Talk:Harvard University/Archive 1

Living Wage campiagn?

How do people feel about adding a section about the Living Wage Campaign? Since it set the stage for literally dozens of such campaigns after it, and had a 3 week sit in, with literally thousands of supporters rallying outside, and gained national coverage, isnt it kind of relevant? I might start a small section that can link to somthing else. Put some ideas in here though.--129.171.198.105 02:05, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

seems to me that the living wage campaign is not especially notable in the overarching history of the college. If this article were much longer and went into more topics in greater detail, I would be all for including the living wage campaign as a significant campus movement/event of the last decade. But to add it here just seems like a bias toward including stuff that is recent, rather than stuff that is truly notable.

Harvard's former name

Question: What was Harvard called before 1639? Answer: It was called New College ... I'll add that to the article.

• Question: What's your source? This seems extremely unlikely to me — are you sure you didn't just see it referred to as "the New College at Cambridge" or something? My point is that it probably didn't have a name in our modern, precise sense.

Also, something about Harvard's relationship with Radcliffe really ought to be added.

Harvard College had no name for its first two years of existence: http://www.news.harvard.edu/guide/commu/index.html. The second sentence of the first paragraph in the link states as much.

The color crimson

It might be mentioned (I'm not quite sure how to do this) that the school colour "crimson," the shade of gules the field of the Harvard shield is almost invariably depicted in, is that fashionable for showing gules around the time of Harvard's founding, but that in this sense, the same shade is invariably referred to as "chocolate". --Daniel C. Boyer 19:11, 3 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It's indeed crimson. Please see http://www.news.harvard.edu/guide/lore/lore5.html . -- PFHLai 15:01, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)

You may (or may not) be interested in John Harvard's background prior to Emmanuel College. See:

http://www.saintolaves.net/?page=distinguished

VES link

Should Visual and Environmental Studies really redirect to Art? --Daniel C. Boyer 19:03, 4 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Yes. "Visual and Environmental Studies" is simply Harvard's term for its art program. See http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu. --Lowellian 20:37, Dec 4, 2003 (UTC)

I know that; I was in it. Perhaps my question reveals too technical a mindframe. --Daniel C. Boyer 15:01, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Some questions

1. Is the image of Gore hall really the best use of space? And why is the file called colonial harvard 2? I mean, I know most people won't see the filename, but that building is clearly post-colonial. 2. Also, it might be nice to right-align those captions (instead of centering them). Is there a way to do this without building a whole table thingummy? 3. I changed the list of house namesakes. I'm certain about Lowell and Winthrop, but not quite so sure about Adams — somebody let me know if I'm wrong. Doops 20:57, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC) (P.S.: apologies for mislocating my question earlier)

Why some faculties, schools, etc. are listed with 'Harvard' in their names and some aren't

Each of the schools has a 3-letter (except for GSAS) acronym by which they're commonly referred to around Harvard. Some (HLS, HMS, HDS) include H; others (GSD, GSE, SPH) don't. I listed each school by the expaned version of their everyday acronym.

Alternatively, I suppose we could list them in a more consistent manner, but then include the acronyms in parentheses after each school.Doops 16:56, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Name of Winthrop House

Why not call John Winthrop House by its full name? Doops 21:09, 16 Apr 2004 (UTC)

For consistency with the other Houses, which we don't call by their full name. --Lowellian 18:10, Apr 18, 2004 (UTC)

What other houses have a first name? (I mean, it's not like some obscure forgotten thing; it actually says John Winthrop House on all documents, stationery, etc.) Doops 20:52, 18 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether the other Houses officially have a first name or not, but certainly people usually say "Winthrop House" and not "John Winthrop House." Even Winthrop's website titles it "Winthrop House." I like the current revision, where it's called "Winthrop House" but has a note behind it that says it has a longer official name. --Lowellian 18:47, Apr 19, 2004 (UTC)

• I went to Harvard for 3 years and lived in Winthrop House for 2, and never once did I hear it referred to as John Winthrop House. I've just located a large beer stein from those days that has my nickname on it, a shield, the year, and the words "Harvard University" up around the top and the words "Winthrop House" down by the base. No "John".Hayford Peirce 00:43, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I grant you that people don't say it much in everyday speech; but it is on stationary, the plaque at the gate, etc. etc. Doops 06:08, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Name of Dudley House

I just added that Dudley House is named for Thomas Dudley. Is this actually true? AJD 12:18, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Yes. See the little garden behind Lamont for more on the guy. Doops 12:41, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I knew that; I just wasn't 100% sure that the House and the garden were both named for the same Dudley. Thanks for clearing it up. AJD 15:56, 19 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Need source for NIH statistic

I removed the following text from the document:

Harvard's funding from the National Institutes of Health annually exceeds $1 billion, making it by far the largest of NIH's beneficiaries.

User:Yanamad originally added the text [1]:

Harvard's funding from the National Institutes of Health annually top $900 million, making it by far the largest of NIH's beneficiaries.

Yanamad then modified the text [2]:

Harvard's funding from the National Institutes of Health annually reach upwards of $1 billion, making it by far the largest of NIH's beneficiaries.

User:Ajd then changed the text [3]:

Harvard's funding from the National Institutes of Health annually exceeds of $1 billion, making it by far the largest of NIH's beneficiaries.

I then fixed the grammer, changing "exceeds of" to "exceeds" [4].

However, I am now removing the entire text because the sole source for this information seems to be Yanamad (on Ajd's edit, his edit comment was "wd choice"). I have searched and been unable to verify this statistic. Also, from what I know of NIH grants, the statistic seems a bit high. I would have asked Yanamad, except from his contributions history and his Talk page he seems to only have been active in Wikipedia for two days back in April 2004. If anyone can provide a citation/source for this information, then feel free to add it back to the page. --Lowellian 22:30, May 15, 2004 (UTC)

This page http://grants1.nih.gov/grants/award/trends/rnk03all1to100.html lists Harvard as 12th with just over $300K in 2003. If you count only academic institutions, Harvard is 11th. --Chinasaur 02:52, May 16, 2004 (UTC)

According to stats by The Crimson, Harvard receives about $400 million per year from all departments of the federal gov't, which would include the NIH. "If Harvard refuses, the bill threatens to strip the University of all funding from the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy, Transportation and the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Kevin Casey, the University’s Federal Relations chief, the cost would likely amount to over $400 million." http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=358688 User:140.247.75.103

The NIH statistic does not show the whole picture because it does not include the funding obtained by Harvard Medical School professors that are based at its affiliated hospitals. Rather, the funds are assigned to individual hospitals, such as Mass, General, Brigham and Women's, Children's, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Brigham and Women's Hospital. These five actually make up the top five non-university recipients of NIH funding in the country. When these five hospitals are included, Harvard's funding is well over 1 billion. It is only fair to include the hospitals, since other schools with affiliated hospitals include the NIH money given to their hospitals, which make up the bulk of the total. The difference is that Johns Hopkins University owns the Johns Hopkins Hospital, U. Penn owns the Hospital of the Univ of Penn, but Harvard does not own Mass General (although Mass General was founded by Harvard professors and all the doctors at Mass General are on the Harvard faculty).

Eliot and Crimson

Since somebody seems determined to have Eliot in there, here's a way it could be done:

The school color is a shade richer than red but brighter than burgundy, referred to as crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The color was unofficially adopted (in preference to magenta) by an 1875 vote of the student body, during the presidency of Charles William Eliot. (Curiously enough, it had been Eliot who, as a graduate student in 1858, first bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta.) Doops 13:34, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

I don't think the "curiously enough" is necessary. --Chinasaur 06:09, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

All right, "interestingly enough" or "coincidentally enough" if you prefer. Anything but "ironically," since it isn't ironic. Doops 14:35, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

I thought it would be good without any qualifier. And I would make the parenthetic statement part of the last sentence (i.e. before the period and without a period of its own). Actually if I wrote it I'd probably replace the parentheses with a semicolon, but some people don't like those. --Chinasaur 16:06, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I guess this was my thinking.

• Somebody (anonymous, I think) keeps trying to mention that the color was adopted in Eliot's presidency.
• This fact, while true, is pretty irrelevant...unless you want to point out the coincidence that it was Eliot who had first proposed a shade of red in the first place;
• so I was just offerring a compromise to whomever it was that wanted Eliot in there.
• But, if you feel like the coincidence is too minor to mention (and I can't say I disagree with you there), then how about leaving out the president in 1875 altogether thus:

The school color is a shade richer than red but brighter than burgundy, referred to as crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The color was unofficially adopted (in preference to magenta) by an 1875 vote of the student body, although the association with some form of red can be traced back to 1858, when Charles William Eliot, a young graduate student who would later become Harvard's president, bought red bandanas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta. Doops 13:34, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

P.S. Semicolons are certainly cool by me! In fact, I think I tend to overuse them. Doops 17:00, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

I see what you mean. I think the latest version is good. --Chinasaur 17:43, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

I like your 13:34, 16 May 2004 version too. Why don't you add it to the page? :) --Lowellian 20:16, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

Removal of Annenberg photo

Fuzheado just removed the Annenberg photo because it didn't look good. Didn't it used to look better before the last mediawiki change, or am I misremembering? --Chinasaur 05:27, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

And while we're at it, the photos of Mem. Church and the Science Center could stand to be removed. I don't object to photos of either building on the site (okay, so maybe I object to a pic of the Science Center), but I think we could find some photos that show the buildings better (aka a shot of Mem. Church from Tercentenary Theater and an angled shot of the Science Center). In the mean time, I vote for removal. --Guest, 8 Jun 2004

I uploaded a pic of annenberg and another of the science center. hope you like them better. --jacobolus, 9 Jan 2005

Constant battle over "most prestigious in the world"

It seems we are constantly reinserting the section "considered by many to be the world's most prestigious university". I always considered this sentence factual; it is certainly the opinion of many Americans, and my impression was the opinion was even stronger in Asian countries, if somewhat weaker in European ones. Am I mistaken? If it's a simple fact, it is by definition NPOV to state it as such; I don't think anyone is being misled. --Chinasaur 05:27, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

• Well, when I lived in Tahiti and frequently visited France for many years, it sure as hell impressed cultivated, highly educated Frenchpeople that I had attended the place. They were far more impressed by it than I was (or am). Many of these people had attended highly elitist French universities that I'm sure were far more difficult to get into and had a harder curriculum than Harvard had in those days. So, based on my own experiences, I would say that the statement is factual.Hayford Peirce 00:41, 15 Jul 2004 (UTC)

• How would they have reacted if you had said Oxford or Cambridge? Many of the Asian countries have greater US influence than European influence, so it's unsurprising that they would be more aware of US institutions. Africa, the Indian sub-continent and the Commonwealth countries in general are perhaps more likely to be familiar with UK or other European institutions. There seems little doubt that the statement that it's one of the most prestigious is accurate, so that seems like a reasonable approach to take. Jamesday 01:24, 7 Aug 2004 (UTC)

• Boston Globe columnest Alex Beam constantly refers to Harvard as the World's Greatest University, sometimes just WGU for short. But of course, it is in contexts like this (July 1, 2004) where it is recognizable as subtle [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk) ]] 13:30, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The fact that a columnist is of the opinion doesn't make it so. You wouldn't be able to link to Alex Beam for the proposition that his mother is the best ever.

As I explained two weeks ago, Kim wants to publish a grabbier alumni magazine, distributed free to the successnik graduates of the World's Greatest University. I can't resist quoting this example of a story he might pursue, from his website, 02138magazine.com: "Did you know that . . . Paul Bremer, MBA '66, and several of his key advisors in Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority graduated from Harvard Business School?" First Enron, now Iraq! Another triumph for HBS!

• Harvard is an excellent university, but when most Americans think of "Harvard" they think of the College, which is actually quite mediocre and probably doesn't belong in the top 20; it gets pwned by the top 5 liberal arts colleges, as well as Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, every day before breakfast. That is a fact.

• What I want to know about is grade inflation. I've read that Harvard has problems with it, especially concerning the social sciences. If grade inflation can be proven, that would certainly reduce its position as the "world's greatest university." Furthermore, what are the actual criteria that such a position is based on? Endowment? Professors? Number of Nobel Laureates? Robinson0120 00:11, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

• If the argument is over whether Harvard is the "world's greatest university," then I don't think we can come to a reasonable comclusion. but as far whether it's considered to be the "most presitigious," I don't think there's much question. Certainly in America, and probably worldwide. I was in a poor african country recently, and when the locals heard I work at a university, they nearly all asked me, "is it Harvard?" Harvard has name recognition and respect--deserved or not--unlike any other institution. It's a distinguishing feature of the university and i think it's silly not to mention it in the article. -Bindingtheory 04:07, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Nicer arms

OK, who knows how to make an image have a clear background (instead of white)? I put up the nicer arms, and discovered that the white background shows up against the grey box. I guess I could edit the image to have a grey box; but that's just a patch. Does somebody have the software or knowhow to do it properly? Thanks. Also: I moved the motto down into the fact box because it really looked bad visually right under the arms -- the pointy bottom of the coat of arms was balancing precariously on one rather short word. That's the problem with coats of arms: the shield shape is gorgeous until you have to put something underneath it; then all you can think about is "why doesn't it topple over?" :) Doops 11:02, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Doops 11:29, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

JPEG images can't have a transparent background. Perhaps you should convert it to PNG. Acegikmo1 01:45, Jun 29, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. Acting on your advice, I've tried that, but without success. I guess AppleWorks just isn't a powerful graphics program. :) Later this summer, when I have access to PhotoShop, I'll try again. Doops 03:00, 29 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hopefully everyone's happy with the new veritas shield I uploaded? Apparently it was the only high-resolution Harvard seal the Lampoon could find for their recent course guide spoof. --Jacobolus 09:08, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Division of Continuing Education, Harvard Summer School

Should be listed in article. --Daniel C. Boyer 14:19, 7 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Done Doops 23:57, 10 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Alumni

I've adjusted the alumni section for the following reasons. Dictionaries indicate this requires having earned a degree. Poet Robert Frost and Microsoft Founder Bill Gates studied at Harvard but didn't graduate. Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a professor. Sources: Wikipedia articles on the individuals and:

Frost: "Frost's Life and Career" by William H. Pritchard, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [5] ; Columbia and Encarta encyclopedias. Sources indicate attending and leaving without graduating.

Gates: Personal knowledge of his fame as a non-graduate. "The Crimson", Feb 27, 2004 describing him as "Harvard's most famous dropout" [6] . Bill Gates biography at Microsoft Corp. [7] . Sources indicate leaving but not graduating.

Longfellow: The Maine Historical Society biography indicates his graduating from Bowdoin College and being a professor at Harvard but not him graduating from Harvard., In view of the depth of the information presented it seems unlikely that a major event like graduating from Harvard would have been left out. [8] and PDF linked from there. Encarta has a similar unlikely lack of confirming information.

Jamesday 12:06, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

• I think the use of "alumni" to mean "former students" rather than only "graduates" is quite common. People know that Bill Gates attended Harvard, and consider him an alum. Many organizations, especially consulting and law firms, quite often use the word alumni to indicate anyone who has worked there in the past.

1. Bill Gates is listed as a member of the class of 1977 by the Harvard Alumni Association (though with no degree).
2. If I remember correctly (I couldn't find it online), the Harvard University definition of alumnus is anyone who has completed one grading period (half a semester). Gates attended for over 3 years. He even did some of the work leading to his first product at Harvard, on Harvard computers.
3. The American Heritage Dictionary defines "alumnus" as "A male graduate or former student of a school, college, or university", thus explicitly including the possibility of a "former student" who is not a graduate.
4. Gates is certainly a very well-known and prominent person.

For all these reasons, I recommend that he be included in the list, possibly with some annotation, e.g. "Bill Gates (no degree)".

--Macrakis 16:28, 2 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Another question was asked about why I changed "student-run" to "student". I think it just sounds better, and says the same thing. If people feel strongly, we should change it back.

• As for why I removed Princeton Review's survey data, I think it's redundant -- the link to the Ivy League at the bottom places the school in the same context.

