Harvard Founded: America's First University in 1636

The Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony voted on October 28, 1636, to allocate 400 pounds toward the establishment of a "schoale or colledge," creating the institution that would become Harvard University, the oldest in what is now the United States. The colony was barely six years old. Boston had fewer than a thousand inhabitants. And yet the Puritans who governed Massachusetts considered higher education so essential that they funded a college before they had built a proper road system. The motivation was primarily religious. The colony's leaders, many of them Cambridge University graduates, feared that an uneducated clergy would leave the next generation without spiritual guidance. The college's earliest mission statement declared its purpose: "To advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches." The new institution was located in Newtown, a village across the Charles River from Boston that would soon be renamed Cambridge in honor of the English university town. The college received its name in 1639 when John Harvard, a young minister who had emigrated from England, died and left half his estate and his entire library of 400 volumes to the institution. The bequest, worth roughly 780 pounds, doubled the college's endowment overnight. Harvard graduated its first class of nine students in 1642, all of whom entered the ministry. For its first century, Harvard remained a small, intensely religious institution training Congregationalist clergymen. Enrollment rarely exceeded sixty students. The transformation into a research university came gradually during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the curriculum expanded beyond theology to include law, medicine, natural philosophy, and the sciences. Charles William Eliot, who served as president from 1869 to 1909, introduced the elective system, expanded the professional schools, and raised the academic standards that established Harvard's modern reputation. The college that began with 400 pounds of colonial funds now manages an endowment exceeding $50 billion, enrolls more than 23,000 students, and has produced eight U.S. presidents, more than 150 Nobel laureates, and an outsized share of the American ruling class. Whether that represents the fulfillment or the betrayal of the Puritans' original vision depends entirely on whom you ask.