45 Fun Facts About Harvard

Harvard was founded in 1636 by a vote of which colony's legislature?

Massachusetts Bay's Great and General Court voted £400 for a college in 1636, so John Harvard, whose name it took three years later, was its first great donor and not its founder.

Besides half his estate, what did John Harvard bequeath to the college in 1638?

His library of some 400 volumes, together with half his estate, made the Charlestown minister the college's first major benefactor; it was renamed Harvard College in his honour in 1639.

What single Latin word appears on the three open books of Harvard's shield?

Veritas, Latin for 'truth', was sketched on the books in a 1643 design that was forgotten until President Josiah Quincy rediscovered it in 1836; the 1650 charter seal instead read 'In Christi Gloriam'.

Which of these is Harvard's official school color?

Crimson dates from an 1858 regatta, when rower Charles Eliot, a future Harvard president, and his crew captain bought six silk handkerchiefs to set their boat apart; the Corporation made the colour official in 1910.

As of 2025, which Harvard graduate is the only US president with an MBA?

George W. Bush took the degree at Harvard Business School in 1975, after Yale and a spell in the Texas Air National Guard, then went home to Midland to try his luck in the oil business.

By Harvard's own accounts, roughly how large was its endowment, the biggest of any university, in mid-2025?

$57 billion, or $56.9 billion on Harvard's books at the end of June 2025, is the largest university endowment in the world; it is not one pot but roughly 14,000 separate funds.

Harvard's oldest surviving building, completed in 1720, is which one on Harvard Yard?

Massachusetts Hall, finished in 1720, housed Continental troops during the Siege of Boston; the president's offices occupy its lower floors and a handful of freshmen live on the top floor.

Which library, the anchor of the world's largest academic library system, sits in Harvard Yard?

Widener Library opened in 1915 on the site of Gore Hall, an older library that had been declared full back in 1863; it is the flagship of dozens of Harvard libraries.

Harvard's great library is a memorial to a 1907 graduate who died in what event?

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 killed the 27-year-old book collector; his mother Eleanor survived and paid for the library, though the tale that she also demanded a swimming test for every student is a campus myth.

With changes to the exterior of Harvard's main library barred, a 1942 bridge entered through what?

Through a window in the east stacks: that left the outer walls intact when the link to the rare-books library next door was built, and the 'temporary' bridge stayed until 2004.

Which sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial's seated Lincoln also made the John Harvard statue in Harvard Yard?

Daniel Chester French unveiled the bronze in 1884, a decade after his Minute Man at Concord made his name; with no portrait of John Harvard to copy, the figure is an idealised invention.

With no likeness of John Harvard surviving, whose face inspired the sculptor of his statue?

A student named Sherman Hoar, class of 1882, sat for the face; the inscription 'John Harvard, Founder, 1638' underpins the tour-guide routine about the 'statue of three lies'.

What do tourists do to the John Harvard statue for luck?

Rub the toe of his left shoe, the guides say, passing it off as a student tradition, which it is not; the constant handling has polished that one spot of bronze bright gold.

After the 1968 Harvard–Yale football game ended 29–29, the student newspaper ran which famous headline?

'Harvard Beats Yale, 29–29' was the student paper's headline after Harvard scored 16 points in the final minute to salvage the draw; it later titled a 2008 documentary.

During the 1982 Harvard–Yale game, pranksters from which school inflated a weather balloon near midfield?

MIT students struck in the second quarter: a black weather balloon lettered 'MIT' rose from the field and kept swelling in front of the crowd until it exploded.

Harvard's undergraduate humor magazine, founded in 1876, is called what?

The Lampoon spun off National Lampoon in 1970, and its alumni went on to write for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons; it is still run from its own mock castle.

In 1953 Harvard's student newspaper stole the humor magazine's ibis and gave it to which government?

The Soviet Union got it: the newspaper's editors presented the stolen bird to a Soviet diplomat at the United Nations as a gift, one more round in the two publications' long feud.

Harvard's Memorial Hall was built to honour Harvard men who died in which war?

The Civil War dead it honours are those who fell for the Union; Harvard men who died for the Confederacy are left off its tablets, and Sanders Theatre sits inside the Victorian Gothic hall.

Harvard's Hasty Pudding Theatricals, active since 1844, claims what distinction?

Oldest theatrical organization in the US is the Pudding's claim, dating from a first show in 1844; its casts were all male, often in drag, until women were let in from 2018.

Which comedian did Harvard's Hasty Pudding honour as its first Man of the Year in 1967?

Bob Hope took the first Man of the Year prize in 1967, sixteen years after Gertrude Lawrence became the first Woman of the Year; each honouree is then roasted by the student cast.

Which Harvard rowers sued Mark Zuckerberg, claiming he had stolen their idea for Facebook?

The Winklevoss brothers, twins Cameron and Tyler, had hired Zuckerberg to work on their site HarvardConnection; they settled in 2008 for a reported $65 million, then rowed at the Beijing Olympics that summer.

Zuckerberg's earlier site Facemash asked users to do what?

Rate students' attractiveness was the game: Facemash paired ID photos lifted from online student 'facebooks' and asked who was hotter, drawing 450 visitors and 22,000 votes before the outcry made Zuckerberg pull it.

Which 2010 film dramatised the founding of Facebook at Harvard?

