard College) is its initial hired corporation. though ne'er formally connected with any denomination, the first school primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian priesthood. Its information and student body were step by step secularised throughout the eighteenth century, and by the nineteenth century Harvard had emerged because the central cultural institution among Bean Town elites. Following the yankee warfare, President Charles W. Eliot's long tenure (1869–1909) remodeled the school and connected skilled colleges into a contemporary analysis university; Harvard was a innovation member of the Association of yankee Universities in 1900. James Bryant Conant light-emitting diode the university through the good Depression and warfare II and started to reform the information and liberalize admissions once the war. The college man school became co-ed once its 1977 merger with Radcliffe school.

The University is organized into eleven separate educational units—ten colleges and therefore the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—with fieldes throughout the Bean Town metropolitan area: its 209-acre (85 ha) main campus is focused on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, some three miles (5 km) northwest of Boston; the graduate school and athletics facilities, as well as Harvard bowl, area unit situated across the river within the Allston neighborhood of Bean Town and therefore the medical, dental, and public health colleges area unit within the Longwood Medical space. Harvard has the most important monetary endowment of any educational establishment within the world, standing at $36.4 billion.

Harvard may be a giant, extremely residential analysis university. The nominal price of attending is high, however the University's giant endowment permits it to supply generous aid packages. It operates many arts, cultural, and scientific museums, aboard the Harvard Library, that is that the world's largest educational and personal library system, comprising seventy nine individual libraries with over eighteen million volumes. Harvard's alumni embrace eight U.S. presidents, many foreign heads of state, sixty two living billionaires, 335 Rhodes students, and 242 Marshall students. to this point, some one hundred fifty Nobel laureates and five Fields Medalists (when awarded) are connected as students, faculty, or staff.