IVY LEAGUE; Harvard and Yale

Hello readers, it is wonderful to meet you once again. today I would like to compile some information from different sources regarding the biggest giants of Ivy League, namely: Harvard and Yale. Why are the the biggest giants of Ivy League; simply put, they are not only two of the most famous institutes all over the world with a huge reputation to proceed with their banner, but also they are the most influential ones within the community of Ivy League. Therefore, talking about them should require special attention.

In two of my previous articles, I have described both about Harvard and Yale admission and some scholarship related facts in both of those articles. Today I am just going to compose a short introduction regarding these two institutions, as it has been demanded so by many. Please be noted that the article contents are collected from various sources and this in not any authentic article or publication. The information has been accumulated only for the benefit of the candidates and those who are eager to learn about it.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

This is the Harvard, I mean THE HARVARD we are talking about. If you don’t know this name or didn’t hear of it before, then unfortunately this article is NOT for you. I am not even going to dare to talk about the notable alumni of this institution, sorry, royalty of an institution. So, let’s check some facts out –

Established

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.

Harvard University Shields

Naming

The name Harvard comes from the college’s first benefactor, the young minister John Harvard of Charlestown. Upon his death in 1638, he left his library and half his estate to the institution established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Harvard and the Military

Members of Harvard University’s “Long Crimson Line” have served in the United States Armed Forces since before the nation’s independence. Harvard counts among its graduates 18 Medal of Honor recipients, more than any other institution of higher education except the United States Military and Naval Academies. Buildings and sites around campus are daily reminders of Harvard’s deep military history. General George Washington kept headquarters at Wadsworth House before taking command of the revolutionary troops in 1775, Massachusetts Hall and Harvard Hall were used as barracks, and building materials were repurposed to make musket balls during the War of Independence. Memorial Hall and Memorial Church honor the sacrifice of Harvard men and women who “freely gave their lives and fondest hopes for us and our allies that we might learn from them courage in peace to spend our lives making a better world for others.” In 2011, Harvard welcomed the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) program back to campus, followed thereafter by the full complement of Army and Air Force regiments.

Mission Statement

Harvard University (comprising the undergraduate college, the graduate schools, other academic bodies, research centers and affiliated institutions) does not have a formal mission statement.

The mission of Harvard College is to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society. We do this through our commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.

Harvard Campaign

The Harvard Campaign is designed to embrace the future and to ensure Harvard’s leadership as it approaches its fifth century of education and inquiry in the pursuit of enduring truth.

HarvardX

HarvardX is a University-wide strategic initiative, overseen by the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning (VPAL), enabling faculty to create open, online courses for on campus and global learners and advancing research in the learning sciences. To date, HarvardX has engaged more than 170 faculty across 10 schools, producing more than 100 open online courses with more than three million unique course participants. On campus, HarvardX has enabled hybrid learning in more than 40 residential courses and convened more than 600 individuals (faculty, undergraduates, graduates, technologists) in developing content, conducting research, or blending courses. A leader in advancing the science of learning, HarvardX and VPAL Research have produced more than 70 research publications and two major benchmark reports on MOOC learner demographics and behavior.

Faculty

About 2,400 faculty members and more than 10,400 academic appointments in affiliated teaching hospitals

Students

• Harvard College: 6,699
• Graduate and professional students: 13,120
• Harvard Extension School: 16,193
• Total: 36,012 students

These numbers reflect student enrollment for the 2017–18 academic year.

School Color

Crimson	PMS	CMYK	RGB	HEX
	PMS 187U PMS 1807C	C= 7 M= 94 Y= 65 K= 25	R= 165 G= 28 B= 48	A51C30

Alumni

More than 371,000 living alumni, over 279,000 in the U.S., and over 59,000 in some 202 other countries.

Honors

49 Nobel Laureates, 32 heads of state, 48 Pulitzer Prize winners

Motto

Veritas (Latin for “truth”)

Real Estate Holdings

5,457 acres

Library Collection

The Harvard Library—the largest academic library in the world—includes 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. Access to this rich collection is provided by nearly 800 library staff members who operate more than 70 separate library units.

