Harvard University

• 1. Introduction

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  Harvard University began in 1636 with a vote, cast not by scholars but by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. There was no famous founder in the room. The name came later, in 1639, from a dying man. John Harvard, a Puritan clergyman who had crossed from England, left the new college 780 pounds and a library of some 320 volumes. For that gift, the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States carries his name. Today the same institution holds the largest university endowment in the world and the largest academic library on earth, with more than 20 million volumes. How does a colonial training ground for Congregational ministers become the school that the Times Higher Education World University Rankings places first in the world every year? Why does a 2025 study of the 6,141 most influential people on the planet find Harvard alumni massively overrepresented, even after every American is removed from the count? And why, in 2025, did the federal government threaten to pull nearly 9 billion dollars from a single school? These are the questions this documentary follows.

• 2. From Pulpit To Science

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  In 1643 a 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. The early curriculum trained Puritan Congregational ministers and followed the English model of the University of Cambridge, where many colonial Massachusetts leaders had studied before emigrating. Harvard never formally affiliated with any Protestant denomination, yet its teaching conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. In 1708 John Leverett became Harvard's seventh president and the first who was not also a clergyman. That break from the pulpit was only the start of a long secular drift. In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas of reason and free will spread among Congregational ministers, setting them against more traditionalist Calvinist clergy. The conflict turned into a fight over jobs. After the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803, and president Joseph Willard died the following year, a struggle broke out over their replacements. In 1805 Henry Ware took the Hollis chair, and in 1807 the liberal Samuel Webber became Harvard's 13th president, marking a shift toward Arminian thinking. Charles William Eliot, the 21st president, served from 1869 to 1909 and reduced the favored position of Christianity in the curriculum. Eliot was no secularist by intent. His convictions were Transcendentalist and Unitarian, shaped by William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The college that once dreaded an illiterate ministry would soon grant its first doctorates instead.

• 3. Building The Research Engine

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  Charles William Eliot was a chemist who had spent two years in Germany studying at its universities, and he brought that model home. Thousands of Americans, mostly Harvard and Yale alumni, had attended German universities, especially Berlin and Gottingen. Eliot used their example to build graduate study at Harvard. He formed a graduate department in 1872, and it granted its first Ph.D. degrees in 1873, to William Byerly in mathematics and Charles Whitney in history. In 1890 Eliot set up the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with its own dean and budget. The professional schools grew alongside it. Harvard Medical School, the third oldest in the country, was founded in 1782 as Massachusetts Medical College by John Warren, Benjamin Waterhouse, and Aaron Dexter, and moved from Cambridge to Boston in 1810. Harvard Law School, established in 1817 through a 1779 bequest from Isaac Royall Jr., is the oldest continuously operating law school in the nation. By 1827 it was down to a single faculty member. The school was even called Dane Law School for a time, after Nathan Dane endowed a professorship and insisted it go to Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. Radical reform came in the 1870s under Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, who lived from 1826 to 1906. Langdell developed the case method, based on his belief that law could be studied as a science. His first-year curriculum, built on contracts, property, torts, criminal law, and civil procedure, was copied widely across the United States. In 1900 Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities. James B. Conant, who led the university from 1933 to 1953, saw higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy.

• 4. Who Was Kept Out

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  In 1923, a year after the proportion of Jewish students at Harvard reached 20 percent, president A. Lawrence Lowell proposed capping Jewish admissions at 15 percent of the undergraduate body. The proposal failed. Lowell, the 22nd president, also refused to mandate desegregation in freshman dormitories. He wrote that the university owed the colored man the same opportunities for education that it owed the white man, but did not owe it to force him and the white into social relations that are not, or may not be, mutually congenial. For the first decades of the 20th century, the student body was, in the words of sociologist Jerome Karabel, old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians. Change came slowly and through deliberate machinery. Under James B. Conant, an influential 268-page report, General Education in a Free Society, was published by Harvard faculty in 1945, and women were first admitted to the medical school that same year. Between 1945 and 1960 admissions were standardized to open the university to a more diverse group. Special exams were developed so veterans could be considered after World War II. The undergraduate college, once drawing mostly from New England prep schools, became accessible to middle class students from public schools. More Jews and Catholics were admitted, though Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians remained underrepresented. Radcliffe College, the female counterpart of Harvard College, was the bridge for women, and from 1971 to 1999 Harvard controlled its admissions, instruction, and housing. In 1999 Radcliffe was formally merged into the university. The arc of who could enter Harvard would later collide with who controlled its money.

