The history of Harvard University begins in 1636, when Harvard College was founded in the young settlement of New Towne in Massachusetts, which had been settled in 1630. New Towne was organized as a town on the founding of the university, and changed its name two years later to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in honor of the city in England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.

In the late 18th century, as Harvard began granting higher degrees, it began to be called Harvard University, with Harvard College referring exclusively to its undergraduate program. The university's stature became national, then international, as a dozen graduate and professional schools were formed alongside the nucleus undergraduate College. Historically influential in national roles are the schools of medicine (1782), law (1817) and business (1908) as well as the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1890).

For centuries, Harvard graduates dominated Massachusetts' clerical and civil ranks. Since the late 19th century, Harvard has been one of the most prestigious schools in the world, with the largest library system and financial endowment.

Medical School

Main article: Harvard Medical School

The school, the third-oldest medical school in the United States, was founded in 1782 as Massachusetts Medical College by John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse and Aaron Dexter. It relocated from Cambridge across the river to Boston in 1810. The medical school was tied to the rest of the university "only by the tenuous thread of degrees", but its strong faculty gave it a national reputation by the early 19th century.[50]

The medical school moved to its current location on Longwood Avenue in 1906, where the "Great White Quadrangle" or HMS Quad with its five white marble buildings was established.

The reputation continued to grow into the 20th century, especially in terms of scientific research and support from regional and national elites. Fifteen scientists won the Nobel Prize for work done at the Medical School.[53][54] Its four major flagship teaching hospitals are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital.[55]

Law School

Main article: Harvard Law School

The establishment of Harvard Law School in 1817 was made possible by a 1779 bequest from Isaac Royall Jr.; it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the nation.[56] It was a small operation and grew slowly. By 1827, it was down to one faculty member. Nathan Dane, a prominent alumnus, endowed the Dane Professorship of Law and insisting that it be given to then Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. For a while, the school was called Dane Law School.[57] Story's belief in the need for an elite law school based on merit and dedicated to public service helped build the school's reputation at the time. Enrollment remained low as academic legal education was considered to be of little added benefit to apprenticeships in legal practice.

Law Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell

Radical reform came in the 1870s, under Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell (1826–1906).[58] Its new curriculum set the national standard and was copied widely in the United States. Langdell developed the case method of teaching law, based on his belief that law could be studied as a "science" gave university legal education a reason for being distinct from vocational preparation. The school introduced a first-year curriculum that was widely imitated, based on classes in contracts, property, torts, criminal law and civil procedure.

Critics bemoaned abandonment of the more traditional lecture method, because of its efficiency and the lower workloads it placed on faculty and students. Advocates of the case method had a sounder theoretical basis in scientific research and the inductive method. Langdell's graduates became leading professors at other law schools where they introduced the case method. From its founding in 1900, the Association of American Law Schools promoted the case method in law schools that sought accreditation.[59]

Graduate school

Main article: Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

As the college modernized in the late 19th century, the faculty was organized into departments and began to add graduate programs, especially the PhD. Charles William Eliot, president from 1869 to 1909, was a chemist who had spent two years in Germany studying their universities. Thousands of Americans, mostly Harvard and Yale alumni, had attended German universities, especially Berlin and Göttingen.[60] Eliot used the German model to set up graduate programs at Harvard and he formed a graduate department in 1872, which granted its first Ph.D. degrees in 1873 to William Byerly in mathematics and Charles Whitney in history. Eliot set up the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with its own dean and budget in 1890, which dealt with graduate students and funded research programs.[61]

By 2004, there were 3,200 graduate students in 53 separate programs and forty former or current professors had won a Nobel Prize, most of them scientists or economists based in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.[62]

Business school

Main article: Harvard Business School

From its beginning in 1908, the Harvard Business School had a close relationship with the corporate world. Within a few years of its founding many business leaders were its alumni and were hiring other alumni for starting positions in their firms.[63][64][65] The School used Rockefeller funding in the 1920s to launch a major research program under Elton Mayo (1926–1947) for his "Harvard human relations group". Its findings revolutionized human relations in business and raised the reputation of the Business School from its initial "low status as a trainer of money grabbers into a high prestige educator of socially-conscientious administrators".[66] Starting in 1935, the school began weekend and short-term leadership training workshops for executives of major corporations that further expanded its national role.[67]

By 1949, almost half of all the holders of the MBA degree in the U.S. were alumni of the Business School and it was "the most influential graduate school of business".[68]

Harvard Kennedy School

In 1936, Harvard University founded the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, later renamed Harvard Kennedy School in honor of former U.S. President and 1940 Harvard College alumnus John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy School has an endowment of $1.7 billion as of 2021 and is routinely ranked at the top of the world's graduate schools in public policy, social policy, international affairs, and government.[69][70][71][72] Its alumni include 17 heads of state or government.