Dating back to 1636, Harvard University is the oldest
university in the US and is regarded as one of the most prestigious in the
world.
It was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard, who
left his library and half his estate to the institution when he died in 1638.
The private Ivy League institution has connections to more
than 45 Nobel laureates, over 30 heads of state and 48 Pulitzer prizewinners.
It has more than 323,000 living alumni, including over 271,000 in the US and
nearly 52,000 in 201 other countries. Thirteen US presidents have honorary
degrees from the institution; the most recent of these was awarded to John F.
Kennedy in 1956.
Faculty members who have been awarded a Nobel prize in
recent years include chemist Martin Karplus and economist Alvin Roth, while
notable alumni who were given the honour include former US vice-president Al
Gore, who won the Peace Prize in 2007, and poet Seamus Heaney, who was a
professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997.
Situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard’s 5,000-acre
campus houses 12 degree-granting schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute
for Advanced Study, two theatres and five museums. It is also home to the
largest academic library in the world, with 20.4 million volumes, 180,000
serial titles, an estimated 400 million manuscript items, 10 million
photographs, 124 million archived web pages and 5.4 terabytes of born-digital
archives and manuscripts.
There are more than 400 student organisations on campus, and
Harvard’s medical school is connected to 10 hospitals.
The university receives one of the largest financial
endowments of any higher education institution in the world; it created $1.5
billion in the fiscal year ended June 2013 – more than a third of Harvard’s
total operating revenue in that year.
Harvard’s official colour is crimson, following a vote in
1910, after two student rowers provided crimson scarves to their teammates so
that spectators could differentiate the university’s team during a regatta in
1858.
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