Museums

Harvard’s museums are stewards of more than 28 million works of art, artifacts, specimens, materials, and instruments. With deep roots in scholarship and teaching, these internationally renowned collections are fundamental to the development and continuation of many disciplines. These unparalleled institutions rank alongside some of the greatest museums in the world and they are open to the public.  They welcome more than 650,000 local, national, and international visitors each year.

Faculties, Schools, and an Institute

Harvard University is made up of 11 principal academic units – ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The ten faculties oversee schools and divisions that offer courses and award academic degrees.

U.S. Presidents and Honorary Degrees

After George Washington’s Continental Army forced the British to leave Boston in March 1776, the Harvard Corporation and Overseers voted on April 3, 1776, to confer an honorary degree upon the general, who accepted it that very day (probably at his Cambridge headquarters in Craigie House). Washington next visited Harvard in 1789, as the first U.S. president.

Other U.S. presidents to receive an honorary degree include:

• 1781 John Adams
• 1787 Thomas Jefferson
• 1822 John Quincy Adams
• 1833 Andrew Jackson
• 1872 Ulysses S. Grant
• 1905 William Howard Taft
• 1907 Woodrow Wilson
• 1917 Herbert Hoover
• 1919 Theodore Roosevelt
• 1929 Franklin Delano Roosevelt
• 1946 Dwight Eisenhower
• 1956 John F. Kennedy
• 2014 George H.W. Bush

YALE UNIVERSITY

Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the “Collegiate School” was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers. It moved to New Haven in 1716 and shortly after was renamed Yale College in recognition of a gift from British East India Company governor Elihu Yale. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first Ph.D. in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Its faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.

Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut and forest and nature preserves throughout New England. The university’s assets include an endowment valued at $29.4 billion as of October 2018, the second largest endowment of any educational institution in the world. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Yale College undergraduates follow a liberal arts curriculum with departmental majors and are organized into a social system of residential colleges. Almost all members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—and some members of other faculties—teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually. Students compete intercollegiate as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.

Yale consistently ranks among the top universities in the world. As of October 2019, 62 Nobel laureates, 5 Fields Medalists and 3 Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U.S. Presidents, 19 U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 31 living billionaires and many heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, 22 Christensen Scholars, 78 MacArthur Fellows, 247 Rhodes Scholars and 119 Marshall Scholars have been affiliated with the university.

Origins

Official seal used by the College and the University
Yale traces its beginnings to “An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School”, passed by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9, 1701, while meeting in New Haven. The Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. Soon thereafter, a group of ten Congregational ministers, Samuel Andrew, Thomas Buckingham, Israel Chauncy, Samuel Mather (nephew of Increase Mather), Rev. James Noyes II (son of James Noyes), James Pierpont, Abraham Pierson, Noadiah Russell, Joseph Webb, and Timothy Woodbridge, all alumni of Harvard, met in the study of Reverend Samuel Russell in Branford, Connecticut, to pool their books to form the school’s library. The group, led by James Pierpont, is now known as “The Founders”. Originally known as the “Collegiate School”, the institution opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson, today considered the first president of Yale. Pierson lived in Killingworth (now Clinton). The school moved to Saybrook and then Wethersfield. In 1716, it moved to New Haven, Connecticut. Meanwhile, there was a rift forming at Harvard between its sixth president, Increase Mather, and the rest of the Harvard clergy, whom Mather viewed as increasingly liberal, ecclesiastically lax, and overly broad in Church polity. The feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not.

Naming and development
In 1718, at the behest of either Rector Samuel Andrew or the colony’s Governor Gurdon Saltonstall, Cotton Mather contacted the successful Boston born businessman Elihu Yale to ask him for financial help in constructing a new building for the college. Through the persuasion of Jeremiah Dummer, Elihu “Eli” Yale, who had made a fortune through trade while living in Madras as a representative of the East India Company, donated nine bales of goods, which were sold for more than £560, a substantial sum at the time. Cotton Mather suggested that the school change its name to “Yale College”. (The name Yale is the Anglicized spelling of the word Iâl, from the family estate at Plas yn Iâl near the village of Llandegla). Meanwhile, a Harvard graduate working in England convinced some 180 prominent intellectuals that they should donate books to Yale. The 1714 shipment of 500 books represented the best of modern English literature, science, philosophy and theology. It had a profound effect on intellectuals at Yale. Undergraduate Jonathan Edwards discovered John Locke’s works and developed his original theology known as the “new divinity”. In 1722 the Rector and six of his friends, who had a study group to discuss the new ideas, announced that they had given up Calvinism, become Arminians and joined the Church of England. They were ordained in England and returned to the colonies as missionaries for the Anglican faith. Thomas Clapp became president in 1745 and struggled to return the college to Calvinist orthodoxy, but he did not close the library. Other students found Deist books in the library.

