Live in USA
Established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature and soon thereafter
named for John Harvard (its first benefactor), Harvard is the United States'
oldest institution of higher learning,11 and the Harvard Corporation (formally,
the President and Fellows of Harvard College) is its first chartered
corporation. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early
College primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Its
curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century,
and by the 19th century Harvard had emerged as the central cultural
establishment among Boston elites.1213 Following the American Civil War,
President Charles W. Eliot's long tenure (1869¨C1909) transformed the college and
affiliated professional schools into a modern research university; Harvard was a
founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.14 James
Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II
and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The
undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe
College.
The University is organized into eleven separate academic units¡ªten
faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study¡ªwith campuses
throughout the Boston metropolitan area:15 its 209-acre (85 ha) main campus is
centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) northwest
of Boston; the business school and athletics facilities, including Harvard
Stadium, are located across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of
Boston and the medical, dental, and public health schools are in the Longwood
Medical Area.5 Eight U.S. presidents have been graduates, and some 150 Nobel
Laureates have been affiliated as students, faculty, or staff. Harvard is also
the alma mater of 62 living billionaires and 335 Rhodes Scholars, the most in
the country.1617 The Harvard University Library is also the largest academic
library in the United States.
Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment
ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among
Congregationalist ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in
tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties.25:1¨C4 When the Hollis
Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard
Joseph Willard died a year later, in 1804, a struggle broke out over their
replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, and the liberal
Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency of Harvard two years later, which
signaled the changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional ideas at
Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas (defined by traditionalists
as Unitarian ideas).25:4¨C526:24
In 1846, the natural history lectures of
Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on the campus at Harvard
College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans'
"participation in the Divine Nature" and the possibility of understanding
"intellectual existences". Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation
with intuition and the assumption that a person can grasp the "divine plan" in
all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to
matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view
of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived
from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part
of the Harvard curriculum at the time. The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to
"soar with Plato" probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard
students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John
Norrisand, in a Romantic vein, Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard
reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers
were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the "official
philosophy" of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school.
Download