13th March: Harvard

On this date in 1639 Cambridge College was renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard.  The college is still there - now it's one of America's most prestigious universities. Here are some things you may not know about Harvard:

1. Harvard's motto is Veritas, Latin for “truth”. Ironically, the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard is nicknamed the “Statue of Three Lies” because the inscription reads “John Harvard, Founder, 1638”. Lie 1: He wasn't the founder, but the benefactor the college was named after. Lie 2: The university was founded in 1636, not 1638. Lie 3: It's not even a statue of John Harvard but of a random student sculptor Daniel Chester French used as a model.
2. The statue is the third most photographed in the USA and has a very shiny foot, because rubbing the statue's shoe is thought to bring good luck.
3. The Harvard Library is the world's largest academic and private library system, comprising 79 individual libraries with over 18 million volumes. One of its buildings is the Widener Library, the second largest in the United States, consists of a whopping 10 floors. The library was named after Harry Elkins Widener who donated $3.5 million to Harvard to have a library built on one condition - that the building would never be changed. Hence, when the building became too small to house all the books, they couldn't extend it. Instead, they had to dig deeper underground, so four of the library's ten storeys are underground.
4. In the early days, there was a huge Puritan influence. In fact there is a publication from 1643 which states that the whole purpose of the school was "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". It offered a classic curriculum on the English university model, but that didn't include calculus, since that wasn't invented until later.
5. In 1638, the college became home to British North America's first known printing press.
6. There is huge rivalry with Yale University in just about every sport. Probably the biggest event in the sporting year is "The Game", a football match between the two universities. Every two years, however, the rivalry is put aside and the two universities join forces for an athletics contest against Oxford and Cambridge. This is the oldest continuous international amateur competition in the world.
7. In the last six years, Harvard's student population has ranged from 19,000 to 21,000, and there are more than 360,000 living Harvard alumni in the world.
8. Here are a few people you may have heard of who are Harvard alumni: J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb"; Helen Keller, deafblind author, activist, and lecturer; Anne McCaffrey, author of the Dragons of Pern books; Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park; Margaret Atwood, novelist; Timothy Leary, LSD experimenter; actors Matt Damon and Natalie Portman; scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson; and Barack Obama.
9. At $36.4 billion dollars, Harvard has the largest financial endowments of any institution in the world. There are countries with economies worth less than this.
10. One of the gates to the campus, Johnston Gate, is closed for most of the year. Students are only supposed to pass through this particular gate twice - on the day they first arrive and when they graduate. It is considered bad luck to pass through it at any other time.

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