Curriculum
Yale was swept up by the great intellectual movements of the period—the Great Awakening and the Enlightenment—due to the religious and scientific interests of presidents Thomas Clap and Ezra Stiles. They were both instrumental in developing the scientific curriculum at Yale, while dealing with wars, student tumults, graffiti, “irrelevance” of curricula, desperate need for endowment and fights with the Connecticut legislature. Serious American students of theology and divinity, particularly in New England, regarded Hebrew as a classical language, along with Greek and Latin, and essential for study of the Old Testament in the original words. The Reverend Ezra Stiles, president of the College from 1778 to 1795, brought with him his interest in the Hebrew language as a vehicle for studying ancient Biblical texts in their original language (as was common in other schools), requiring all freshmen to study Hebrew (in contrast to Harvard, where only upperclassmen were required to study the language) and is responsible for the Hebrew phrase אורים ותמים (Urim and Thummim) on the Yale seal. A 1746 graduate of Yale, Stiles came to the college with experience in education, having played an integral role in the founding of Brown University in addition to having been a minister. Stiles’ greatest challenge occurred in July 1779 when hostile British forces occupied New Haven and threatened to raze the College. However, Yale graduate Edmund Fanning, Secretary to the British General in command of the occupation, interceded and the College was saved. In 1803, Fanning was granted an honorary degree LL.D. for his efforts.

Campus

Yale’s central campus in downtown New Haven covers 260 acres (1.1 km2) and comprises its main, historic campus and a medical campus adjacent to the Yale–New Haven Hospital. In western New Haven, the university holds 500 acres (2.0 km2) of athletic facilities, including the Yale Golf Course. In 2008, Yale purchased the 136-acre (0.55 km2) former Bayer Pharmaceutical campus in West Haven, Connecticut, the buildings of which are now used as laboratory and research space. Yale also owns seven forests in Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire—the largest of which is the 7,840-acre (31.7 km2) Yale-Myers Forest in Connecticut’s Quiet Corner—and nature preserves including Horse Island. Yale is noted for its largely Collegiate Gothic campus as well as several iconic modern buildings commonly discussed in architectural history survey courses: Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery and Center for British Art, Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Rink and Ezra Stiles and Morse Colleges, and Paul Rudolph’s Art & Architecture Building. Yale also owns and has restored many noteworthy 19th-century mansions along Hillhouse Avenue, which was considered the most beautiful street in America by Charles Dickens when he visited the United States in the 1840s. In 2011, Travel+Leisure listed the Yale campus as one of the most beautiful in the United States. Many of Yale’s buildings were constructed in the Collegiate Gothic architecture style from 1917 to 1931, financed largely by Edward S. Harkness, including the Yale Drama School. Stone sculpture built into the walls of the buildings portray contemporary college personalities such as a writer, an athlete, a tea-drinking socialite, and a student who has fallen asleep while reading. Similarly, the decorative friezes on the buildings depict contemporary scenes such as policemen chasing a robber and arresting a prostitute (on the wall of the Law School), or a student relaxing with a mug of beer and a cigarette. The architect, James Gamble Rogers, faux-aged these buildings by splashing the walls with acid,[96] deliberately breaking their leaded glass windows and repairing them in the style of the Middle Ages, and creating niches for decorative statuary but leaving them empty to simulate loss or theft over the ages. In fact, the buildings merely simulate Middle Ages architecture, for though they appear to be constructed of solid stone blocks in the authentic manner, most actually have steel framing as was commonly used in 1930. One exception is Harkness Tower, 216 feet (66 m) tall, which was originally a free-standing stone structure. It was reinforced in 1964 to allow the installation of the Yale Memorial Carillon.