- Fenster 15:16, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thanks; I thought it was probably differing definitions and usage. When I saw Bill Gates my own reaction, knowing that he didn't graudate, was that it was obviously wrong, so being clear about the exact nature of the relationship seems best. Frost and Longfellow were awarded honorary degrees but Harvard doesn't count recipients of those as alumni. Apparently chooses not to claim Gates as one officially, though the directory does say that those who attended are considered alumni in that context when it's apparent that they won't re-register. Student and student-run have different meanings. One refers to the target audience the other to those who are producing it. The Crimson pitches itself as the university and sometimes the town daily newspaper, so student-run seems to better describe it, though I'll leave it to somene else to change it if they agree. Fair enough on the survey data. Jamesday 17:57, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

regional harvards

I removed the following from the main page — a lot of impressive research here; but I don't see how it's appropriate for an encyclopedia article about Harvard. (An amusing side note, however — Harvard's juggling club claims to be the "Harvard of university juggling clubs.") Doops 04:04, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

---

Harvard's reputation is such that other prominent universities are often dubbed "regional Harvards":

• "Harvard of the West": Stanford University [9] [10] (though there are a number of claims that the reverse is true, that Harvard is the "Stanford of the East" [11] [12])
• "Harvard of the South": Duke University [13] [14] [15], Rice University [16] [17], Emory University, Vanderbilt University
• "Harvard of the North": Queen's University [18] and McGill University [19] [20]
• "Harvard of the Midwest": Washington University in St. Louis [21] [22] [http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40855]
• "Harvard of the Middle East": American University in Beirut [23] [24], Baghdad University [25], and Cairo University [26]

This phenomenon is well-known enough that there have been several spoofs of it: one about Duke and Emory and one about McGill and Queen's.

---

The citations are a bit excessive, and I purposely gave as many citations as I did in anticipation that if I didn't, someone would claim that there was no such thing as "regional Harvards". Given that there clearly are "regional Harvards", I think we would be censoring information if we didn't include it. It's a common phenomenon, common enough that not only are there numerous serious mentions of it but also spoofs of the phenomenon. We might remove some citations for brevity or put it in a separate section (along with the information about Harvard appearances in film) possibly entitled "Harvard in pop culture", but this information definitely belongs in the article. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 04:26, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps the subject should have its own separate page. If the point is "Harvard is really really famous" we only need to refer to the phenomenon without giving examples. If our point is "these schools ARE the Harvard of the wherever" (or, more professionally, "these schools are sometimes called..." etc.) — well, that plainly doesn't belong in an article on Harvard. Doops 05:21, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[P.S. Just to nitpick, all that evidence (impressive as it is) doesn't actually prove (as you suggest) that there are "regional Harvards", since it doesn't demonstrate that the claims you put forward are the only ones — if every university in the south claimed to be the "Harvard of the south" (or, if the Harvard name is a liability, not an asset, was accused by its rivals of being the "Harvard of the south"), then there plainly would be no Harvard of the south! (The old leprechaun and handkerchief trick.) But all this is just a witty postscript; my real objections are given above. Doops 05:21, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC) ]

I agree—I'm not claiming that there actually are "regional Harvards"; I'm saying that a significant number of schools—and it usually tends to be the same few schools—claim that they are the "Harvard of the whatever-region." —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 06:47, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)

Well, do the schools (or more precisely, the students there, since I'm sure it's nowhere official) actually claim that moniker, like it's something that they're proud of? I have to say that it I went to Duke or wherever I'd be insulted by the attempt to define my worth in relationship to some other institution, no matter how famous. It's like addressing an invitation to Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Oh really? Is the wife's name John? Does she have no existence independent of her husband? (Again, this is on a tangential topic, not germane per se to the discussion of where the content is located.) Doops 07:21, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Well, notice that some of the citations above are in publications published by the school that claims to be the "regional Harvard". —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 05:56, Nov 15, 2004 (UTC)

Just to note, some Duke students have referred to Harvard as the Duke of the North (I know I have seen it on t-shirts). "Regional Dukes" seem just as important to mention as "regional Harvards" - that is, they are both frivolous! Ernieefiii 03:04, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

By my previous comment, I meant I agree with the specific point in what you call your "witty postscript". However, I still think the information belongs in the article. It seems to me that the subject is not expandable enough to have its own page, and yet it is notable enough to be mentioned on the Harvard page. We might cut down on the number of examples, but we must at least give a few so that readers can understand what the article is discussing by seeing specific instances, and so that the reader can see that such claims actually are made. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 06:51, Oct 24, 2004 (UTC)

Well, I think the best example is that clown-training school in Florida that always gets called the "Harvard of Clown Colleges." :) Doops 07:12, 24 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Comments on latest edits

The following edits were recently made:

• "Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra, composed mainly of undergraduates, was founded in 1808 as the Pierian Sodality and has been performing as a symphony orchestra since the 1950s."
• "the University has not allowed any movies to be filmed on its campus since "Love Story" in the 1960s."

The first is a point of interest as it disputes the long standing claim of this article, and of the HRO generally, that HRO is the longest continually performing music group in the United States. I think this is open to debate; clearly if you read the Pieran Sodality history pages, it doesn't sound like the longest performing description is merited. But I always took those Pieran Sodality histories to be pretty farcical. Does someone have some other source of information bearing on this issue? The second I have no real beef with except I am curious whether anyone can confirm my recollection that the opening shots of Road Trip show aerial views of Eliot nad Kirkland. User:Chinasaur

Aerial views aren't subject to Harvard's control, as far as I know. (Legally Blonde also features aerial shots of the River.) Christopher Parham (talk) 2005 June 29 17:19 (UTC)

Hasty Pudding edit

Is "burlesque" better than "drag musical" for the Hasty Pudding show? Burlesque seems to suggest striptease, which the Pudding show isn't; it's definitely a drag musical. User:Ajd

First, note that the article burlesque is incorrect if, as it seems, it asserts that, in modern usage contrasted with historical usage, burlesque is sexual entertainment and strip-tease, etc. Instead, such burlesque is a subset of the entire class of burlesque entertainment that is mock-heroic or mock-pathetic or humorous by caricature or mockery. In this case, as the About page on the Hasty Puddings website indicates (and which uses the word burlesque and not at all the word drag), the quality of their shows is such mockery and bombastic humor. That the show is "no-holds-barred" may proceed from that, but that men play all the parts is only a small part of the burlesqueness of the show. Because burlesque shows may be of such variety and may be "no-holds-barred" (and so might include strip-tease), they may be considered reserved for adults, but that adultness is rather incidental to the tenor of the show, which is burlesque. Drag, on the other hand, simply means that feminine attire is worn by the men in the show and is not as fully descriptive as burlesque for what the show is. Note also that, at least historically, these were not all musicals. - Centrx 23:07, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Immodest?

Someone (not me, though I was sympathetic) recently slapped an NPOV tag on the MIT article as a result of a lot of strutting cardinal-and-grey peacock plumage in the "About MIT" section. It has now been made more neutral.

In the discussion, one Wikipedian commented that I should "see Harvard University, Yale University, and Princeton University for examples of how the MIT article of the past wasn't out of line with other Wikipedia articles on these topics."

Well, I have.

I'm thinking the "About Harvard" section indeed goes on and on and on to excess about how great Harvard is. Wouldn't it be better to shorten and tone down some of the remarks about its lofty position on ranking lists, etc. and putting the buttressing data here in Talk? [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk) ]] 13:48, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I disagree. "goes on and on...to excess"? It's not really currently very long; it could be much, much longer, and it's really relatively short compared to what you could cite on the topic if you really wanted to do so. If an university has a few statistics to back up its prestige, then great, they belong on the article. This goes not just for Harvard, but for other schools as well; if the other schools, such as MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, etc. have statistics to back up their prestige, I think those statistics belong on those pages. The questions to ask are, first, (1) are the statistics factual and (2) do people care about these statistics? If so on both counts, they're okay. The US News rankings, etc., are stuff that, even if you disapprove of this being the case, nevertheless does seem to attract a lot of press coverage and affect people's opinions toward universities. —Lowellian (talk)[[]] 01:08, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)

Mascot is John Harvard?

What's the source of John Harvard being the mascot? I've never seen anyone dressed up as Johnnie H at a football game. I'm an undergrad here, and we basically don't have a mascot. 140.247.238.202 20:25, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

He comes out for some of the games. They have a big scary pilgrim head for him. http://128.103.142.209/issues/jf98/jhj.sports.html (photo on left): MattHanlon 19:43, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

• • Students at Harvard have most recently claimed that their mascot is "The Crimson"

from the College Prowler guidebook, Harvard University - Off the Record

the institution section

Should "US News placed Harvard First" really be at the beginning of a section about the institution? Is it really the most important thing? Maybe we should add a section about "reputation" nearer the bottom of the page, after history, the institution, etc. that can list these statistics. They just don't seem that important to me, are the subjective opinion of US News, and also seem a bit boastful. Would any other encyclopedia list that info at the top of an article about a school?

Also, I think that some of the rest of this info (about the color crimson, john harvard, etc) probably belongs in some other section. This whole page needs massive cleanup and reorganization. --Jacobolus 13:48, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Although I'm not sure I agree with you about spinning off Harvard College info to that page, I wholeheartedly agree with you about the need for better organization. Every time I come to this page I am mortified to find that the ranking and admissions percentage are apparently the first thing people need to know about Harvard. But I just haven't felt up to the herculean task of rewriting. Doops 22:02, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Is this article really about Harvard University?

This has bothered me for a while. Much of this article (extracurriculars, athletics, houses, concentrations, etc.) is focused, really, on Harvard College rather than the wider university. As I see it, there are two options:

• we could have separate full-scale pages for the university and college, dealing with everything on the appropriate page. (This has the virtue of accuracy and consistency.)
• we could keep the bulk of the info on the Harvard University page, but add a disclaimer and create Harvard College as merely a little explainer page. (This has the virtue of making one page the main article, rather than splintering everything down to lots of little articles.)

As you can see, I've provisionally chosen the latter of the two options, because, as I see it, if we rob the Harvard University article of the Harvard College stuff, there's nothing interesting left -- all the good stuff would go! And where would the pictures belong? (With either method of arranging things, there will be a fair amount of housekeeping, I'm afraid, since people will inevitably put things in the wrong place.) Doops 10:21, 27 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Jacobolus's Proposal

I also feel that the Harvard University page should be better arranged, perhaps with major headings and some detail about each of the schools, with Main Article: Blah links, as many other Wikipedia pages currently do. It would be possible to then migrate the majority of this article to the Harvard College page, especially about the houses, etc., while keeping some images and data on this page. I feel that this is the best way to truly make the article about Harvard University. There is no reason that the college gets 95% of the article, with many pictures and graphics and links while the med school or the kennedy school, etc., get one line and a link. I'm thinking that the organization could go something like:

• Intro
• The institution
  • FAS
    • Harvard College (main article elsewhere)
      • Migrate "Campus" and "Concentrations" sections, add section about extra-curricular activities, etc.
    • Radcliffe College
    • GSAS
    • Continuing Education
  • Harvard Law School
  • Harvard Medical School
  • Harvard Divinity School
  • Harvard Business School
  • etc.
• History
• Harvard People
• External Links
• Sources
• Footer

I'd be willing to make veritas shield seals for the other schools, if someone was willing to try to help figure out what a modified harvard template should look like

Preferably, there would be some sort of footer, listing all of the schools of the university.

What do people think about this? I really think the article would be better for the reorganization, which would allow for better consistency between articles about the individual schools, as well as better supporting extending the information about the articles at a later date. This will take a good few hours of work, and should be discussed somewhere first.

Anyone know how to make those nifty templates that are used all over Wikipedia? I guess we could start copying some and play around a bit.

--Jacobolus 09:21, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I made up a little template thing. We might want this to be vertical on the right hand side though. I really think we should fill out the stubs about the professional schools, and move most of the info about the college into the college page. We of course should leave a hefty summary, and there should be some summary about the other schools as well. But the Harvard University article should I think be about Harvard University, not about Harvard College (with pictures of the yard and the science center only, not even upper-class houses) with a list of links to the other schools. --Jacobolus 13:24, 3 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I disagree. Whether one thinks it should be so or not, within public perception, the name "Harvard" is often more associated with the College than any other part of the University. Indeed, the term "Harvard University" is often used (technically incorrectly, but this is nevertheless a very widespread usage) by the public to refer to "Harvard College." I don't see it as a problem that this page doesn't discuss the Kennedy School, the Law School, etc., in a great deal of detail, because if someone is linking to or looking for info on those graduate schools, they will likely link to those pages. If some do see it as a problem, then this page could be expanded to talk more about the rest of the university. However, I do not believe information about the College should be moved off this page. Also, compare this page to other university pages across Wikipedia. Most of them also show a similar focus on the undergraduate portions of the university. Furthermore, Harvard redirects to Harvard University. —Lowellian (talk) 19:37, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)

Jacobolus's proposal strikes me as the most rational way to organize the page. Regarding Lowellian's comment -- I don't dispute that 'Harvard University' is often used as a synecdoche for 'Harvard College', but I doubt that any reasonable person searching for information on Harvard College by typing in Harvard University would be in any way inconvenienced by a few-paragraphs summary of the information on the College currently in the University article, accompanied by a link to the College article. Regarding Lowellian's other comment, that most university pages are undergrad-focused, I would observe that Harvard is unusually decentralized (see ETOB) in comparison to other universities, making a university-equals-college page especially confusing. jdb ❋ (talk) 02:15, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I think a lot of people are not particularly clear on the distinction between a "college" and a "university" and just use the two interchangeably. Maybe Dartmouth has the right idea :-) Dpbsmith (talk) 02:33, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Lowellian: as jdb said, will someone really be inconvenienced by a link to Harvard College material? As I see it, currently the Harvard article suffers from poor organization and having information about the college on a page about the University in fact limits the amount that can be added to wikipedia about the subject. Making the article(s) more modular will allow writers to flesh out sections of the Harvard College article, and those of the other grad schools, without worrying about being too specific for a bloated article like that on this page. That is to say, right now, the article is a soup. Structure improves readability. --jacobolus (t) 15:38, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Re "having information about the college on a page about the University in fact limits the amount that can be added to wikipedia about the subject:" that shouldn't be a substitute for a discussion on the merits. The article is presently about 22K long. The firm limitation to precisely 32K is obsolete and the page size warning notice has been softened accordingly. By all means decide on what the best organization for the material on Harvard is, but the present article could double in size with no problems. Articles should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:47, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

OK, the person who originally brought up the issue is finally weighing in again. Jacobolus's proposal is certainly appealing in its logic. It's great in theory — the only question is how would it work in practice? For example, although the university article would mention the various campuses, where would a description of the Yard belong? University? FAS? College? Likewise, what about history — until 1800 or so the university's history and the college's are interchangable.

Also, remember that if we start migrating things to the college page, where will it end? Think about the info boxes. The university doesn't really have sports teams; the university doesn't really belong to the ivy league; etc. Would there be anything of interest left?

Finally, part of me is reluctant to see the currently fairly brief and to-the-point Harvard College article get obscured. Right now it's easy for the confused person to find, there, a discussion of the distinction between the college and the university. Lengthen the page and it'll be less transparent.

But I'm not an advocate of closed-mindedness, so here's what I propose. I've set up a sandbok at talk:Harvard University/experiment to play with the idea. Let's see what a true Harvard University article would look like. Please help work on that page if you're interested in the question. Doops 21:41, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree that Harvard University and Harvard College need to be separated. The current article is confusing, mixing up not only the University and the College, but also the College and the FAS -- where it has a very undergraduate perspective, not even listing the academic departments, but only undergraduate concentrations! The faculty, the courses, the libraries (except Lamont/Hilles) -- they're all FAS, not College, and though graduate students do have an administrative connection to GSAS, they are really more attached to their departments, that is, to FAS directly. I am not sure, though, how best to organize all this. Thoughts? --Macrakis 00:39, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

It's my opinion that the detailed lists of College-specific stuff—namely the House system and the concentrations—belong unambiguously on the College page. They interrupt this article with detail that is too specific for a "Harvard University" article. What I'd like to do is move those parts wholesale to the College article and replace them with a summary and a link. For instance, leave on the University page something like: "First-year students live in dormitories in or near Harvard Yard. Upperclass students live in twelve residential [[Harvard College#House system|Houses]]. Three Houses are located at the the Quadrangle, half a mile northwest of Harvard Yard; the other nine are south of the Yard, situated along or close to the banks of the Charles River." These facts are all relevant to a description of the campus of the University as a whole without going into unnecessary detail about the internal structure of the College. What do you think? I think this makes so much sense that if there isn't an immediate outcry I'll go ahead and move it. AJD 17:27, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Well, I went ahead and moved it. AJD 02:11, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

How about a source citation for "one of the world's most prestigious..."

