Harvard College
Coat of arms of the College
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| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Established | 1636 |
| Location | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Campus | Urban |
| Website | college.harvard.edu |
Harvard College is the undergraduate liberal arts college of Harvard University. Founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world.
The "New College" came into existence in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court (colonial legislature, second oldest in British America) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—though without a single building, instructor, or student. In 1638, the college became home for North America's first known printing press, carried by the ship John of London. Three years later the college was renamed in honor of deceased Charlestown minister John Harvard (1607–1638) who had bequeathed to the school his entire library and half of his monetary estate.
Harvard's first instructor, schoolmaster Nathaniel Eaton (1610–1674), was also its first instructor to be dismissed—in 1639, for overstrict discipline. The school's first students were graduated in 1642. In 1665, Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, (c. 1643–1666), a native/indigenous American, "from the Wampanoag … did graduate from Harvard, the first Indian to do so in the colonial period."
At the time of Harvard's founding (as today) the "colleges" of England's Oxford and Cambridge Universities were communities within the larger university, each an association of scholars (both established and aspiring) sharing room and board; Harvard's founders may have envisioned it as the first in a series of sibling colleges which, on the English model, would eventually constitute a university. Though no further "colleges" materialized in colonial times, nonetheless as Harvard began granting higher degrees in the late eighteenth century it was increasingly styled Harvard University—even as Harvard College (in keeping with emerging American usage of that word) was increasingly thought of as the university's undergraduate division in particular.
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