Admissions

Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library, as seen from Maya Lin’s sculpture, Women’s Table. The sculpture records the number of women enrolled at Yale over its history; female undergraduates were not admitted until 1969. Undergraduate admission to Yale College is considered “most selective” by U.S. News. In 2017, Yale accepted 2,285 students to the Class of 2021 out of 32,914 applicants, for an acceptance rate of 6.9%. 98% of students graduate within six years. Through its program of need-based financial aid, Yale commits to meet the full demonstrated financial need of all applicants. Most financial aid is in the form of grants and scholarships that do not need to be paid back to the university, and the average need-based aid grant for the Class of 2017 was $46,395. 15% of Yale College students are expected to have no parental contribution, and about 50% receive some form of financial aid. About 16% of the Class of 2013 had some form of student loan debt at graduation, with an average debt of $13,000 among borrowers. Half of all Yale undergraduates are women, more than 39% are ethnic minority U.S. citizens (19% are underrepresented minorities), and 10.5% are international students. 55% attended public schools and 45% attended private, religious, or international schools, and 97% of students were in the top 10% of their high school class. Every year, Yale College also admits a small group of non-traditional students through the Eli Whitney Students Program. In 1999, about 29% of Yale students were Jewish.

Handsome Dan

It is impossible to talk about Yale and not mention Handsome Dan in the same article. Handsome Dan is a bulldog who serves as the mascot of Yale University’s sports teams. In addition to a person wearing a costume, the position is filled by an actual bulldog, the honor (and the title “Handsome Dan”) being transferred to another upon death or retirement. Handsome Dan was selected based on his ability to tolerate bands and children, negative reaction to the color crimson and to tigers (the symbols of rival schools Harvard and Princeton respectively), bought by Yale student Andrew Barbey Graves,[1] who cleaned up the dog and named him “Handsome Dan.” Soon, Dan followed Graves everywhere around campus, including sporting events. The students quickly adopted Dan as the Yale mascot. After Graves graduated and returned to England, Dan stayed on campus with his master’s brother, William Leon Graves. Before football and baseball games would begin, Handsome Dan founded a tradition and a dynasty by being led across the field. One newspaper reported: “He was a big white bulldog, with one of the greatest faces a dog of that breed (English) ever carried”. This was not an exaggeration, as Handsome Dan was one of the finest specimens of his breed in America, and went on to win first prize at the Westminster Dog Show and at least thirty other first prize ribbons in the United States and Canada. According to the Hartford Courant, “In personal appearance, he seemed like a cross between an alligator and a horned frog, and he was called handsome by the metaphysicians under the law of compensation. The title came to him, he never sought it. He was always taken to games on a leash, and the Harvard football team for years owed its continued existence to the fact that the rope held.” The Philadelphia Press reported that “a favorite trick was to tell him to ‘Speak to Harvard.’ He would bark ferociously and work himself into physical contortions of rage never before dreamed of by a dog. Dan was peculiar to himself in one thing – he would never associate with anyone but students. Dan implanted himself more firmly in the hearts of Yale students than any mascot had ever done before.” Handsome Dan crossed the Atlantic to join his old master in 1897 and died in 1898. Graves had Dan stuffed and returned him to be displayed at Yale in the old gymnasium. When it was torn down, Dan I was sent to the Peabody Museum for reconstruction. Handsome Dan I now is in a sealed glass case in one of the trophy rooms of Yale’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium, where, according to Stanton Ford, “he is the perpetual guardian of the treasures which attest to generations of Yale athletic glory.” Andrew Graves died of tuberculosis on February 18, 1948, in Westbury, Long Island.

Notable Alumni From Yale

Yale has produced alumni distinguished in their respective fields. This includes U.S. Presidents William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; heads of state, including Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Governor-General Francis Burton Harrison, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika; U.S. Supreme Court Justices Taft, Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh; Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, and Steven Mnuchin; and United States Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi. Confederate States Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and Attorney General; Judah P. Benjamin. Some royals have attended, among them: Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon, Prince Rostislav Romanov and Prince Akiiki Hosea Nyabongo.

That’s it for today. Any more information will be too much information and I would definitely not want that for anyone to bare. Therefore, wait for my next article and until that does not come out, happy reading!!