Not that Harvard isn't, and not to make a big deal about it... but this seems like the sort of remark that would go over better if it could be put into the mouth of someone other than an individual Wikipedian contributor. Preferably someone recognized as reasonably authoritative or neutral.

This doesn't seem as if it should be hard to do.

If the context is world's most prestigious, of course it shouldn't be a U. S. source. If we could be satisfied with "one of the most prestigious universities in the U. S." then a U. S. source would do. But not, say, the Boston Globe! Dpbsmith (talk) 21:48, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I daresay this is one of those instances where pragmatism can trump principle. No reasonable person would disagree with that statement if it were inserted into the Harvard, Oxford, or Cambridge (and it doubtlessly is). jdb ❋ (talk) 00:28, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Admissions details redacted

This tidbit on the mechanics of the admissions process is too small a detail for the HU article. I was going to put it in the HC article, but HC is currently a grab-bag of things that were too College-ish for the HU article, and I didn't want to make it worse by dropping another random paragraph into it. So here it is:

Harvard recently returned from an unrestricted Early Action policy (where students can apply "early" to Harvard in addition to other schools) to a single-choice nonbinding Early Action policy (where you can apply "early" only to a single school), aligning it with the policies of Yale and Stanford, which had both recently moved from a binding single-choice Early Decision policy.

jdb ❋ (talk) 00:24, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The "prestige" comment

Watchers of this page should see this poll about whether this page should contain a phrase like "widely considered one of the most prestigious universities in the world". Nohat 15:47, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What I mean by a "source" for prestige claim

It should be obvious, but a "source" for the claim of prestige means a source which says, in so many words, that Harvard has "prestige."

We all know Harvard tops many lists, but unless it is a "list of universities ranked by prestige" it's irrelevant.

U. S. News and World Report not only does not measure "prestige," but I believe they would insist that they try very hard to evaluate only academic excellence. Dpbsmith (talk) 10:08, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

As others have stated on this page, "prestigious" is really rather obvious, to the point of common knowledge. Citations are easy, even avoiding the harvard.edu domain:

• "Not even the world's most prestigious place of learning is immune..." [27]
• "[Summers] runs the world's most prestigious university..." [28]
• Describes Harvard and Yale as "...two of the world's most prestigious universities..." [29]
• "As one of the world's most prestigious universities, Harvard's...." [30]

—Lowellian (talk) 10:24, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

Fine. Use one of them, then. Don't do what a recent editor did, namely cite a U. S. News and World Report ranking with an edit comment giving his interpretation of why the ranking denotes prestige. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:29, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

What are you talking about? Fenster cited the U.S. News reputation ranking. Strong positive reputation is equivalent to prestige because that's what the word prestige means. AJD 15:52, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

If "reputation" and "prestige" mean the same thing, then why not say Harvard "enjoys the highest reputation among U. S. schools" and cite U. S. news as the source on that? Why the coupled insistence on a) using the word "prestige" and b) either not backing it up at all, or backing it up by sources that use some other word?

My perception is that the insistence on insertion of deliberately vague statements about "prestige" has little to do with communicating the interesting and important nuances of Harvard's special role in American society, and a lot to do with boosterism and an informal policy of allowing only flattering statements to be made in this section. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:11, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Related thought if we say "Harvard is widely regarded as the most powerful university in the United States," or "one of the most powerful" if you prefer, we have another statement that probably falls in the category of generally accepted common knowledge. True, "powerful" isn't precisely defined, but neither is "prestige." So why is it that the statement that people are so insistent on is the one about "prestige?" Answer: because "prestige" is simply flattering, whereas "power" has some less flattering overtones is less congenial to boosters.

All right, I hope this settles it. I've created a page Talk:Harvard University/prestige whose purpose is to collect citations such as those Lowellian lists above. Then in the article, I describe Harvard as "widely regarded" as one of the most prestigious, and link to the list of citations. Can everybody be okay with that? AJD 16:12, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Short answer: yes.

Carping question: why shouldn't the citations be in the article itself? Dpbsmith (talk) 16:15, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Because listing all these quotes would break up the flow of the text; this is the very beginning of the article, where we still want the discussion to be engaging, readable, and not overly detailed. This is confirmatory material, not the actual content of the article. The typical encyclopedia reader, wanting to know something about Harvard, will be interested in learning that it's one of the most prestigious universities in the world, but doesn't care about the random selection of quotations from people saying so. And it is a random selection: none of these are authoritative sources for the prestige of a university; the point of these quotes is to demonstrate that Harvard's prestige is "common knowlege". For the same reason, I don't like Nohat's recent "contextualizing" edit. It overemphasizes minor points while underemphasizing the main point—it's not particularly important that writers characterize Harvard as prestigious, or that U.S. News does; what's relevant is that it's generally regarded as such, which is the point of having casual quotations from a variety of sources. But I'm not going to revert Nohat's changes immediately; I want to get some opinions here first. AJD 16:48, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Oh, sure. The remarks about prestige, etc. in the introductory section should be very short. Shorter than they are now. But I'm thinking the confirming material should in the main namespace rather than in the Talk namespace. An ancillary part of the article, but a part of it. I would think we would wanted it edited the same way, and with equal care, as an article, not in the style of loose discussion. Maybe this is a case where "subpages are evil" should not apply, and this should be a subpage in the main article space. If the editors of this page opt for that direction I'd just as soon see most of the content of the first two paragraphs of the institution section offloaded there.

I still think it would be desirable for the prestige statement itself to be a quotation, with a reference to a list of additional citations: "Harvard is, in the words of so-and-so, "the most prestigious blah blah," an opinion that is [[Harvard University/reputation|widely held]]." Dpbsmith (talk) 17:25, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think it's ridiculous questionable that we now have enough sentences for an entire paragraph about Harvard's prestige in the article. What was wrong with the original simple sentence "Harvard is one of the world's most prestigious universities..."? It flows much better within the prose of the article, and anyone who removes the claim can be reverted with an edit summary pointing to Talk:Harvard University/prestige. —Lowellian (talk) 22:51, Apr 14, 2005 (UTC)

What's wrong with it is that you can put that sentence in just about any college article, but if you hold to the standard of citing sources it will be easier to put them in colleges that are more prestigious and harder to put them in colleges that are less prestigious. And the source quotations are likely to provide important qualifications. "Among the most prestigious Catholic liberal arts colleges in the Southwest..." By all means, offload the boatload of material buttressing the claim to someplace offpage, but have the claim itself be stated as a sourced quotation rather than a flat, unattributed statement of fact. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:10, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

P. S. In fact, the "prestige" disease spreads, because when people see it made in a college that's only a bit more prestigious then theirs, they figure their college deserves it, too. It is literally the case that someone gave as a reason for including a "prestige" statement in the MIT article the fact that other college articles had it, too. If we insist on source citations, well, at least they won't all be exactly the same statement made with exactly the same wording! Dpbsmith (talk) 23:13, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

P. P. S. You know, the good old Wikipedia formula, "X said Y about Z," where Y = "prestigious," Z = "Harvard," and the problem is to find the value of X. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:17, 14 Apr 2005 (UTC)

A fresh start?

Hi. I've completely reworked the bone-of-contention ¶. Does it address all concerns? Doops 04:56, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It looks like there have been some more edits, all minor and some from you, but all in all it is a much more NPOV factual section.

Excellent! I would still like to see a one-general general statement in the form of a source quotation. What would people think about leading off the section with:

Measured in purely objective terms, Harvard is—as Baedeker's guidebook phrased it in 1893—"the oldest, richest, and most famous of American seats of learning?"

Virtues of the source citation approach: I don't believe any other college is likely to come across anything comparable in terms of being a simple, triple superlative from a source that carries some authority. Yale boosters seeking quotations from this particular source must settle for "second in dignity and importance to Harvard alone" while MIT advocates would have to be content with "the leading institution of the kind on the W. side of the Atlantic (1000 students; fine apparatus and collections)."

Dpbsmith (talk) 09:58, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Great quote, just show some sort of net reference to the book, or an ISBN. Baedekers is a book, isn't it?

Baedeker more or less invented travel guides in the era when the word "tourism" (referring to the Grand Tour of Europe) was coined. I don't think there's an online copy. However I do see that there's a 1975 reprint, Da Capo Press (October 1, 1975) ISBN 0306713411. Dpbsmith (talk) 12:25, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Go for it. Baedeker's is linkable and the quote is short and to-the-point; what's more important, your sentence is very well camouflaged (i.e. the quote looks like it's there for color, not as an attempt to source the obvious). Doops 14:40, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Political orientation

The article currently says "Harvard is known for its liberal left-wing politics." Some time ago, I edited this to clarify that this is the Right's position, while the Left often considers Harvard to be a bastion of conservatism, and the training ground for the "Establishment". This was reverted and I didn't discuss it at the time. Now, I'd like to find some more NPOV language which clarifies the situation. For one thing, an institution like Harvard--especially when one considers all the schools--reflects a wide variety of political positions. There are some very left-wing professors at the Law School, and some very conservative professors in the business school--and vice versa. Though most FAS professors seem pretty centrist, some are rather Left and others are rather Right. There are undergraduate liberal organizations, and undergraduate conservative organizations. That said, I agree that Harvard is used as a whipping-boy by the Right, and that is worth reporting. Any suggestions on how to approach this? --Macrakis 19:00, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

While Harvard might be on the right from the viewpoint of, for example, Communists, it is certainly on the left of the American political center. There are concrete statistics to back this up; take for example this poll [31] by The Harvard Crimson in which Harvard students favored Kerry over Bush by 73% to 19%. —Lowellian (talk) 02:58, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. One quick note: we should note that the students and faculty may differ in political opinions --- although in the 2004 election, they did not: faculty, for instance, gave far more money to Sen. Kerry than Pres. Bush [32]. (We should also consider the other university units, but only FAS has a newspaper on par with the Crimson to keep track of this sort of thing.) jdb ❋ (talk) 04:10, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There are many problems with the current wording. One is the blanket description of an institution as having a political position, whereas there is a range of positions within it. Why not just cite the polls you mention? Another is limiting the info to FAS in general and undergraduates in particular (I would guess that HLS and especially HBS have significantly different politics). Then there's the characterization of that political position. The current wording is "liberal left-wing politics", and the proof you give for this is that 73% favored Kerry. Yes, Kerry is to the left of Bush, but it was a close contest, and it is wrong to characterize him as "left-wing" as opposed to "left of center". Next question is the point of comparison. I'll agree that a reasonable comparison is the U.S. median (even though that has moved to the right -- surely Ashcroft is radical right, for example). Another reasonable comparison would be other Ivy League schools or other elite universities. Perhaps (I really don't know) undergraduates at all elite universities are more liberal than elsewhere.

I am also distressed by the nastiness of the wording and of Lowellian's comments. Comparing Harvard to the Kremlin was a vicious slur; and of course it speaks to some people's perceptions of Harvard (and also to Nixon's treatment of his 'enemies'), which is what I emphasized in my rewording. I think there is a similar perception -- in fact it is discussed in one of the cited books -- that Harvard is the training-ground for the Establishment. Lowellian's pseudo-concession that Harvard is to the right of Communists is just gratuitous. --Macrakis 14:59, 26 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Could you please take back that I am trying to "slur" Harvard? I think anyone who has followed this page's history can say that I have never tried to do anything of the sort. I added the Kremlin statement simply because it is a common characterization of Harvard—both by those criticizing Harvard and those who are proud of the characterization. Your wording of the Nixon statement was "Richard Nixon famously slandered it as the 'Kremlin on the Charles'..." I changed that to "Richard Nixon famously called it..." because "called" is a more neutral word than "slandered". In any case, I have now rewritten the beginning of the paragraph again. How does it look now? —Lowellian (talk) 23:19, Apr 26, 2005 (UTC)

I never said you tried to slur Harvard: Richard Nixon did. I do appreciate your good-faith work on the page, including your recent edits. I will make a few adjustments, I think; see how they look. --Macrakis 01:00, 27 Apr 2005 (UTC)

• • Why not ask the students?

"Largely liberal political base, but conservative political groups do make their presence felt."

from the College Prowler guidebook, Harvard University - Off the Record

Vandalism

217.44.98.244 (talk · contribs) is looking to continually revert previously decided links to quotes about Harvard's "prestige". I have added a vandalism-protect label and directed the user to discuss their edits on this talk page. So far, they have refused to do so. Harro5 01:02, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)

Harvard/Harvard University Page Discrepancy; Broken Redirect?

I've noticed discrepancies between the Harvard University and older Harvard page; the latter doesn't seem to redirect to the updated Harvard University page (i.e., if you type in 'Harvard' alone, you get one un-updated page whereas 'Harvard University' brings you to the version with all recent revisions). It's somewhat confusing, but I haven't figured out how to correct it: changes to the Harvard page seem to take hold only temporarily before reverting to an older form, and without any recorded reverts on the history page. No doubt someone else here knows what to do! - 81.155.5.125 (talk · contribs) Apr 25, 2005

This sounds like a caching issue on your web browser. Try Wikipedia:Bypass your cache? --DropDeadGorgias (talk) 20:32, Apr 25, 2005 (UTC)

Thank you, whatever it was it seems to be working now! -- 81.155.5.125 (talk · contribs)

Apr 25, 2005

Most sports teams claim

The article claims "With 41 official sports teams, Harvard has the widest-ranging athletic program in the NCAA." However, MIT has 42 varsity level sports. So, perhaps some clarification is in order.Kime1R 13:20, 22 May 2005 (UTC)

Yeah, I just changed that. One (of many) of the things MIT is known for is for having the widest range of collegiate sports (intramural and NCAA-related) out of colleges in the country. Harvard has a lot, but it doesn't hold the title someone gave it above. 02:30, 1 June 2000 (EST)

Well, Harvard always claims to have the most. See, e.g., [33]. On the other hand, MIT also seems to have 41 teams (see [34]), so I guess it's a tie (not, of course, that bare number of teams is a particularly meaningful statistic). Doops 08:09, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

VFD of HYP

People interested in this page may be interested in Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/HYP (universities) 2. —Lowellian (talk) 23:55, Jun 4, 2005 (UTC)

Name of Harvard-Yale football article

People interested in this page may be interested in Talk:The Game (college football). So far it's just been a one-on-one debate on whether the article about the Harvard-Yale game should be called The Game or Harvard-Yale game, and I'd appreciate input from more people. AJD 21:06, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Arms rights

Hello. User: 217.44.61.126 has taken to removing the image of the Harvard arms from this article, making vague threats about its alleged illegality. Needless to say, it is mere politeness that somebody making such a major edit should at the very least give a little more explanation than those cryptic edit summary comments. Hence I am inviting him/her to post, here, his/her argument explaining why, precisely, he/she believes our use of this image to be illegal. Doops 21:41, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

In particular, he/she should make clear whether the objection is to a) Wikipedia's overall interpretation that fair use laws permit use of logos and coats-of-arms (see Wikipedia:Image_copyright_tags and so forth); or b) this particular image, in the belief that it somehow doesn't come under the permission. After all, the wikipedia currently has literally thousands of such logos. Doops 21:46, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Please contact the Office of General Counsel, Harvard University, if you wish to apply for permission to use the Harvard logo. If you already have explicit consent from the Counsel, please state this in your article. The office may be contacted through http://www.ogc.harvard.edu/ . Whether or not other pages include such 'logos' is not of concern to Harvard itself; the Office's interest is in direct copyright infringements of the Harvard University arms. The University supports not-for-profit endeavors such as Wikipedia but, as we cannot verify the information contained on the pages herein, we request you remove copyrighted University-affiliated images which suggest Harvard's validation of the page's content. Further postings of trademarked or copyrighted images will not be tolerated. Please direct any relevant questions to the Counsel.

