History

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.
It was named after the College’s first benefactor, the young minister John Harvard of Charlestown,
ho upon his death in 1638 left his library and half his estate to the institution.
A statue of John Harvard stands today in front of University Hall in Harvard Yard,
nd is perhaps the University’s best known landmark.


View of list of historical facts


Harvard University has 12 degree-granting Schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
The University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment
of more than 20,000 degree candidates including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students.
There are more than 360,000 living alumni in the U.S. and over 190 other countries.


Harvard University Shields



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).
ashington 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