When was Harvard University founded?

Harvard University was founded in 1636 by vote of the Grand and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

In 1638, it acquired the first known printing press for British North America.[20][21] In 1639, it was named Harvard College after the deceased clergyman John Harvard, a Cambridge graduate who bequeathed to the school £779 and his library containing about 400 volumes.[22] The charter to establish the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650.

A circular of 1643 stated the purpose of the school as “to advance learning and ensure its continued transmission to future generations, for fear of leaving the service of the churches to illiterate persons when our present ministers have fallen into poverty.”[23] It trained many Puritan ministers in its early years[24] and offered a classical curriculum based on the English university model‍—‌many leaders in the colony attended Cambridge University‍—‌but consistent with Puritan principles. Harvard University has never affiliated itself with any particular denomination, although many of its early graduates went on to become clergy in the Congregationalist and Unitarian churches.[25]

Incres Mather served as president from 1681 to 1701, and in 1708, John Harvard became its first president who was not also a clergyman, marking a shift in the college away from puritanism and toward intellectual independence.[26]

19th century

Statue of John Harvard, Harvard Yard
In the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideas of reason and free will spread among ministers in religious congregations, putting these ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditional Calvinist parties.[27]:1–4When Hollis’s professor of theology, David Tappan, died in 1803, he died President Joseph Willard A year later, a struggle broke out over their replacement. They elected Henry Ware to the Hollis presidency in 1805, and appointed the liberal Samuel Weber to the presidency two years later, marking a shift from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal ideas, Arminian.[27]:4–5[28]: 24

President Charles William Eliot, 1869–1909, eliminated the preferred position of Christian religious education from the school curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. Although Eliot was the decisive figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education but by Unitarian Transcendentalist philosophical beliefs influenced by William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson.[29]

20th century

Watercolor landscape by Richard Sand, 1906, view from the northeast.[30]
In the twentieth century, Harvard’s reputation as a thriving endowment grew and prominent professors expanded the university’s reach. Rapid growth continued to flourish as new graduate schools were established and the University College expanded. Radcliffe College was then founded in 1879 as the women’s counterpart to Harvard College, and became one of the most prominent women’s schools in the United States, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.[10]

Harvard’s student body in the first decades of the century was predominantly “Protestants of old stock and high standing, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.” The 1923 proposal was rejected by President A. Lawrence Lowell urged that the number of Jews be limited to 15% of undergraduates, but Lowell banned blacks from freshmen seats.