Sorry, but it works the other way around. If you have problems with Wikipedia's fair use of logos, you will have to demonstrate ownership of the copyright and file a DMCA-compliant complaint with Wikipedia's designated agent. Until then, the logos stay. Nohat 00:16, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Although I am not an expert in these matters, the IP address 217.44.61.126 appears, so far from being an official Harvard University one, to be somehow associated with British Telecom. That, considered along with the unorthodox hour of day involved and the fact that the messages are left unsigned, suggests to me that we needn't take these threats as official. Furthermore, I suspect that if the general counsel's office were actually taking an interest in the wikipedia, they would do so through more formal channels rather than by using edit history comments and the talk page to bully mere writers like us. (Wikipedia:Copyvio would be a good place to start.) At any rate, I hope that, by the time I return to this page, somebody more experienced with Wikipedia copyright issues will have weighed in and put the matter to rest. Doops 07:28, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The address could have been dynamically rendered or shadowed and needn't tell us much anyway. Furthermore, I doubt a representive would have left his or her name and telephone number on the web (or go through the trouble of registering a Wiki account). It seems possible that the image was removed proactively. Before this turns into a ridiculous conspiracy theory, however, perhaps we could find a personal photograph of the arms off of a university building? That shouldn't risk any copyright issues and seems a fair solution. Angeledit

Well, the best set of arms for that purpose would be the ones over the door of the Fogg, since they're in color. But that would only deal with the artistic copyright of that particular rendering; while the wording of the threat above seems directed rather at the arms' trademark status, which is dicier. Where's a lawyer when we need one? At any rate, though, I repeat my skepticism; I don't think it's some silly conspiracy, mind you — just some practical joker pulling our legs. Doops 22:06, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

If Harvard really objects to the use of their logo in this way, then they have to go through the proper channels to get it removed. If they are going to insist on being assholes about it, then they will have to deal with all the bad press that will go along with it. I will not sit idly by and have our fair use rights scoffed at and shat upon by an anonymous user. If they truly believe this doesn't constitute fair use, the onus is on them to carry out the legal ugliness. We will not just roll over.

What is probably happening here is some anonymous Harvard apologist—possibly a former student or something—objects to something on this article, and rather than just deal with it or fix it, has decided to make trouble for Wikipedia by concocting some bogus legal brouhaha. If Harvard University's legal department were really upset about this, making anonymous comments in the edit history is not the way they would do it. One can be fairly sure that if there really were a problem we would be hearing about it through official channels. Nohat 00:56, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

As a former student, I was going to say that both possibilites seem feasible but would probably guess (tentatively) that it's a disgruntled apologist at work.Angeledit 19 Jun 2005

It looks like the person involved has now created an account, User:RGluckman, with some attempt at legal-sounding text I can't decipher on the user page. I restored the image, as there's no evidence that this person has any authority to speak for Harvard, and in that case there's no reason to give in to this kind of bluster.

Nohat correctly points out that a legitimate complaint would come through different channels. Having handled permission for Wikipedia to use the same kind of image involving another university, I expect that while Harvard might want to make sure the image is fully correct and not used inappropriately, they are unlikely to demand its removal here. --Michael Snow 22:42, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Just for the record, "the official channels" begin with a trip to Wikipedia:Copyvio, where any complaint will, I believe, be more likely to be seen by our resident experts in fair use. As for myself, I freely admit that I have no expertise in the matter— but that if anything makes me even more determined not to let myself get pushed around by those who have (or pretend to have) some. Doops 22:55, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Recent Developments

I added a few notes to the "Recent Developments" section. The information came from the 5/27 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The URL for the article is http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i38/38a00801.htm. I'm still a bit new to Wikipedia so I don't know if this minor update merits its own footnote to note the source. If it does, I'm a bit unsure how exactly to go about adding it. --ElKevbo 05:01, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

How do people feel about adding a section about the Living Wage Campaign? Since it set the stage for literally dozens of such campaigns after it, and had a 3 week sit in, and gained national coverage, isnt it kind of relevnat?--129.171.198.105 02:05, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

Arms rights revisted: message for RGluckman

Hi. User:RGluckman, you seem to be new to the Wikipedia and I know that it's pretty complicated and can be somewhat overwhelming. I left you some questions on your talk page; but you haven't answered them & so I thought I'd try you here.

In particular, you have never stated explicitly whether or not you are empowered to act in any official way for Harvard University. Are you employed by the General Counsel's office? A straight yes/no answer would be helpful.

If you are so empowered, the "proper channels" for addressing your fair use concerns can be found at Wikipedia:Request_for_immediate_removal_of_copyright_violation; this is preferable to harassing those of us who edit the Harvard article. If you are not so empowered, but merely acting on your own initiative, then you should be prepared to engage your fellow editors (i.e. us) in dialogue rather than simply acting unilaterally.

Please let us know one way or the other, both out of politeness to the rest of us and to protect your reputation here (lest you become known for a lack of respect for community standards). Thanks. Doops 23:13, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for this message. Perhaps you could tell me how I might remove the Harvard arms from the infobox which I did not intend to delete. RGluckman 23:41, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps first you could tell us what authority you have to demand removal of this image. The rest of the editors working on this page are all in agreement that there is no basis for removing it, barring an actual complaint from the university itself. --Michael Snow 00:01, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A quorum of Wikipedia 'editors' has no bearing on the law, as you, Mr. Snow, should be aware. You have already been instructed to remove these images and replace them with others. 'Doops' suggestion of a Fogg photograph would, I find, be acceptable as has been indicated in the past to the appropriate Wikipedia overseers (or those whom I have been led to believe are in charge of such matters -- perhaps I have been intentionally misled). Your cooperation is much appreciated. Do not contact my talk pages; I am obviously not a regular user. You will notice I have left the aforementioned infobox untouched for the time being though expect the arms will likewise be replaced with something heretofore uncontravened. RGluckman 00:23, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've requested this article be protected. --ElKevbo 00:43, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

About time! Thanks. Hayford Peirce 00:47, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Mr Gluckman has been blocked. Protection is probably not necessary at this time. Nohat 00:49, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That will work, too. Thank you Nohat! --ElKevbo 00:54, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I think Mr Gluckman's failure to identify exactly who he is and what relation he has to Harvard is telling, as is his unwillingness to explain why fair use doesn't apply here other than in obscure (and meaningless) pseudo-legalese. Dpbsmith has blocked him for 24 hours for vandalism. Let us hope he doesn't continue to vandalize when his block period is over.

Mr Gluckman, if you truly do represent Harvard's legal department and Harvard does not want their logo used in this way on Wikipedia, I highly recommend you cease trying to remove the image from this page, and instead follow the instructions set out in Wikipedia:Copyrights to begin the proper procedure for the takedown of copyrighted materials.

We do not believe that use of this image in this way is prohibited by copyright law, and your contrarian bluster is unpersuasive. Indeed, the only thing we would find persuasive is actual, verifiable action taken by the university's legal department, which is heretofore absent. Nohat 00:49, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

By the way, here's a link to the webpage of the Harvard General Counsel's site that specifically deals with University copyrights. I've glanced through it but dunno if there's anything that specifically refers to such a silly hoohah as this. http://www.techtransfer.harvard.edu/UseOfName.html Hayford Peirce 00:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This could be easily solved with a simple telephone call. --Alterego 00:59, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

I've blocked RGluckman for 24 hours for violation of the Wikipedia:Three Revert Rule:

18:45, 20 Jun 2005 RGluckman (Please find an alternative image. (memo 7))

(cur) (last) 17:56, 20 Jun 2005 RGluckman

((cur) (last) 17:46, 20 Jun 2005 RGluckman (Please use a non-copyrighted image)

(cur) (last) 15:56, 20 Jun 2005 RGluckman (These copyrighted images shall be removed)

By the way, I don't see how copyright could possibly apply here, since I'm pretty sure the Harvard University Veritas shield is more than ninety-five years old. The Harvard University VERITAS Shield is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College, but that doesn't affect us since Wikipedia is not claiming to be part of Harvard or affiliated with Harvard and there is no conceivable way anyone could interpret the article as making any such claim. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:01, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've blocked without commment RachelGluckman (talk · contribs) for being an obvious sockpuppet of RGluckman (talk · contribs). Nohat 01:02, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Hayford, I looked over some of the same Harvard pages you did and I get the clear impression that Harvard's main concern is people or organizations with loose connections to Harvard giving the impression that they are an official part of Harvard. On the other hand, there is nothing to suggest they are worried about the Veritas therapeutic community or Veritas!, the official website of the Archdiocese of Singapore, or Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy's Veritas Shield or Veritas software or the Veritas forum of Duke University... Dpbsmith (talk) 01:07, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, I should hope not. Veritas is simply a word and Harvard has no more monopoly on it than it does on "truth." (Ha! I'll be here all week, folks.)

Come to think of it, I seem to recall there's some school somewhere with the motto "Lux et Veritas" and some stuff written on a book on a shield... Dpbsmith (talk) 09:52, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That said, however, they do have certain rights over the specific coat of arms itself. If there ever was artistic copyright in the design, that is long since expired; the artistic copyright in this particular rendering of it might still be running, but if Harvard (or the original artist) objects to that we can simply draw our own version of the arms; it's the trademark issues which might cause concern — but dpbsmith's explanation above is much more convincing than RGluckman's; so I think we can continue in the assumption that we're OK.

As for RGluckman, I think it's pretty clear now that he/she doesn't have any standing in this matter. Doops 02:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Someone mentioned above that the image couldn't possibly be copyrighted based on it's age. I want to agree with that. The first sketch, according to the Harvard Gazette, was done on Jan. 6, 1644, and the version in use today is from 1885 [35] --Alterego 02:25, Jun 21, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. I did a quick Google for it under various combinations of "history" and "Harvard" and "Veritas" and "shield" without luck. Harvard has soooooo much history, and all of the hits were about the history of something else Harvardian that happened to have a Veritas shield illustrating them... Dpbsmith (talk) 09:56, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Not really...the arms have been drawn and redrawn plenty of times since 1885; so this particular rendering could conceivably still be copyright. (But that doesn't necessarily mean that we can't claim a fair use exception for it...) I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if the design can be copyrighted — but if it can, then you're right, that's certainly old enough. Doops 02:35, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Well, I guess my point is that if anyone from Harvard were to have a concern about the image I'll expect them phrase it as a trademark concern rather than a copyright concern. Dpbsmith (talk) 09:52, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

By the way, there is certainly no Gluckman, Rachel or otherwise, listed at the General Counsel's website right now; nor does his/her email address (as given on his/her user page) follow that office's standard format. And for whom, by the way, is that partial email address supplied? The rest of us don't know how to complete it, while a colleague presumably could look it up at work and wouldn't need to be given it again. Doops 02:44, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Message for RGluckman, again

RGluckman, you have been asked repeatedly to identify yourself. For various reasons, most of us think it very unlikely that you have any standing to speak for Harvard; and indeed, if we parse your various comments carefully, it is notable that you have often implied such a standing but never explicitly claimed it. You have ignored the friendly overtures we've made to you; I think we are perfectly justified, therefore, in assuming that you are merely being willfully annoying — but I'll ask again: once and for all, are you acting officially for Harvard or not? Doops 04:47, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Friendly overtures? Well, good job 'parsing' the comments. How many editors did that take? How long did it take? I am sick of seeing Harvard associated with this ridiculousness. Articles like this are part of the reason Harvard's gone downhill since my grandparents (and later, I) attended it. Not only should Harvard have no place on Wikipedia, it shouldn't look so obsessively insecure, which only makes us a laughingstock. The moral of this story: you asked where my authority came from, and the point was that you had no way of knowing, nor does anyone. That goes for every contributor including the guy who should put his thinking cap on and strip his cats for fur. I look forward to my next (lifetime?) ban. Don't worry though, I won't be back (though I expect Wiki advocates will come to the rescue and either delete this or write three hundred self-righteous responses to it, none of which I will see). I apologize for being rude but many of you seem not to understand what you're doing. RGluckman 04:58, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry; I don't understand at all. Please feel free to explain on my talkpage. I think most editors would be genuinely interested to hear your views on how to make this article better. I promise that I will take anything you have to say seriously. Doops 05:03, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

We take what we do seriously. Even when people apparently vandalize pages and create mock-serious comments in support of their actions, we try to give respectful consideration, up to a point. This means that yes, sometimes we spend a lot of time dealing with such things. It is hardly news that we are vulnerable to vandals and pranksters; that comes with the territory. I don't see what you mean by saying you are is "sick of seeing Harvard associated with this ridiculousness." The article itself looks pretty good to me. Do you find the Harvard article ridiculous? Or do you feel that Harvard should actively try to prevent us from including an article about Harvard at all, because Harvard ought to take a principled opposition to Wikipedia's nontraditional scholarly methodology? Dpbsmith (talk) 13:48, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Gah. I suspect the punchline for this is going to be a giant YHBT. Vague legal threats, blustering, long incomprehensible justifications, revert wars, and sockpuppetry generally lead me to suspect the poster is acting in bad faith. jdb ❋ (talk) 00:38, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I agree 100%. Ignore this character if he ever returns.... Hayford Peirce 04:36, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Apparently you folks have missed the coda; the matter appears to be resolved now. See my talk page. Doops | talk 28 June 2005 05:48 (UTC)

US News Peer Assessment Scores

A number of users have been adding the names of other schools to the line about the US News Peer Assessment scores, such as Duke, Penn, etc. These users are confusing the overall US News rankings, which change every year, and the peer assessment scores of "prestige", which consistently name the same five schools (Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale and Princeton) as the most prestigious with a 4.9/5.0 rating. I've clarified the wording to prevent further misunderstanding. - MartianMank 00:32, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Ahh... I see where you're coming from. As you probably guessed, I added Duke - out of loyalty to my future school - to the list since it tied MIT and Stanford for fifth in this year's overall ranking. Choosing just one of the subfactors seems arbitrary to me, but considering the whole ranking process is arbitrary - who can argue that Harvard, Duke, Penn, or Stanford are "better" than Columbia, or vice-versa? - it doesn't really matter. Best, JTM

Judaica collection

Article currently says: "Harvard boasts a unique $5 million Judaica library which has identified and categorized books by ink type, font type, paper thickness, pagination style, binding method and numerous other categorizations." Several problems with this. First of all, it seems strange to discuss one of Harvard's many great special library collections in the main Harvard University page. Secondly, what does it mean that it is a "$5 million" library? That it has a $5m endowment? (true?) That it has a $5m building? (false) That it has $5m worth of books? Third, what is most important about this collection (like the others) is its great depth of content, not the cataloguing system. After all, many collections (especially rare book collections) catalogue the physical attributes of books. I propose to delete this sentence entirely. --Macrakis 20:27, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

You're right; that is a weird sentence. We might as well toss it (or move it to the article on HUL/HCL/Widener, if there is one). jdb ❋ (talk) 00:24, 27 July 2005 (UTC)

feeder schools

I hope nobody minds but I removed the bit about the Boston Latin school. There are many schools that have close ties to Harvard and many schools that send a large contigent to Harvard each year; this seemed like a little bit of boosterism for Boston Latin.

Request for information: how high is Memorial Hall's tower?

I hope you'll tolerate this very mild abuse of Wikipedia. This is research for an unrelated project. I'm writing some notes about a 1903 novel set in Harvard University circa 1882. (I'm fantasizing about self-publishing a reprint of the novel, with annotations).

Anyone know:

• How high is the tower of Memorial Hall? Preferably the original height (or the height after restoration in 1999).
• I assume that it would have been the tallest structure in Cambridge for many years. Can anyone confirm this and does anyone know the actual range of years in which this was true (i.e. what structure eclipsed it and when?)
• The novel mentions seeing Memorial Hall from the general vicinity of Braintree or Quincy: "across the flat suburban spaces, they again sighted Memorial tower, small in the distance; the sun was lighting it." Any personal observations as of 2005 as to distant locations from which Memorial Hall's tower can be sighted? If so, can I quote you (with attribution of course)?
• Apparently, as of 2005 the building is no longer used as a dining hall. Is this right? When did it stop being used for dining, and why?

