University of Chicago

             

                  University of chicagao is private, co educational university, located on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, U.S. One of the United States’s most outstanding universities.

 This university is founded in 1890 by the endowment of John D. Rockefeller. William Rainey Harper, president of the university from 1891 to 1906, did much to establish what has come to be regarded as the traditional outlook and character of the university. University of Chicago is Internationally recognized as a centre for research and advanced study, it was also a pioneer in adult education and has influenced undergraduate programs  through its “Chicago plan,” which was designed to ensure a broad-based education. Under the administration of Robert M. Hutchins, president from 1929 to 1945 and chancellor from 1945 to 1951, the college attracted national attention for such innovative policies as measuring student achievement by comprehensive examinations and stressing the reading of “Great Books.” Total enrollment exceeds 14,000.

        In 1892 it established the United States’s first department of sociology. In 1942 it was the site of the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, achieved under the direction of the physicist Enrico Fermi. Other notable achievements by Chicago scholars include the development of carbon-14 dating (1946) and the isolation and first weighing of the element plutonium (1942). The university also lent its name to the Chicago school of economics, which took a neoclassical approach emphasizing the free market; associated with economics professors Frank Hyneman Knight and Jacob Viner, the university trained several future Nobel Prize recipients, including Milton Friedman and James Buchanan. More than 80 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university.

The university includes an undergraduate college, four graduate divisions (biological sciences, humanities, physical sciences, and social sciences), the Graham School of General Studies (continuing education), and six graduate professional schools (Divinity School, Graduate School of Business, Law School, Pritzker School of Medicine, School of Social Service Administration, and Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies). It has a number of centres for advanced scholarship and research, including the Oriental Institute (ancient Middle Eastern studies); the Computation Institute; the James Franck Institute; the Enrico Fermi Institute; the National Opinion Research Center; and the Center for International Studies. Under contract with the U.S. government, the university operates theArgonne National Laboratory, southwest of the city. The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, begun in 1896 by American educator John Dewey, offer a progressive education program for students from kindergarten through high school. Cultural institutions located on or near campus include the Museum of Science and Industry, the DuSable Museum of African American History, the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, and the Frederick C. Robie House (1909; designed by Frank Lloyd Wright).

Harvard University (USA)

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.