Harvard College is founded, becoming America’s first university

Story: 1636 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1636

In the autumn of 1636 C.E., lawmakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony did something that would echo for centuries: they voted to create a school. They had no campus, no faculty, no name. What they had was a conviction — that a literate, educated leadership was essential to the survival of their young settlement. That vote, modest and practical as it was, planted the seed of what would become the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States.

Key facts

• Harvard College founding: The Massachusetts General Court authorized the college in 1636 C.E., two years before it received its name — making it the first institution of higher education established in colonial North America.
• John Harvard’s bequest: In 1638 C.E., Puritan clergyman John Harvard died and left the college £780 and roughly 320 books from his personal library — a gift so significant the institution was named in his honor the following year.
• Printing press acquisition: Also in 1638 C.E., the college acquired the first known printing press in English North America, immediately making it a center not just of learning but of intellectual production.

A colony’s bet on knowledge

The founding logic was blunt and honest. A 1643 C.E. Harvard publication stated the college’s purpose plainly: to “advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

This was not abstract idealism. The colony’s founders — many of them Cambridge University graduates — understood that institutions decay without renewal, and that renewal requires education. They built the college on the English university model, offering a classical curriculum shaped by Puritan theology but never formally tied to any single Protestant denomination.

The first headmaster, Nathaniel Eaton, took office in 1637 C.E. The college’s governing body, the Harvard Corporation, received its charter in 1650 C.E. — making it the oldest corporation in the Western Hemisphere. In 1708 C.E., John Leverett became the first Harvard president who was not a clergyman, marking an early step in the institution’s long, gradual secularization.

From ministry to modernity

Harvard’s evolution tracked — and sometimes drove — the intellectual shifts of American life. In the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas began reshaping its curriculum. By the early 19th century, the college was at the center of a theological controversy, as liberal Arminian and Unitarian thought challenged its older Calvinist roots.

The most decisive transformation came between 1869 C.E. and 1909 C.E., under president Charles William Eliot. Eliot expanded student self-direction, reduced compulsory religious content, built out professional schools, and helped turn Harvard into a research university in the modern sense. In 1900 C.E., Harvard co-founded the Association of American Universities, a coalition that would shape the architecture of research higher education across the continent.

By the 20th century, the institution’s endowment — now valued at $55.7 billion — made it the wealthiest academic institution in the world. Its library system, holding more than 20 million volumes, is the largest academic library on Earth.

Lasting impact

What 1636 C.E. set in motion is almost impossible to fully account for. Harvard alumni, faculty, and researchers include eight U.S. presidents, 24 heads of state, and hundreds of Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, and Pulitzer Prize recipients. The university has educated founders of companies, leaders of movements, and — perhaps more quietly — generations of teachers, doctors, lawyers, and public servants whose names never appear in rankings.

Beyond individual achievement, Harvard’s founding helped establish a model: that a young society could invest in higher education as a public good, even before it had resolved its most basic political questions. That model spread. The Land Grant College Act of 1862 C.E., which seeded public universities across the United States, was in many ways a democratic extension of the same founding logic — knowledge as infrastructure.

Harvard also helped establish the idea that a university could be a place of evolving inquiry rather than fixed doctrine. The slow, contested secularization of its curriculum across two centuries is itself a story about how institutions can change without collapsing — a harder thing to do than founding them in the first place.

The university’s influence on global higher education has been substantial. The Academic Ranking of World Universities, first published in 2003 C.E., used Harvard as an implicit benchmark. Institutional structures developed at Harvard — the tenure system, the research seminar, the professional school model — were adopted by universities around the world.

Blindspots and limits

For most of its history, Harvard’s benefits were concentrated among a narrow slice of humanity: white, Protestant, wealthy men from the northeastern United States. Women were not admitted to Harvard College until 1977 C.E., when it merged with Radcliffe College, though graduate programs had admitted small numbers of women decades earlier. Enslaved people’s labor and the wealth of slaveholding families helped fund early American higher education broadly, and Harvard’s own 2022 C.E. report on its ties to slavery documented those connections in detail. The college’s founding mission — training a Puritan ministry — also reflected a project of colonial settlement that displaced Indigenous peoples from the land on which the institution was built.

Access to Harvard, and to elite higher education generally, remains stratified by wealth. The institution’s enormous endowment has drawn scrutiny from policymakers and the public over whether the concentration of resources in a handful of private universities serves the broader goals that education is meant to achieve. These are not peripheral concerns — they are part of the full picture of what this founding set in motion.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Harvard University — Wikipedia

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• The Good News for Humankind archive on the early modern era

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