Dpbsmith (talk) 13:49, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

• Apparently the original height was 195 ft. Since then, the spire has been by turns gussied up, stripped of metal for the war effort, accidentally burnt down, missing for years, and finally (in 1999) rebuilt. I presume its height is once again in that region, since the new design is based on the original 1877 spire. I wouldn't be surprised, by the way, if it is still the tallest building in Cambridge — or if not, it's not eclipsed by very many feet. All the real tall buildings are in Boston proper.
  • Hmmm... From Emporis it looks as if the ugly and dysfunctional MIT Green Building might actually be the tallest building in Cambridge, and it was built in 1964, making it one of the earlier buildings in their high-rise list. 295 feet, and that probably doesn't include all the crap on top. They don't give the height of 100 Memorial Drive, built in 1949, or the Peabody Terrace Apartments at Harvard, built in 1964, or 1105 Massachusetts Avenue, built in 1970, which seem to be possible candidates for "first building in Cambridge to exceed the height of Memorial Hall..." Dpbsmith (talk) 18:41, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Re the various changes in the tower: writing in 1905, Frank Preston Stearns complains "an enormous clock on the tower of Memorial Hall detonates the hours in a manner which is by no means conducive to the sleep of the just and the rest of the weary. The elderly graduate, returning to the dreamland of his youth, finds that it has actually become a dreamland and still exists only in his imagination. The university has broadened and extended itself wonderfully under the present management, but the simple classic charm of the olden time is gone forever." Dpbsmith (talk) 18:14, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
• Really? From Braintree or Quincy? Wouldn't, you know, Boston get in the way? But it can occasionally be seen from 95 as you go across the Charlestown bridges and viaducts north of Boston.
  • Whoops, I screwed up... they are returning in the early morning from Quincy to Cambridge and have already passed Jamaica Pond when they see Memorial Hall "across the flat suburban spaces." Never mind...
• It (or more precisely the western half of it) stopped being used as a dining hall quite a long time ago, in 1926 when student dining was dispersed to the houses; but in 1994, after years of relative idleness when it was used for storage and examinations and things like that, it became the freshman dining hall, known as "Annenberg." (I believe that in the early 20th century it was a college-run dining hall; but in the late 19th century there was no such thing: many students ate in their boarding-houses or belonged to private eating clubs and Memorial hall was run as a student co-operative by and for those who couldn't afford to do so. It was built not for this purpose but to hold alumni gatherings.)
  • It seems to have been used for dining from the very beginning, though. A clergyman writing in 1884 says "the deportment of the students to-day is that of gentlemen, with very rare exceptions, such as might be expected among so large a number. In the great Memorial Hall, where they eat, the best of deportment is always to be seen, and everywhere there is now a pride, in all departments of the University, in observing the proprieties of good conduct." In 1886 Henry James wrote: "The Memorial Hall of Harvard consists of three main divisions: one of them a theater, for academic ceremonies; another a vast refectory, covered with a timbered roof, hung about with portraits and lighted by stained windows, like the halls of the colleges of Oxford; and the third, the most interesting, a chamber high, dim and severe, consecrated to the sons of the university who fell in the long Civil War." I (blush) had to check a dictionary to confirm that a "refectory" is "A room where meals are served, especially in a college or other institution." A 1892-3 Harvard catalog refers to board at "the great dining-room at Memorial Hall" as costing $4.25 a week and available to anyone who joins "the Association that uses [it]." Deportment must have deteriorated by 1906, because a member of the class of 1906 recalls "Most of the students ate at commons in Memorial Hall, or 'Mem' as it was called. There was a balcony from which visitors might see how the animals were fed. If ladies came, there was apt to be a rhythmic stamping of feet." Dpbsmith (talk) 17:43, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

In case you haven't found it, here's the official website, with adequate (although not terribly extensive) information: [36]. Doops | talk 15:48, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Thanks much. Dpbsmith (talk) 17:43, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Oh, yes... I see the page on Annenberg Hall says it was used for dining immediately after the hall was constructed and explains everything. Dpbsmith (talk) 17:46, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

"Midwestern Ivy League" ?

Contributors to this page may be interested in this article, which has been proposed for deletion:

Midwestern Ivy League

Please review the article and provide your input on that article's Votes for Deletion page. - 18.95.1.22 03:55, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

"America's Oldest university"

I eliminated the following sentence from the opening paragraph, until its claim is verified: "(The College of William and Mary in Virginia is America's oldest university, however, as Harvard was originally a seminary)." --Masoni 04:17, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

Don't worry about it. It's just nonsense. Doops | talk 05:09, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

"library"

I wonder if Harvard really does have the largest university library in the world. The bodleian library, Oxford's library, is a copyright library just like the british library. So, it gets a copy of every book copyrighted in the UK, and has done since the late eighteenth century. Plus they have whatever they had before the late 1700's, although thats probably not too much compared to the amount thats been published since. 67.22.5.134 02:44, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

I remember seeing the actual numbers once; in first place was the US Library of Congress with ca. 28 million; second was the British Library with ca. 18 million; third was Harvard University Library with ca. 14 million; and fourth was the French Bibliotheque National with I don't rememeber how many. But of course this is just anecdotal evidence; somebody find the real numbers to back me up. Doops | talk 04:30, 21 October 2005 (UTC)

"Why Harvard is better than Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc."

Moving some egregious POV sections to the talk page:

The college and university rankings published annually by US News & World Report generally place Harvard at the top, primarily based on surveys of university officials and various criteria such as graduation rate, SAT scores, and alumni giving rate. The U.S. News rankings have been criticized for the intrinsically subjective nature of the survey, questionable significance of some of the criteria, and possible conflict of interest in surveying university officials. Surveys of the general public in the U.S. reveal that Harvard is perceived to be the top university across the nation, while other leading schools tend to rank high only within specific geographic regions, such as the West Coast, the South, or the Atlantic. The 2004 Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings put Harvard University in first place^[37], as did the 2005 World Universities Rankings by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.[38]. The former was based on a combination of international reputational surveys and the number of citations of published work by faculty. The latter was based on the number of Nobel Prizes won by alumni and faculty, publications in top journals, and research citations. Harvard leads the nation in the number of faculty in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an honor given to only about 2,000 most accomplished scientists. Harvard's current membership is at 167, compared to 128 for UC Berkeley, 126 for Stanford, 101 for MIT, 70 for Princeton, and 63 for Yale. Harvard has a large faculty overall but many are clinical faculty affiliated with its professional schools. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, including the Engineering Division, numbers 1063, compared to 1038 at Yale's School of Arts and Sciences, and 801 at Stanford's Schools of Humanities and Sciences, Earth Sciences, and Engineering.

Harvard traditionally has had the highest "yield", or the proportion of students who matriculate. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that Harvard is preferred by a wide margin in a "head-to-head" competition with another school. Harvard College perenially enrolls the largest number of National Merit Scholars (312 out of 2500 national winners, followed by 224 at Yale, 217 at Stanford, and 192 at Princeton), National Achievement Scholars, and Westinghouse/Intel Science Competition winners. Harvard undergraduates lead the nation in winning the prestigious Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships to British universities. Harvard students have won the Putnam Mathematical Competition more than any other university in North America (24 first place finishes, 50 top five finishes), well ahead of rivals such as MIT (5 first place finishes, 35 top five finishes), Caltech (9 first place finishes, 28 top five finishes), and Princeton (23 top five finishes). A study by the Wall Street Journal (http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/pdfs/wsj_college_092503.pdf) has found that Harvard graduates are significantly better represented at the top-notch medical, law, and business schools than their counterparts in the peer institutions. In the 2003 entering class of elite professional schools selected by the Journal, 358 held Harvard undergraduate degrees, while 231 hailed from Yale, 181 from Stanford, and 174 from Princeton.

Moved this back to the article since it is a simple FACT, not a personal OPINION, that the overall quality of faculty and students at Harvard is substantially higher than those of other schools and it's important for the reader to have the information. Data such as number of faculty in the National Academy, the number of National Merit Scholars in the freshman class, the number of wins in the Putnam Competition are all objective information, not based on some bullshit rankings or surveys. The person who called this info "egregiouis POV" obviously thought that the Atlantic Monthly ranking are valid enough to leave in the article. Talk about a double standard!

Reverting these edits. Despite the opinions of some Harvard students and alumni, it is certainly not a "FACT" that the overall quality of faculty and students at Harvard is higher (or even as high) as the PEER SCHOOLS mentioned. The section is obviously trying to enumerate all of the stats which show Harvard outperforming those peer schools, but lists nothing that shows the converse. And even if it did, a detailed list of rankings information is just not very worthy of the main entry -- a few primary stats should suffice. The Atlantic Monthly rankings are the only point of "balance" (if you can call it that, considering that Harvard still does well in those rankings at #5) in that section of the article. - MBAguy 19:43, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I've reinserted the text deleted by MBAguy. Please discuss why this text is objectionable and gain a consensus before deleting it again. Thanks. Obviously that " the overall quality of faculty and students at Harvard is higher" than others, is clearly debatable. But that for example: "It is widely considered one of the finest academic institutions in the world", or that "Admission to Harvard is extremely competitive.", seem factual and relevant, (just as it they would if be in the Stanford or Yale or MIT articles by the way). As does most of the removed text. Is anyone saying that any of the assertions of fact in the text are wrong or irrelevant? If so which ones? By the way the title of this section is misleading. The article does not assert that "Harvard is better than Yale, MIT, Stanford". It does say that many people and think it might be, or that by some measures it exceeds other institutions. These statements seem factual and relevant. Are there other balancing opinions or measures which should be included? Paul August ☎ 20:47, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

It's patent boosterism and should be removed per the guideline: Wikipedia:avoid academic boosterism Dpbsmith (talk) 21:23, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

P. S. It's bad enough when people keep adding garbage to my own alma mater's article like "MIT ranked #1 in the 2005 Washington Monthly ranking of US colleges and universities," but I expect Harvard to show a bit of class. There's no reason for Harvard to give an impression of insecurity. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:34, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Dpbsmith is right on the money about insecurity. The longer the comparison-with-other-schools § gets the less professional the article seems. Brevity is key. (Also: when reverting an article, please be sure not to lose useful edits in the process.) Doops | talk 22:02, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't understand the "insecurity" or "class" issues. What Wikipedia writes does not reflect on Harvard's "class" or "insecurity". Harvard isn't writing this article, Wikipedia is. So Harvard is'nt giving any impression at all. There are only a handful of institutions which are in the running for being considered the most prestigious university in the world, Harvard is one of them, that seems relevant to this article. Paul August ☎ 22:54, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I wasn't challenging the prestige sentence—that's a different issue—but the two long paragraphs containing 3K bytes of text that reel off every conceivable statistic that could be summoned in praise of fair Harvard. It's a question of balance. It is perfectly possible to present a non-neutral point of view simply by presenting facts, and that's what is happening here.

If you have an article about Hitler, and it mentions in passing he was a vegetarian or an ovolactarian or whatever he was, that's one thing. If it were to go on and on for paragraph after paragraph extolling his kindness to animals, his gentleness with children, the excellence of his architectural drawings, and so forth, one would begin to feel that the article was no longer trying to serve the reader nor to present knowledge impartially, but that some kind of a point of view was being pushed.

Those two paragraphs may not have been written by Harvard, but they read as if they were written by Harvard. Or, rather, by Harvard's admission's department. Or, rather, by the admissions department of a mediocre university. They are way, way out of balance. They read like advertising. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:57, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

I'm a current student at Harvard and authored most of the two paragraphs in question. A common misperception is that schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are pretty much interchangeable with Harvard, a notion that these other schools try very hard to propagate. I remember agonizing over the decision between Harvard and some of these schools when I was choosing which college to attend. If I had known what I know now two years ago, it would've been a no brainer. So I think it's important for the uninformed reader to have access to the truth. The reason why the article is "out of balance" is because there are so few factual data showing that these other schools are better than Harvard in just about anything. If you can find other reliable and relevant information that can "balance" the picture, by all means, add it to the article. People would tell me that Harvard is good in the humanities and social sciences and MIT is the best in the sciences and so forth. But in reality, Harvard has by far the largest collection of the best scientists in the country and also has a large share of the very best student mathematicians and scientists, all the while being great in English and history and economics. This doesn't say a darn thing about individual students, of course, but the overall difference is significant and should be noted. By the way, I just looked at the Yale article, and it contains pretty much the same kind of information, e.g. Fortune 500 CEOs, U.S. Presidential candidates, admissions statistics at the Yale Law School, etc. I'm sure the Yalies would love to go on and on if they only could. I do somewhat agree with the point about "insecurity" and "class" but since the information is clearly new to most of you, it does inform and is therefore necessary.

With regard to the Yale article: yes, academic boosterism spreads like ivy. Poison ivy. It shouldn't be in the Yale article either, but everyone feels they have to out-brag their rivals. Yale acquired a great big buttful of blue peacock feathers just a while ago, and MIT has been growing a cardinal-and-gray tailspread.

As for "it does inform and is therefore necessary," Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.

This all reminds me of a magazine profile of Harvard some decades ago. It quoted a Harvard student as saying "This is the only place where nobody is impressed by your being a Harvard student." A month later, the letters column was full of letters from students at other Ivy League and Seven Sisters (I told you this was decades ago) saying "We're not impressed, either."

I'm glad you think Harvard is tops in absolutely everything, but personally I think Embry-Riddle is better than Harvard in aeronautical/astronautical engineering, Juilliard is better than Harvard for music, Cornell is better than Harvard for hotel administration, and Johnson & Wales is better than Harvard for culinary arts. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:50, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Dpb, you may be right about all those places being "better than Harvard". Of course none of that matters. What matters is what does the rest of the world collectively think. In my experience, Harvard, rightly or wrongly, has the reputation of being the best school in the U.S. and one of the best schools in the world, thus for example the phrase "Harvard of the Midwest". Paul August ☎ 05:31, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

"Harvard of the Midwest?" OMG. Of course I know about all of the various Harvards of the South. Look. I don't personally have any problem whatever with the idea that Harvard is the premier university in the U. S. (although I have a big problem with, as Alex Beam calls it ironically, deeming it the WGU, World's Greatest University). One of the characteristics of Yale is the truly large number of metrics by which it can be characterized as "second only to Harvard." I have no problem with some kind of well-sourced quotation that makes it clear in one fairly succinct sentence that Harvard has a special status.Dpbsmith (talk) 11:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree with all of the above. Paul August ☎ 17:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I have a problem with these paragraphs that go on and on and ON.Dpbsmith (talk) 11:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

And I have no problem with cutting down some on that material (or perhaps much of it could be moved to a footnote as support for Harvard's "special status" you mention above. But I don't think that the original edit of removing all of it was appropriate. Paul August ☎ 17:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I'd prefer a subpage. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:34, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I didn't know about the joke below ("attended Harvard college") but I find it absolutely astonishing that in person Harvard alums are thought to be so modest and diffident that they are reluctant even to name the institution they attended for fear of seeming arrogant... yet they have no objection to the boosterism currently in the article. Dpbsmith (talk) 11:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't see how the attitudes of Harvard alums are particularly relevant to this discussion. Paul August ☎ 17:26, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Apologize, the paragraphs that bother me were added by someone who says he is a Harvard student, not an alum.

