Harvard University Blog

Harvard University that solemnized its 350th jubilee in 1986 is the oldest American university of higher learning. Established 16 years after the influx of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, it has emerged from a single master with nine students and turned into an enrollment of about 18,000 degree candidates. An extra 13,000 students are entered in several Harvard Extension School’s courses. About 14,000 people work here, comprising 2,000 persons of the faculty.
Seven American presidents were graduates of Harvard University. They are John Adams, Franklin and Theodore Delano Roosevelt, John Quincy Adams, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Rutherford B. Hayes, and George W. Bush. In addition, the faculty has trained roughly 40 Nobel prizewinners.
Harvard College was found in 1636 by selection of the General and Great Court of the Bay Colony of Massachusetts and it was named in honor of John Harvard of Charlestown, its first patron, a young minister who devised half his estate and his library to this new institution. The first scholarship fund in Harvard was made in 1643 with a present from Ann Radcliffe.
At its early years, Harvard College provided a classic academic course grounded upon the English university pattern but dependable on the prevalent Puritan philosophy of the former colonists.