The mascot for Harvard University, as of 2014, is the pilgrim John Harvard. John Harvard was the first benefactor of the university. Harvard University’s school color is crimson, which is also the name of its athletic teams.
Brown is an independent, coeducational Ivy League institution comprising undergraduate and graduate programs, plus the Alpert Medical School, School of Public Health, School of Engineering, and the School of Professional Studies. The College offers 80 concentration programs that lead to the bachelor of arts or the bachelor of science degree.
The University, which is based in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, has an enrollment of over 20,000 degree candidates, including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, plus some 30,000 other students who take credit courses, non-credit courses, and seminars. When people refer to Harvard students, often they mean the subset of roughly 6,400 students who attend Harvard College.
Harvard is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The Harvard Library—the largest academic library in the world—includes 18.9 million volumes, 174,000 serial titles, an estimated 400 million manuscript items, 10 million photographs, 56 million archived web pages, and 5.4 terabytes of born-digital archives and manuscripts.
John Harvard’s statue stands in Harvard Yard and is the third most photographed statue in the U.S. Despite its popularity, Harvard students call it the “Statue of Three Lies” because the inscription reads “John Harvard, Founder, 1638”. John Harvard was in fact not the founder but rather a benefactor who was honored in the naming of the university. Harvard was also not founded in 1638 but in 1636 and is the oldest college in the U.S. Finally, the statue is not actually a depiction of John Harvard but of a random student sculptor Daniel Chester French used as a model.
When Harvard was first founded, calculus class was not offered because it had not yet been invented. Calculus emerged in the late 1600s with the publication of “Nova Methodus” by Gottsfield Leibniz. In fact, Galileo, who died in 1642, was still alive during Harvard’s early years.
Of Harvard’s long list of past alumni are eight who have signed the Declaration of Independence including John Hanco*ck, Samuel Adams, John Adams, William Ellery, William Williams, William Hooper, Elbridge Gerry, and Robert Treat Paine. Eight seems like a magical number because eight Harvard alumni have also served as United States presidents including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush, Rutherford Hayes, and of course, Barack Obama.