The stuff on rankings and admission and all that is longer than the history section. Personally, I have no intention to to apply to Harvard et al., and don't need a brochure, but I would be interested in reading more on the history of Harvard and the other Ivy League institutions, and about their historical role in American society. One would perhaps have expected Ivy League students to be provided with the type of education that would enable them to contribute meaningfully to these articles. u p p l a n d 11:16, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I just made some major additions to the article and added some of those stats for you. It was relatively easy, as there are mountains of evidence which point to Harvard NOT outperforming (or even matching) many of its competitors in all kinds of metrics. I don't think 99% of this ranking stuff belongs in the main article, but if the pro-Harvard stuff is there, then the other stats should be added too. I hope others contribute, and then the whole giant section gets moved to the talk page. :-) Your devotion to your alma mater is commendable, but unfortunately your attitude and need to prove that Harvard is the greatest in the world at absolutely everything is one of the most common criticisms of Harvard students and alumni (also now noted in the Criticism section). - MBAguy 05:54, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

I fully agree with those who have stated that all of the rankings statistics, metrics and comparisons to other schools don't belong in this article. The statistics are full of POV, they do not shed any real insight into the institution, there are many contradicting statistics available that have not been included, and most importantly, the whole section reads like the fringe rant of an exceptionally insecure Harvard student who feels the need to justify himself by "proving" that his school is somehow in a class by itself. The author's own comments in the discussion above justifying his POV language because "Harvard really is so much better than all the other schools and the uninformed reader has a right to know" is as bizarre and embarrassing a rant as I have ever read on Wikipedia. The POV flag that has been placed on this article is appropriate, and the whole rankings/comparison section should be removed.

I have made some changes to these new sections that have been added, mainly to point out a couple of things. First, it can be easy to lie with statistics - a lot of the raw numbers in these new sections like "most National Merit Scholars" are misleading when placed outside of the context of Harvard's larger class size. They suggest a wide gap against Harvard's peers that may not really exist. Second, selective use of surveys and rankings to connote institutional quality can also be misleading, since different surveys produce different results. The WSJ survey shows that Harvard students do well in getting placed in graduate programs, the Fortune study shows Harvard graduates are poorly represented among Fortune 500 CEOs relative to Yale and Princeton. Which is right, and does either survey really point to the quality or lack thereof of a 350 year-old institution, or its peers? I would argue that all of these new comparisons to peer schools and rankings should be removed, since they can be misleading, and do not really accomplish the mission of an encyclopedia. That goes for my new additions to these sections as well, which I have mainly added to point out the absurdity of what is already there.

I have also added a new paragraph to the "criticism of Harvard" section, which I believe is legitimate and informative in the context of what the section is trying to accomplish, which is to point out major, widely-held criticisms of Harvard. Given that the criticisms are sourced directly to Harvard publications and Harvard students and administration, not to third-party sources, I do not believe they reflect any bias or POV. If anyone disagrees with this new paragraph in the criticisms section, please address here in the discussion boards before deleting.

Power factor! Power factor! Have people seen the stuff added by 69.110.41.173 (not me!) in which he counters a questionable WSJ article that shows how Harvard rules the corridors of corporate America with a dubious Fortune article that applies a fudge factor to compute a "power factor" that shows Princeton and Yale spanking Harvard? I love it! It's as good as the Eli who replaced a statement that Yale's endowment was smaller than Harvard with one that showed that the endowment per undergraduate is just as high. And, by golly, Yale's library is just as good as Harvard's, too—if you adjust for class size! Now if we can just figure out what the "class size" is for the whole City of Boston, we can probably get Yale's library to be "larger" than the Boston Public Library. Me, I'm working on trying to discover a metric that would explain why MIT's library (#98 with 2.71 million volumes) is, if regarded properly, far better than either Yale's or Harvard's. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:33, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

The sensible people seem to be winning the battle of the talkpage but not that of the article itself. Let's do something about it. Doops | talk 21:37, 2 December 2005 (UTC)

Yes, Dpbsmith, of course the Fortune article is "dubious" - that's the whole point and the reason I put it in. All of these rankings and comparisons that have been cited are dubious, and all of them are ruining a perfectly good and otherwise informative article. No one is trying to "show Princeton and Yale spanking Harvard." I am trying to get the community to take a stand and remove these ridiculous comparisons that have suddenly appeared (all of which seem to have been written by a current Harvard student who has articulated a clear POV above) and made this article unprofessional and inappropriate.

I agree with you completely. I like what you did. What I wrote sounds as if I was attacking you for selecting dubious statistics in order to prove a predetermined point. I didn't mean that. I understand that what you were doing was demonstrating how easy it is to select statistics in order to prove a predetermined point. I enjoyed the fact that you were able to find such a perfect example. Me, well, to me "power factor" will always mean the actual power consumed, divided by the product of the voltage and the amperage. Dpbsmith (talk) 00:06, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

This is Andrew, the Harvard student "with a clear POV". I haven't checked back this page in a while- because unlike some of you, I actually carry a heavy academic workload, compete against brilliant classmates, and also happen to have a life. I notice that you've deleted much of my contribution to the article. That's fine, I'm not gonna bother - none of this will have the slightest effect on how people view Harvard. 100 years from now, Harvard will still be the greatest institution of higher learning on the face of the earth. I have two comments: 1) for people who think that the statistics are dubious and irrelevant, many universities actually have this type of information on their websites. Check Berkeley's, for example, http://metrics.vcbf.berkeley.edu/. Look at Faculty and Elected to Scholarly Academies. MIT actually proudly displays its rankings in U.S. News on their official website - pathetic!!! Harvard is too dignified to do this sort of a thing, of course. 2) "MBA guy", the person who added "legitimate and informative" criticism of Harvard, is clearly biased against Harvard for whatever reason. This section is a prime example of "a clear POV". It's pretty ridiculous for someone who's never gone to Harvard to write this kind of bullshit about how Harvard students feel about their own school. Where did this survey showing that Harvard students are unhappy come from? They never asked me! Harvard students are pretty demanding, so perhaps they can be critical of the administration, but if they were given the chance to transfer to Yale or Princeton or MIT, how many do you think will go for it? Zero! Andrew December 11, 2005

Andrew, the entire "undergraduate experience" criticism section is directly sourced to Harvard sources, not to "someone who's never gone to Harvard". The Harvard Crimson Magazine, which wrote an extensive two-part article criticizing the Harvard undergraduate experience is of course researched and written by Harvard students, and all of the quotes in the article, such as "I don't know anyone who likes it here", come from the Harvard community. The Consortium on Financing Higher Education student satisfaction survey is based solely on the responses of students at each of the 31 colleges surveyed - in other words, Harvard's near-bottom rating is based completely on the responses of Harvard students to the survey. And though you may choose to dismiss the survey, it is clear that Harvard's administrators take it very seriously, from their quotes and from the internal memorandum quoted in the Boston Globe article. By the way, the criticisms were not just leveled at Harvard's administration - they were leveled at the most important aspects of the undergraduate experience, including quality of teaching, quality of advising, the residential housing system, and social options. The sum of information suggests that despite all of the statistics you keep citing, the Harvard undergraduate education is seriously flawed, and many Harvard students are clearly very dissatisfied. These are serious enough criticisms, coming from multiple Harvard-based sources, to warrant a place in the "Criticism of Harvard" section.

So you think that the WSJ article and the Fortune 500 study are equivalent. I hope you agree that in a country of 300 million, your chance of becoming the CEO of one of the 500 wealthiest companies are not too high. The whole Ivy League only accounts for about 10% of the Fortune 500 CEOs, and any slight lead that Yale might have over others is quite miniscule. In your whole Yale class, maybe one guy a year might end up being a Fortune 500 CEO, more often none. The majority of Fortune 500 CEOs come from little known schools and public schools. Is that a surprise? Of course not. You don't have to be academically brilliant to be a businessman. The number of Fortune 500 CEOs is not a good reflection of how well schools do in producing business leaders. If you looked at the top 5000, it might be more representative. Among those CEOs of large companies with MBAs, Harvard graduates account for 25%, by far the largest number. The WSJ article, on the other hand, is very relevant because it tells you that a quarter of the Harvard graduating class went to top business, law, and medical schools, ie. if you go to Harvard, the chances are about 50% that you will get into a top graduate school. If you went to another school, the chances are lower. Is this misleading or irrelevant information? Is ir irrelevant that Yale has only about 1/3 as many faculty in the National Academy as Harvard while having about the same number of faculty in Arts and Sciences? To me, it shows that Yale is not as strong in the sciences as Harvard. Is this misleading or irrelevant? Also, why all this fuss about the larger class size at Harvard? OK, Harvard has about 25% more undergraduates than Yale, but does it fully account for the difference in the number of National Merit Scholars (40% more), number of Rhodes Scholars (95% more), Marshall Scholars (136% more), or the number of wins in the Putnam Math Competition (24 first-place finishes versus 0 wins, 50 top-five finishes versus 11)? In my personal experience, the majority of the smartest people that I knew in high school who exceled in national competitions and so forth went to Harvard (about 60%). MIT got a few, Stanford got a few, but few went to Yale. Andrew

Oh... I wonder where Andrew went to high school. Half a crown says I can guess in less than ten. As far as his statement that H will be at the top of the academic heap in 100 years, that's rather limited scope, don't you think? I'm sure that the major European centers of learning were saying the same thing in fin de siecle academia, only to find the upstarts from across the drink breathing down their backs shortly thereafter. The Harvard of the 22nd century, to borrow the expression, will very likely not even be this side of the Pacific. I daresay, impermanence is a revelation wasted on the dead. I don't even need to touch on the efforts of Ol' Larry to run you guys into the ground of late. He's probably been plotting since his days at Senior Haus. No doubt surprised you kept him aboard so long. Anyway, Andrew, you've gone a long way to bring me a small bit of amusement. I assure you it is much needed, since, unlike yourself, I don't happen to have a life, and I don't compete against brilliant classmates, I work with them. 08:35, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Attended Harvard College or Harvard University?

People who attend the undergraduate school say they "attended Harvard" or "Harvard College"; the lawyers say they went to "Harvard Law School." So Wikipedia style for biographies should prefer saying "XXX attended Harvard College" when the undergraduate college is meant. Rjensen 08:52, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Heh--this reminds me of a joke about Harvard alums. General cocktail party discussion, Person A says to Person B, "I couldn't help overhearing you say that you went to college in Boston." Person B, "Yes?" Person A, "So, I went to Harvard too. What house were you in?" Not all Harvard alums are so modest, of course. betsythedevine 21:37, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

????? I don't get it... Is the point that Harvard isn't in Boston? Or that Harvard alums think Harvard is the only school in "Boston?" Or is it that if a Harvard alum is trying to establish pecking order and discovers that the person he's evaluating also went to Harvard, the next step is to determine who lived in the more prestigious dorm? Or is it an in-joke incomprehensible to anyone who didn't go to Harvard? Or do I just lack a sense of humor? Or... Dpbsmith (talk) 00:10, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Some Harvard students and alums often are timid to mention Harvard in a conversation. I think mostly because the school has so much cultural weight that it sometimes can be hard to refer to it in a casual manner. So a lot of people just end up saying that they go or went to school in Boston. Tfine80 00:52, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! Fascinating. I find it astonishing that in person Harvard alums are thought to be so modest in person that they will not even name the institution they attended, yet have no objection to the braggadocio currently displayed in the article. Dpbsmith (talk) 11:02, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Dpbsmith - ouch! As a Harvard (College) alum myself, I'll attest to the fact that once the "H-bomb" is dropped, a person's attitude towards you can change pretty quickly. Some struggle for words, thinking that they need to say something "smart" to be on your "level"...some become guarded, expecting you to become arrogant and condescending...the best I got was from a girl who, when I told her that I was a Harvard student, replied in a relatively irritated way, "Wow, you must be rich." (My response: "Umm...OK"; my thoughts: "Yeah, I guess, but what difference does it make?") My point is that the Harvard name, with all of its positive connotations, carries various negative ones as well - stereotypes that are only exacerbated by such (otherwise excellent) movies as "Good Will Hunting" and "How High". Say what you want about the braggadocio (that's what the Talk page is for, after all), but implying that some hypocrisy is created by taking a different approach to generally agreed-upon facts (the "general agreement", in this case, being a main function of the Wikipedia vetting system) versus socially constructed prejudices seems a little unfair... - myu kulathungam ('04) 2 December 2005

College v. University

This gets to a deeper problem with this page in that it doesn't do a good job discriminating between a college and a university. Historians of the university understand that the rise of the modern university as a cultural movement in the US began with the founding of Johns Hopkins University in 1876. A university is an amalgam of colleges, graduate, and/or professional schools. Harvard University, as a modern university, followed after Johns Hopkins (sure, it may have been called a "university" earlier, but typologically it really wasn't). WHEN? is why I came to look on this page and could not find out that information.

I think a major re-write is in order here. Separating out the various colleges associated with Harvard University (Harvard College, Harvard Law, Harvard Medical, etc.) would be very helpful.--RedJ 17 21:49, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

If you're interested in the introduction to the US of the new German-style research university, Johns Hopkins was certainly a key player; but Yale did award its first PhD in 1871 and Harvard in 1873. At any rate, it's certainly true that this page'ss history section is still a stub and this shift is among the things it should address. Do note, though, that there already are pages for each of the faculties and schools. Doops | talk 22:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

FWIW, the first known mention of Harvard as a university was 1779 in Massachusetts's Constitution. Of course, that didn't mean then what it has come to mean now. - Nunh-huh 03:32, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

good grief

This is getting out of hand. Now just step back and think for a moment: what should an encyclopedia article about an educational institution say? It should tell us what the instution is, how it works, its projects and routines. It should tell us something of its history. It should talk about its symbols, its architecture, and so forth. It should be ABOUT THAT INSTITUTION and its work.

Instead, we've got growing sections which are not about Harvard — they are about comparing Harvard to other institutions. Moreover, they're not about comparing Harvard qualitatively ("it was until recently the only college which allowed its students to build fires in their dorm-room fireplaces") but quantitatively ("athough other schools are brilliant, Harvard is 23.5% more brilliant"). This is pathetic, especially when they're given pride of place at the top of the article. The breakdown of the school into faculties is shoved down the page. The house system -- a defining characteristic of undergrad life -- does too. The history section is still a stub. Lemme repeat: the history section is still a stub, and we're trying to figure out exactly how many angels can dance on the head of an admissions office pin. Doops | talk 00:40, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

Thank you for your suggestion! When you feel an article needs changing, please feel free to make whatever changes you feel are needed. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit any article by simply following the Edit this page link at the top. You don't even need to log in! (Although there are some reasons why you might like to...) The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use out the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. Nohat 02:00, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

There's no need to be rude. Doops | talk 02:37, 1 December 2005 (UTC)

I have made some changes to these new sections that have been added, mainly to point out a couple of things. First, it can be easy to lie with statistics - a lot of the raw numbers in these new sections like "most National Merit Scholars" are misleading when placed outside of the context of Harvard's larger class size. They suggest a wide gap against Harvard's peers that may not really exist. Second, selective use of surveys and rankings to connote institutional quality can also be misleading, since different surveys produce different results. The WSJ survey shows that Harvard students do well in getting placed in graduate programs, the Fortune study shows Harvard graduates are poorly represented among Fortune 500 CEOs relative to Yale and Princeton. Which is right, and does either survey really point to the quality or lack thereof of a 350 year-old institution, or its peers? I would argue that all of these new comparisons to peer schools and rankings should be removed, since they can be misleading, and do not really accomplish the mission of an encyclopedia. That goes for my new additions to these sections as well, which I have mainly added to point out the absurdity of what is already there.

I have also added a new paragraph to the "criticism of Harvard" section, which I believe is legitimate and informative in the context of what the section is trying to accomplish, which is to point out major, widely-held criticisms of Harvard. Given that the criticisms are sourced directly to Harvard publications and Harvard students and administration, not to third-party sources, I do not believe they reflect any bias or POV. If anyone disagrees with this new paragraph in the criticisms section, please address here in the discussion boards before deleting.

This is Andrew, the Harvard student "with a clear POV". I haven't checked back this page in a while- because unlike some of you, I actually carry a heavy academic workload, compete against brilliant classmates, and also happen to have a life. I notice that you've deleted much of my contribution to the article. That's fine, I'm not gonna bother - none of this will have the slightest effect on how people view Harvard. 100 years from now, Harvard will still be the greatest institution of higher learning on the face of the earth. I have two comments:

1) for people who think that the statistics are dubious and irrelevant, many universities actually have this type of information on their websites. Check Berkeley's, for example, http://metrics.vcbf.berkeley.edu/. Look at Faculty and Elected to Scholarly Academies. MIT actually proudly displays its rankings in U.S. News on their official website - pathetic!!! Harvard is too dignified to do this sort of a thing, of course.

