Harvard: The Oldest University in a New World
Massachusetts
The year was sixteen thirty-six. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had existed for six years. The nearest college was in England, three thousand miles and a dangerous Atlantic crossing away. The Puritan founders of Boston understood what this meant: if this colony survived, the men trained to lead it, the ministers, the magistrates, the schoolteachers, the lawyers, would have to be educated here. They authorized a college. They named the surrounding town Cambridge, after the English university town where many of them had studied, and the college itself soon took the name of John Harvard, a young minister who died in sixteen thirty-eight and left half his estate and his library of four hundred books to the new institution.
The first classes met in a cowyard. This detail, which appears in the Harvard institutional record, is almost too perfect to be believed, and it is apparently true. An English-educated scholar, Nathaniel Eaton, was appointed the first master. He was dismissed within a year for beating his students with walnut-tree branches and feeding them rotten food. Harvard's early history is not a story of settled institutional dignity.
What it became, over four centuries, is the oldest university in the Western Hemisphere, and one whose history of exclusion is as long as its history of education. Women were not admitted until eighteen seventy-nine, when Radcliffe College was founded as a separate but connected institution. Harvard and Radcliffe did not fully merge until nineteen ninety-nine, one hundred and twenty years later. The university's relationship with the Black community of Boston has moved through phases of exclusion, tokenism, and the ongoing argument about what a university owes the city that surrounds it.
None of that makes the institution smaller. The concentration of ideas that has come out of this block of Cambridge for four hundred years has shaped American intellectual life in ways that cannot be cleanly credited to any single institution, and Harvard is at the center of it.