The Social Network, directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin's script, could not film on campus because Harvard refused permission, so Johns Hopkins and other colleges stood in.

Which 1970 film pairs a wealthy Harvard hockey player with a dying music student?

Love Story stars Ryan O'Neal as Oliver Barrett IV and Ali MacGraw as Jenny Cavilleri; Erich Segal wrote the screenplay first, then turned it into a novel that topped the bestseller lists before the film opened.

Who became Harvard's first female president in 2007?

Drew Gilpin Faust, a historian of the American South, took over after her predecessor resigned in the wake of a faculty no-confidence vote, fuelled in part by his remarks about women's aptitude for science.

Which Harvard president resigned in January 2024 after the shortest tenure in its history?

Claudine Gay stepped down on 2 January 2024, six months and a day after taking office, amid plagiarism allegations and criticism of her congressional testimony; Provost Alan Garber took over as interim president.

Which future late-night host was president of Harvard's humor magazine before graduating in 1985?

Conan O'Brien led the magazine in his sophomore and junior years, then made comedy his living, writing for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before he got a show of his own.

Which future Supreme Court justice left Harvard Law School after two years and took her degree at Columbia?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of nine women in a class of about 500, moved when her husband took a job in New York; Harvard's dean refused to let her finish its degree from Columbia.

Harvard Medical School's Longwood campus, opened in 1906, lies not in Cambridge but in which nearby city?

Boston has been the school's home since 1810: owning no hospital of its own, it moved with its clinical ties until settling in Longwood, where teaching hospitals now crowd around it.

Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration was later renamed for which president?

John F. Kennedy, class of 1940, gave the school his name in 1966; his presidential library was meant to rise beside Harvard too, until opposition in Cambridge sent it across town to Columbia Point.

Harvard Business School and Harvard Stadium sit across the Charles River in which neighbourhood?

Allston holds the business school and the stadium, and Harvard's campus there now covers more ground than the one around Harvard Yard.

Adams, Kirkland and Winthrop are three of Harvard's twelve what?

Residential houses for upperclassmen arrived around 1930, paid for by Yale graduate Edward Harkness, who took his millions to Harvard after his own university dithered over the same offer.

The Blaschka Glass Flowers are a celebrated exhibit at which Harvard institution?

The Museum of Natural History shows the glass plants that Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka made near Dresden from 1887 to 1936; a botany professor ordered them because pressed specimens went flat and lost their colour.

Football legalised which play in 1906 instead of widening fields, which Harvard's new concrete stadium could not allow?

The forward pass won out: reformers trying to make a deadly game safer wanted wider fields, but Harvard's concrete stadium, opened in 1903, could not be enlarged, so play was opened up another way.

Every two years, Harvard and Yale field a combined track team against which pair of universities?

Oxford and Cambridge threw down the gauntlet in May 1899 with a formal challenge to the Harvard and Yale track teams; the series is billed as the world's oldest continuing international intercollegiate competition.

Which Harvard graduate went undrafted, then became an overnight NBA sensation with the New York Knicks in 2012?

Jeremy Lin, an economics graduate already cut by two teams, came off the Knicks' bench that February and led them on a seven-game winning streak that the press dubbed 'Linsanity'.

Who in 1895 became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard?

W. E. B. Du Bois arrived with a degree from Fisk that Harvard would not fully credit, so he earned a second bachelor's there before the 1895 doctorate; he later helped found the NAACP.

Barack Obama made news in 1990 as the first Black holder of which Harvard post?

Law Review president was the post: the publicity brought Obama a book contract, and the memoir that came of it, 'Dreams from My Father', appeared in 1995.

Who spelled the lectures and textbooks into Helen Keller's hand throughout her studies at Harvard's sister college?

Anne Sullivan signed everything into Keller's hand, straining her own weak eyes; in 1904 Keller graduated with honours, the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree.

Which author told Harvard's graduating class of 2008 about 'the fringe benefits of failure'?

J. K. Rowling said that hitting rock bottom as a jobless lone parent became the foundation on which she rebuilt her life; the speech was later published as 'Very Good Lives'.

Which religious movement originally shaped Harvard's undergraduate college?

Puritanism drove the founding: the colonists dreaded leaving their churches an illiterate ministry once their present ministers died, so training clergy was the college's first mission.

Which Harvard psychology lecturer's experiments with psychedelic drugs ended his time there in 1963 and made him a counterculture icon?

Timothy Leary ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project with Richard Alpert, who was fired for giving the drug to an undergraduate and later became the spiritual teacher Ram Dass.

Why was Harvard's first master, Nathaniel Eaton, dismissed in 1639?

Beating his assistant was the charge, and the court also heard that goat dung had turned up in the hasty pudding his wife served students; Henry Dunster took over the next year as the first president.

A Harvard art museum founded as the Germanic Museum is named partly for a patron in which trade?

Brewing beer made Adolphus Busch of Anheuser-Busch rich; the Busch-Reisinger Museum, founded in 1903, also carries the name of his son-in-law, the art collector Hugo Reisinger.

Which women's college, tied to Harvard since 1879, formally merged into it in 1999?

Radcliffe had long been merging in all but name: its students shared Harvard's classes from 1943 and its diplomas from 1963, so the 1999 deal mostly left an institute for advanced study behind.