Because it's their website! Universities promote themselves on their website. Just as Coca-Cola's website promotes Coca-Cola and the Christian Science church's website promotes Christian Science. Such websites can be useful sources of information, but not everything in them is legitimate encyclopedia material even if it is factual. If the Christian Science website says Mary Baker Eddy established the First Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879, fine, that can go in an article. But if the Christian Science website says that

Recent Recognitions Include

1995: Eddy was elected to the National Women’s Hall of Fame for leaving “an indelible mark on society, religion and journalism.”

1998: Eddy was named by Religion & Ethics Newsweekly one of the 25 “most significant religious figures for Americans in the 20th Century.”

2002: the Congress of the United States recognized both Eddy for her outstanding achievements and contributions, and The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity

I would not automatically assume that all of that should go into the article, even if it is factual, because it is written from the point of view of promoting Eddy's reputation and that of Christian Science. There's no reason for one of our articles to make a point of enumerating every positive recognition Eddy has received in the last decade.

Similarly, Wikipedia is not a university's website and it is not Wikipedia's job to boost universities. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:36, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

2) "MBA guy", the person who added "legitimate and informative" criticism of Harvard, is clearly biased against Harvard for whatever reason. This section is a prime example of "a clear POV". It's pretty ridiculous for someone who's never gone to Harvard to write this kind of bullshit about how Harvard students feel about their own school. Where did this survey showing that Harvard students are unhappy come from? They never asked me! Harvard students are pretty demanding, so perhaps they can be critical of the administration, but if they were given the chance to transfer to Yale or Princeton or MIT, how many do you think will go for it? Zero! Andrew December 11, 2005

Andrew, the entire "undergraduate experience" criticism section is directly sourced to Harvard sources, not to "someone who's never gone to Harvard". The Harvard Crimson Magazine, which wrote an extensive two-part article criticizing the Harvard undergraduate experience is of course researched and written by Harvard students, and all of the quotes in the article, such as "I don't know anyone who likes it here", come from the Harvard community. The Consortium on Financing Higher Education student satisfaction survey is based solely on the responses of students at each of the 31 colleges surveyed - in other words, Harvard's near-bottom rating is based completely on the responses of Harvard students to the survey. And though you may choose to dismiss the survey, it is clear that Harvard's administrators take it very seriously, from their quotes and from the internal memorandum quoted in the Boston Globe article. By the way, the criticisms were not just leveled at Harvard's administration - they were leveled at the most important aspects of the undergraduate experience, including quality of teaching, quality of advising, the residential housing system, and social options. The sum of information suggests that despite all of the statistics you keep citing, the Harvard undergraduate education is seriously flawed, and many Harvard students are clearly very dissatisfied. These are serious enough criticisms, coming from multiple Harvard-based sources, to warrant a place in the "Criticism of Harvard" section.

Criticism of Harvard

I am very disappointed with the "criticism of Harvard" section. I checked out the entries of other comparable institutions, and nowhere does anyone feel the need to add a section of criticisms. This section is even longer than most of the other sections about the institution. Although you may claim that the criticisms about Harvard come from 3rd parties and are therefore not biased, the fact that this section exists for Harvard and for no other university clearly demonstrates a biased view: that the myth surrounding Harvard should be disproven - and not the myth surrounding any other school. Many people are just as impressed by the Yale and Stanford name. It seems to me that whoever wrote this feels a particular resentment toward Harvard for its reputation. I can understand how the assumption that Harvard people are somehow smarter can be obnoxious, but this is ridiculous. I feel like deleting it, but I thought I should open discussion before getting rid of it. —the preceding unsigned comment is by 140.247.142.60 (talk • contribs)

Well, the information in the Criticism section is interesting, but it does seem to go on a bit long and in a bit too much detail in some ways. For instance, many of the issues mentioned there don't affect just Harvard, but actually all colleges and universities, or many of the prestigious ones. A good way to make the Criticism section here more manageable would be to push out some of the details into general articles, like grade inflation, legacy preferences, teaching assistant, and higher education. There is also no links to other important issues in higher education in which Harvard is involved, including affirmative action and liberal/conservative bias controversies. It sounds like the articles for other schools could also use a healthy dose of negative information (though it need not be concentrated in a standalone section like this), if there's notable criticism to be documented. The section you see here now was not written by any one person; it has accumulated over time from the contributions of many editors. Sometimes nothing grows if no seed is planted (as for other schools), but once something gets growing, it often needs pruning. Harvard, of course, also has more than its fair share of critics, simply because it is so famous. -- Beland 02:21, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

This is Andrew, the Harvard student "with a clear POV". I haven't checked back this page in a while- because unlike some of you, I actually carry a heavy academic workload, compete against brilliant classmates, and also happen to have a life. I notice that you've deleted much of my contribution to the article. That's fine, I'm not gonna bother - none of this will have the slightest effect on how people view Harvard. 100 years from now, Harvard will still be the greatest institution of higher learning on the face of the earth. I have two comments: 1) for people who think that the statistics are dubious and irrelevant, many universities actually have this type of information on their websites. Check Berkeley's, for example, http://metrics.vcbf.berkeley.edu/. Look at Faculty and Elected to Scholarly Academies. MIT actually proudly displays its rankings in U.S. News on their official website - pathetic!!! Harvard is too dignified to do this sort of a thing, of course. 2) "MBA guy", the person who added "legitimate and informative" criticism of Harvard, is clearly biased against Harvard for whatever reason. This section is a prime example of "a clear POV". It's pretty ridiculous for someone who's never gone to Harvard to write this kind of bullshit about how Harvard students feel about their own school. Where did this survey showing that Harvard students are unhappy come from? They never asked me! Harvard students are pretty demanding, so perhaps they can be critical of the administration, but if they were given the chance to transfer to Yale or Princeton or MIT, how many do you think will go for it? Zero! Andrew December 11, 2005

As I explained above... it is perfectly appropriate for Harvard students to cheerlead for Harvard at football games. It is appropriate for a universities' own website to do a bit of cheerleading for the university. It is not appropriate for an encyclopedia article about a university to do cheerleading. The neutral point of view is one of the Five Pillars and Jimbo Wales has described it as being "non-negotiable." Dpbsmith (talk) 23:42, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Andrew, the entire "undergraduate experience" criticism section is directly sourced to Harvard sources, not to "someone who's never gone to Harvard". The Harvard Crimson Magazine, which wrote an extensive two-part article criticizing the Harvard undergraduate experience is of course researched and written by Harvard students, and all of the quotes in the article, such as "I don't know anyone who likes it here", come from the Harvard community. The Consortium on Financing Higher Education student satisfaction survey is based solely on the responses of students at each of the 31 colleges surveyed - in other words, Harvard's near-bottom rating is based completely on the responses of Harvard students to the survey. And though you may choose to dismiss the survey, it is clear that Harvard's administrators take it very seriously, from their quotes and from the internal memorandum quoted in the Boston Globe article. By the way, the criticisms were not just leveled at Harvard's administration - they were leveled at the most important aspects of the undergraduate experience, including quality of teaching, quality of advising, the residential housing system, and social options. The sum of information suggests that despite all of the statistics you keep citing, the Harvard undergraduate education is seriously flawed, and many Harvard students are clearly very dissatisfied. These are serious enough criticisms, coming from multiple Harvard-based sources, to warrant a place in the "Criticism of Harvard" section.

Very interesting. I just looked at that Boston Globe article, and the figure accompanying it clearly states that 79% of Harvard students are satisfied with their education, 14% are ambivalent, and 7% are dissatified. I would not insinuate that most Harvard students are unhappy based on these numbers-- it is intellectually DISHONEST to do that. In fact, being a Harvard student myself, I know it for a fact that most of us are happy to be here, and would choose to come here again if we had to do it all over. We are not always happy, we are often stressed out, and we could probably come up with a list of things that Harvard could do better in, but it is simply OUTRAGEOUS to imply that we are getting a poor education. Many Harvard students were stars in high school and find themselves very ordinary all of sudden at Harvard, and that can be a crippling sensation to some people. Most of us get over it very quickly but some don't. There is nothing wrong with Harvard's advising system - we get everything that others get at other colleges - we have faculty advisors, upperclassman "big brother" or "big sister", House Masters, House tutors in your discipline (these are graduate students who live in dorms, and each dorm has at least ten or more such tutors), student clubs (women in science, for example), and many other informal opportunities. We even have hotlines for anonymous discussions. The quality of teaching can be variable, but we are at Harvard, not in high school, and our idea of learning is self-directed, not spoon-fed. Granted, if you went to Swarthmore or Williams, you might have a professor hold your hand more, but their primary responsibility is teaching not doing the kind of groundbreaking research that Harvard professors do. One privilege of going to Harvard rather than a small school is the opportunity to see these great minds first-hand and be inspired. All professors who teach classes have weekly office hours and if you can get up enough nerve to go, it can be wonderful. Many senior professors teach small freshman seminars with less than 12 people per class. Harvard professors are quite accessible if you have the initiative. They won't come knocking on your dorm room - you have to take the first step. Graduate students who teach sections can be brilliant to terrible, but usually one can shop around for a good teachiing fellow, and plus the grad students need to learn to teach, too, and they can learn from us. Often grad students know exactly when you are having trouble grasping a concept because they recently underwent the same process. Harvard is not exactly a party school, and that's because of who we are, not because of Harvard. There are parties every weekend somewhere, and there are so many things going on on campus every weekend that I rarely have had to venture outside the campus. The House System at Harvard is the crown jewel of the Harvard experience and the envy of other schools. As I pointed out before, very few Harvard students would want to live at MIT (whose campus resembles an industrial complex), Yale (New Haven!), or Princeton, New Jersey, for obvious reasons. The biggest source of stress at Harvard is from having so many things to choose from and from having to measure yourself against so many brilliant classmates. Andrew

I agree with what dpbssmith said, but by the same token, an encyclopedia should not be saying things like "Harvard students are known for self-promotion" (so I deleted this part). This is clearly an opinion, and it is not even true - at least my statistics were accurate and relevant. This is an insult to 75% of Harvard students who take time out of their busy schedule to volunteer at the Philips Brooks House (a building dedicated solely to public service at Harvard). There are many Harvard students dedicated to activism and service. Of course, you can point to this book and that book claiming that Harvard students are this and that, but the main purpose of these books is to sensationalize and sell. I've seen at least a dozen books about Harvard since coming here - there are books about being black at Harvard, being gay at Harvard, finding God at Harvard, there was one girl who claimed that all Harvard students were nutcases and cokeheads, there was another one from a recent graduate which claimed that Harvard students are not interested in learning but only in shameless self-promotion (this must be the book you are referring to). You must be incredibly naive if you actually believed all of this. There are many, many different kinds of Harvard students - there are math geniuses, budding scientists who spend all their free time in lab, jocks, concert musicians, pre-meds and pre-laws, socialists, Republicans, activists, environmentalists, writers, and the only thing they have in common is that they possessed some unique characteristic or talent that Harvard found refreshing and valuable. You do great injustice by lumping them into "shameless self-promoters". Andrew

One more comment about grade inflation. Since you objected to my numerical comparisons between schools, it is not fair to mention exact percentages between different schools. I might add that a below-average student at Harvard would be in the top quartile at a school like Penn or Cornell, based on objective academic criteria. When you have 10 people who went to the U.S. Math Olympiad in your freshman math class, it is simply not the same thing as when you have one person who went to the Math Olympiad, let's say at a school like Yale. Someone who barely got an A- at Harvard might well have been at the very top of the entire class if he or she went to a lesser school. Harvard professors recognize that their students are the cream of the cream and are simply rewarding outstanding performance for its own sake. Andrew

While I don't want to engage in personal attacks or evoke the stereotypes of arrogance and self-promotion sometimes associated with Harvard students (no matter how tempting it might be in this instance), it must be said that Andrew's continued "contributions" to this discussion page really paint a clear picture of what kind of person he is, and what his POV is. I would encourage the community to take a serious look at Andrew's "contributions" to this article with NPOV in mind, and make revisions or reverts as necessary (he contributes under the IP address 170.223.183.78). Andrew seems to have the tendency to put out completely unsupported bouts of arrogance (e.g. "a below-average student at Harvard would be in the top quartile at a school like Penn or Cornell") in the discussion board and he then puts statistics and claims in the article without sourcing them. At a minimum, he has a clear and exceptionally arrogant POV, but more importantly, many of the claims he is putting in the article may be flat out wrong, and without sourcing, we have no way to check his many claims. He already triggered one NPOV flag in the past month...

Chill out. This is a discussion board, not the actual article, and I don't see any footnotes in other discussions, either. Having said that, although there's some variation from year to year, Harvard's median SAT is about 1500, and Cornell's is about 1400, and Penn's is about 1440, with a standard deviation of about 70-80. So a below-average Harvard student would indeed be in the top 25% at Cornell or Penn. I did not mean to sound arrogant, nor was I trying to put down Cornell or Penn (my older brother went to Penn and it's a fine school), but was just making an observation. The same way that I was observing that Harvard is overall stronger academically than Yale, which the president of Yale himself is quite willing to acknowledge but 69.110.21.81 just can't. The actual survey result is in the figure in the Globe article, as I state above, and the source is the same as the source used by the previous author. All the statistics I've cited are valid- I may be arrogant but at least I am not dishonest. Andrew

You may not think yourself dishonest, Andrew, but your conclusions from statistics as documented across this discussion board are often poorly thought out. To use your example above, you assume that because Harvard may have a 60 point higher median SAT than Penn, a below-average Harvard student would by definition be in the top 25% of his class at Penn. You draw the unsupported conclusion that there is a direct correlation between median institutional SAT scores and how students would rank in their class based on GPA. You have a tendency to dismiss statistics you don't like (e.g. Harvard's 79% satisfaction rate in the COFHE survey is pretty close to the 85% median of the other schools, so what's the problem?), and trumpet statistics that you do like (e.g. Harvard has a 60 point advantage in median SATs over Penn, so obviously Harvard students must be much smarter than Penn students). You often draw unsupported or wrong conclusions from statistics (and I can give you several examples of this from your prior discussion board entries if you like). You also make a lot of condescending statements about other schools when in fact you don't know anything about those other schools beyond your own arrogant prejudices. You often seem to be working backwards from your already-drawn conclusion that Harvard is best, a conclusion that seems to be based solely on your apparently insecure need to bolster yourself by proving how great your college is. A much more humble person, also apparently affiliated with Harvard, started this discussion by saying that "I can understand how the assumption that Harvard people are somehow smarter can be obnoxious" - you prove this person's point.

My comment originated, if you remember, because this encyclopedia was claiming that Harvard had "declining standards" compared to Cornell and Yale simply because Harvard was giving out more honors. My point is that perhaps Harvard students deserve the honors and there is no reason why every school has to have the same proportion of students graduating with honors, since they don't start out with equally capable group of students in the first place. Harvard may be more generous with the lowest level of honors (cum laude) but it still limits the highest honors to only about 4%. I never claimed that SATs directly correlate with the GPAs (I think the SATs are a stupid test in any case). And I think I've stated pretty clearly before that whatever numbers I cite do not imply anything about individuals. Penn and Cornell are great schools and I would have been happy to go to either of those places if I had to and I would've met plenty of talented people. The COFHE survey issue, again, originated because this supposedly neutral encyclopedia was claiming that Harvard students are much more unhappy than their peers. If you look at the hard data (I'm trained to do that thanks to my Harvard education), only 7% of us actually rate ourselves dissatisfied. Don't you concede that the original article was deliberately misleading and biased? I am not trying to show how great my college is to bolster my ego, but rather trying to straighten out misleading information contributed by biased individuals, such as the ones who originally wrote "Criticisms of Harvard". I happen to go to Harvard so I know about the place better than most people. Personally, I think the people who are insecure are the ones who feel the need to continuously check on another school's website and cry out Harvard "boosterism" whenever they see the slightest hint that Harvard is better than other schools. If you can rebut some of the statistics I've provided before, I would be interested in hearing it. However, I'm in the middle of my exams before the holidays and probably won't be checking back for a while. Merry Christmas! Andrew

It's been very intersting observing the back-and-forth discussion here, but I feel the need to step in since my sole contribution to the criticism section has been mentioned. Namely, Andrew, you mention "this encyclopedia was claiming that Harvard had "declining standards" compared to Cornell and Yale simply because Harvard was giving out more honors. ". Actually you are incorrect. It never claimed that. It claimed and still claims that concerns have been raised because of that. That is absolutely true, given the media attention to that issue. And note that enough people grew concerned that the 2005 class will be getting much less honors. One thing you need to straighten out is the difference between saying "X has property Y" and "Some people say X has property Y". Wikipedia makes statements of both all the time, and the latter is often appropriate, although some, such as you, confuse it with the former. --C S (Talk) 21:05, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

One last thing: it is rather unfortunate that so much attention has been given to criticizing Harvard in this article. On the other hand, it's overcompensation for much (but lesser) attention being given to promoting Harvard. I am rather satisfied to see the self promotion section gone though; I always felt it was clear POV. The undergrad experience section clearly still needs more work. But I believe that it is not inappropriate for this Harvard article to contain a section on criticism. Harvard is a big target and thus is prone to draw fire from many quarters. Wikipedia, in order to do a good job of NPOV, should mention some of this. --C S (Talk) 21:15, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I wrote the first posting for this section and have been very interested to see how the discussion has developed. I must say that I appreciated Andrew's later posts more than the earlier ones and would discourage him from saying things like "unlike some of you, I actually carry a heavy academic workload, compete against brilliant classmates, and also happen to have a life" and "100 years from now, Harvard will still be the greatest institution of higher learning on the face of the earth." I work hard to change the common conception of Harvard students which I think people hold for several reasons: 1) resentment at the societal idea that Harvard University students are universally smarter and 2) that the Harvard students who get noticed are the loud ones who draw attention to the university only for self-promotion. However, Andrew makes some good points about undergraduate life and diversity at Harvard, and I hope most people realize that 95% of Harvard students (and no, I have no source for that) are not shameless self-promoters. Although I appreciate the very close attention that has been given to citations and carefully-worded statements, I still don't feel that this section is justified in its length and detail. Chan Ho expressed satisfaction that the self-promotion was eliminated and expressed satisfaction at the criticism, that "Wikipedia, in order to do a good job of NPOV, should mention some of this." However, just leaving criticism is not a NPOV. If you want to be neutral, both sides should then be reported. Why should Wikipedia not then mention the good things said about Harvard in society? What is the praise? What is the criticism? And just leaving it unbalanced is not okay. I do not believe that it is Wikipedia's job to right the wrongs of society - that it's okay to criticize and not praise Harvard here to combat its inflated reputation in society. If an argument is reported on Wikipedia, both sides should be reported, not just one.

I authored much of the "undergraduate experience" section of the criticism, which I suspect may be one of the bones of contention here, especially among Harvard-affiliated members of the community who may perceive it to be an attack. The section was not intended, as the first poster in this section suggested, to disprove the myth surrounding Harvard. Rather, it was a response to how out of hand the POV in this article got over the last couple of months, mainly because of Andrew's contributions, but also attibutable to some others (see "Why Harvard is better..." above). The POV was especially offensive because of the undertones it carried - the unwarranted tone of superiority, the condescension towards other schools, the sheer level of obnoxiousness, all put forth under cover of a supposed "factual approach". In the "Why Harvard is better" section, Andrew put forth the following challenge in the spirit of pure arrogance: "The reason why the article is 'out of balance' is because there are so few factual data showing that [other schools] are better than Harvard in just about anything. If you can find other reliable and relevant information that can 'balance' the picture, by all means, add it to the article." In the same discussion, Paul August opined that "these statements seem factual and relevant", implying that the burden of proof was on others in the community to find balancing information. And it seems evident to me that the community, including the majority of Harvard-affiliated editors who are not self-promoters, has not taken a hard enough stance against the egregious POV language and Harvard boosterism when it appears. That is why I suspect many of us have let the criticism section grow to the extent it has - to balance out the boosterism that always seems to worm its way into the article, and which many editors seem to turn a blind eye to. Dpbsmith has laid out in extensive detail the appropriately neutral tone for this article elsewhere in the discussion. I would encourage the community to be proactive in striving for that level of neutrality, and challenging the POV as it appears. If the article can come close to those standards of neutrality, and maintain it even in the face of the Andrews who sneak in and push their own arrogant agenda, I have no problem with someone editing and tightening the criticism section.

Less than 24 hours have passed since I wrote the comments above suggesting that the community respect the NPOV guidelines highlighted by Dpbsmith, and now entirely new boosters have come out of the wood work to trumpet Harvard's rankings and "prestige". I have reverted the edits. Let's see how long this sticks...

Harvard School of Dental Medicine - First US Dental School?

Hey guys, I'm a newbie here, and I've recently been adding to the Harvard School of Dental Medicine article that has been pretty empty until I started adding.

Strictly speaking, I don't think HSDM is the first US dental school. The first US dental school would probably be the Baltimore College of Dentistry (formed before harvard), which later merged into the University of Maryland to form the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery in the early 1900s. Another similar situation happened with Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery later merging with the University of Pennsylvania.

However, Harvard still has a claim to fame because these initial colleges in Baltimore and Pennsylvania were probably like barber colleges before they merged with their universities. These colleges were like trade schools. Harvard School of Dental Medicine is the world's first university-based dental school (that's a fact). And so it was probably the first dental school that actually made dentistry a science, and created the dental educational institutions we know today with research and all that.

So, harvard is the World's First University-Based Dental School and probably not, strictly speaking, the The First US Dental School. But writing the World's First University-Based Dental School might seem a little pompous. I don't know. Anyhow, I'll let you guys chew on this one. I'm not gonna change it cause I haven't contributed to the Harvard University article. Good work guys, keep it up! : ) --HarvardToofDoc 00:38, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Ok, changed my mind, I'm gonna change it myself! : P

Please let me know if you have any suggestions for the Harvard School of Dental Medicine article. : )

Criticism of Harvard (and of other Ivy League Universities)

Why does this section exist? Almost every criticism in this section also applies to Yale (my school) and Princeton. Isn't this POV? People are criticizing Harvard not because it's problems are much worse, but because (even I will admit) the college is more well known. I think we should move the criticisms either also to Princeton and Yale or move it off entirely.

There's a great deal of consensus here on the talk page among experienced Wikipedians that the article is woefully short on facts and long on opinions. Now I'm normally a big fan of how easy it is for a newcomer to get involved in the wikipedia, but in this article I admit to being frustrated by it. It seems like every week some new editor or anonymous-IP editor comes along whose attention, invariably, is drawn instantly to the reputation of Harvard; he/she enthusiastically fills the article with more boosterism or criticism -- and usually is quickly answered by another editor with the opposite agenda. But somehow, nobody ever seems to have the slightest interest in improving the factual parts of the article -- the parts which describe what Harvard IS (as opposed to what people think of it). I'm as guilty of this as anybody else is; I've been meaning to give the page a major overhaul for over a year and just haven't gotten around to it because I'm too daunted by the size of the undertaking. But somehow the boosters and detracters are never daunted; which is why the page is as it is. Doops | talk 04:28, 17 December 2005 (UTC)

The "criticism of Harvard" section contains almost 6,000 characters, or nearly 23% of the entire article (25,850 characters). While it makes for an interesting reading, it does not belong in an encyclopedia article and represents a grossly unbalanced treatment of the topic. The section has been edited for brevity and relevance to resemble what was originally in the section.

All colleges have those who want to criticize it. I'm not sure having a Criticism section for Harvard is warranted. Why are lavishing so much attention onto Harvard?

Recently, someone added to this section information about President Lowell that already was on his wiki. It is not criticism. If anything, it's the actions of President Lowell. It is correctly at his wiki and not in this section. It's not like this is new information.FifthAveLex 00:34, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

No, the expulsions were official university actions, not the rogue action of President Lowell (though his persecution of Harvard students "found" to be gay is particularly egregious given the predelictions of his sister). The continued harassment of the expelled students was continued long past Lowell's presidency. Did you read the information you deleted? It is new: revealed in 2002 and the subject of a book in 2005. - Nunh-huh 01:03, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

An article on Germany should cover Hitler and the Holocaust, as ours does. An article on the United States should cover slavery, as ours does. This does not mean Germany currently kills Jews or that the United States currently enslaves blacks, but they are legitimate parts of the histories of these countries.

I don't know why, when it comes to universities, people think that our policies and practices should be different, and that we should limit ourselves to puffy paraphrases of admissions-office brochures.

While not unique to Harvard, the anti-gay episode seems noteworthy to me, and it is at least a properly-sourced fact. I don't know whether it should go in "criticism" or "history." It could probably use some trimming.

I have absolutely no idea what you mean by "President Lowell's wiki." Dpbsmith (talk) 01:10, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

"Views" section

I've renamed the "criticsm" § "views". Here's my vision for it:

• all of us responsible editors, whenever we spot either choler or puffery elsewhere in the article, can instantly and confidently move it to the "views" § without so much as a thought.
• editors with a strong stomach (i.e. not me) can then go through this section periodically to whittle it down to the factual and relevant and notable.

Hopefully this will help deal with the frustrations we've been having recently. Doops | talk 08:16, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

"....and older than the country itself. "

I trimmed the last phrase from

It was founded on September 8, 1636, by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States and older than the country itself.

This is a good example of something which is, assuming a certain meaning of "country," true, but unencyclopedic. Of course 1636 < 1776. This is a comparison that a reader can easily make for himself. It's also a pointless observation, or at least I can't think of any non-boosterish reason to mention it.

The important facts are the date of founding, and that it is the oldest college-like-thing in the U. S.

One could write, equally factually,

It was founded on September 8, 1636, by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, making it older than the formal organization of the United States; about the same age as Dedham, Massachusetts; younger than St. Augustine, Florida; and four centuries younger than the Sorbonne.

But what's the point?

Is there a good reason, other than boosterism, why, after saying that Harvard was a) founded in 1636, and b) the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, it is valuable to add that it is "older than the country itself?" Dpbsmith (talk) 13:11, 30 December 2005 (UTC)

It is factual that Harvard is older than the US. You could also make the (absurd) argument that it is boosterism to mention that the college is the oldest in the US. The point is that much of Harvard's history was dictated by the fact that it was founded before the nation. It is a fact.

Really? How does the fact that Harvard is older than the US affect Harvard's history? Doops | talk 23:25, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, among other things it means that Harvard's second president, Rev. Charles Chauncy, was somewhat audacious when he had tea with William Goffe, one of the refugee Regicides, and it might be of some interest that Harvard acquired Goffe's house, in Harvard Square, to become a dormitory called "Goffe's College" (no longer standing, though marked by a plaque in its former position.) And it meant that early documents and legislation relating to the founding of Harvard were subject to endorsement by a foreign power. From 1636 to 1650 Harvard was operated without a charter, untested by Crown or Parliament, making it an operation of questionable legality. (P.S. The Regicides had to flee Cambridge for New Haven, where they received more reliable protection. Trend-setting?<g>). - Nunh-huh 00:03, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Well, having seen the Regicides' cave on West Rock, I can't say that I would recommend New Haven to any fugitives from justice asking me for a comfortable hideout. But in all seriousness, your answer doesn't show Harvard's history being affected by the fact that it's older than the US — because at the time when those incidents took place the US didn't exist yet and to the best of my knowledge the future can't affect the present. :) Doops | talk 00:13, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I rather think monarchical institutions are differently constitued than republican ones. Harvard was also founded in the British tradition that established churches were desirable, which is not an American concept: it was not until 1843 that other than Congregationalists were eligible for election as overseers of the college . The Revolutionary War disrupted education at Harvard and other institutions. Your mileage may differ. (The Regicides, of course, moved from their cave to more accomodating circumstances, were never turned in, and were never caught, which would certainly seem to make New Haven recommendable.). - Nunh-huh 00:57, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

1) Harvard's a monarchial institution? That's new by me. 2) What does the establishment or disestablishment of churches have to do with the sectarianism of colleges? Lots of sectarian colleges have been founded since independence. 3) 'Not an American concept': Surely early puritan New England was by temperament both ANTI-monarchist and yet at the same time PRO-religious establishment? 4) You obviously have a habit of knowing your facts, so I probably shouldn't question your 1843 date; but it does strike me as odd given that Harvard was supposedly a bastion of Unitarianism in the early 19th century -- and didn't direct election of overseers only start in 1836? (That's just off the top of my head, mind you.) Doops | talk 03:06, 3 January 2006 (UTC) PS I take it back about New Haven. I will heartily recommend it to all my criminal friends. D

[1] OK, you're right, that was really stretching the point - though the authority on which the charter of 1650 is ultimately based is the royal charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1629. [2] The establishment of sectarian colleges by public legislation qualifies, I would think, as a form of establishment of a church. [3] rebelling against/escaping the clutches of the elsewhere established church was a defining part of the American experience. [4] well, it's from a note, and I wouldn't swear to it, but I could try to pin it down if you like. [5] Please stop. New Haven has enough of your criminal friends<g>. Please just recommend it to amiable regicides. - Nunh-huh 06:02, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Tracked it down. According to the Quinquennial Catalogue of Harvard University, referring to 1780, the date of the adoption of the Constitution of Massachusetts: "The term Congregational as then understood included the Unitarian Church. Membership in the Board was thrown open to clergymen of all denominations by an Act of 1843." - Nunh-huh 06:39, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Clergymen? And a reference to the 1780 constitution? Does this mean that direct election of the overseers began after 1843? (i.e. that "the Honourable and Reverend" were still literally such?) Doops | talk 06:45, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Direct election of the board of overseers was enacted by the legislature in 1865 and begun in 1866. There's a good page (i can find it only in Google's cache) which I hope you can get to with this link - Nunh-huh 06:55, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

So from 1843 to 1866 ANY and ALL clergy of the six towns were on the board? Doops | talk 07:05, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Scratch that. The 1810 entry suggests that there must have some sort of election, although who did the electing is unclear. Doops | talk 07:06, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Burying the reader in facts

JDMember asserts that this is not boosterism:

Five Presidents of the United States (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John F. Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt) have graduated from Harvard College; one (Rutherford B. Hayes) graduated from Harvard Law School; and one (George W. Bush) graduated from Harvard Business School. Bill Gates, the world's wealthiest person as of 2004, attended Harvard College but did not graduate. Five of the nine current Supreme Court Justices also have Harvard degrees: John Roberts (B.A. and LL.B), David Souter (B.A. and LL.B), Antonin Scalia (LL.B), Stephen Breyer (LL.B), and Anthony Kennedy (LL.B).

Wikipedia:Avoid academic boosterism says:

Do not bury the reader in facts. It is tempting to replace claims of prestige or academic excellence with a cascade of facts intended to generate the same impression (by, for example, listing all faculty members who have won awards).

Dpbsmith (talk) 01:34, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

P. S. What does JDMember mean by "college wikis" in his edit comment? Neither Harvard nor Harvard's former president Lowell has any wiki that I know of. (Well, I assume Harvard may well have some internally, but not publicly). Is this some personal definition of "wiki" shared by FifthAveLex and JDMember? Dpbsmith (talk) 01:36, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

To answer your last question first, I think it's obvious that they've been using "wiki" to mean "wikipedia article." It's weird, yes; but I don't think it's all that confusing.

As for the paragraph in contention, I'm less interested in its boosterism than its shallowness. From reading it, one would think that government is the be-all-and-end-all of life. For people who have their priorities straight, I would argue that the ¶ tends to be HARMFUL to Harvard's reputation and/or to the wikipedia's because of its pathetic idolatry of the presidency and the supreme court. So boosterism is the least of my worries, really.

To justify its deletion, by the way, I think this is the main point: there's already mention of famous alumni elsewhere in the article. This ¶ is redundant. Doops | talk 03:06, 31 December 2005 (UTC)