• 5. The Wealth Question

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  Only 22 percent of Harvard's revenue comes from students' tuition, fees, room, and board. The rest leans heavily on the largest university endowment in the world, which funds operations through annual distributions of investment income. That dependence cuts both ways. During the recession of 2007 to 2009, the endowment suffered significant losses that forced large budget cuts and temporarily halted construction on the Allston Science Complex. A poor performance in fiscal year 2016 forced a 4.4 percent cut in the number of graduate students funded by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The money has also been a target of conscience. Since the 1970s, student-led campaigns have pushed Harvard to divest from controversial holdings, including South Africa during apartheid, Sudan during the Darfur genocide, and the tobacco, fossil fuel, and private prison industries. In the late 1980s, during the disinvestment from South Africa movement, activists built a symbolic shanty town on Harvard Yard and blockaded a speech by South African Vice Consul Duke Kent-Brown. The wealth supports a sprawling physical footprint. The main campus covers 209 acres centered on Harvard Yard, where Massachusetts Hall, built between 1718 and 1720, stands as the oldest building still in use. Across the Charles River, the Allston campus runs to 358 acres, and the university now owns more land there than in Cambridge. The Longwood medical campus adds 21 acres in Boston. As of 2025, Harvard differs sharply from its peers in two ways. It does not make its governing statutes publicly available, and it has no academic senate, though it is trying to create one. That opacity matters most when an outside power decides to test it.

• 6. A Government Showdown

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  In April 2025, the federal government under President Donald Trump threatened to withhold nearly 9 billion dollars from Harvard unless it modified many of its policies. The threat grew out of a wider battle over university autonomy after student protests against the Gaza war, and it followed similar demands made of Columbia University. Harvard's leadership refused, calling the demands an unlawful overreach. The Department of Education then announced it was freezing 2.3 billion dollars in federal funds. The Department of Homeland Security threatened to revoke Harvard's eligibility to host international students. Harvard sued in the District Court of Massachusetts, arguing the freeze was unconstitutional. The pressure kept escalating. In May 2025, education secretary Linda McMahon told president Alan Garber that grant funding would stop, and the administration then cut an additional 450 million dollars. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem announced that Harvard's Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification had been revoked. The next day Harvard sued again, and U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs granted a temporary restraining order. On the 4th of June 2025, Trump issued a proclamation restricting international students at Harvard. On the 20th of June, Harvard won an injunction allowing it to keep hosting them. On the 3rd of September 2025, Judge Burroughs ruled the administration had illegally frozen more than 2 billion dollars, saying it violated Harvard's free-speech rights as well as the US Civil Rights Act. In February 2026, Trump announced he would seek 1 billion dollars in damages, accusing Harvard in a Truth Social post of supplying misleading information to The New York Times. On the 6th of February, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon would sever ties to Harvard's graduate-level military training courses, calling the school a factory for woke ideology and a breeding ground for anti-American radicals.

• 7. The Harvard Imprint

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  A 2024 study analyzed 30 different achievement groups totaling 26,198 people and found Harvard alumni unusually dominant among the most successful and influential Americans. The numbers behind that reputation are concrete. Harvard counts eight U.S. presidents, 188 living billionaires, 162 Nobel laureates, 48 Pulitzer Prize winners, seven Fields Medal recipients, 252 Marshall Scholars, and 369 Rhodes Scholars among its alumni. Its students and alumni have won ten Academy Awards and 108 Olympic medals, including 46 gold. That imprint reaches into print and film. The Harvard Crimson, founded in 1873 and run entirely by undergraduates, counts two future U.S. presidents among its alumni staff, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Harvard appears across American fiction, from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to John P. Marquand's The Late George Apley in 1937, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. On screen it carries a fixed meaning. As film critic Paul Sherman said in 2010, in the grammar of film, Harvard has come to mean both tradition, and a certain amount of stuffiness. That image runs through Love Story in 1970, The Paper Chase in 1973, Legally Blonde in 2001, and The Social Network in 2010, which portrays the founding of Facebook. The reputation extends to the playing field as well. Harvard fields 42 intercollegiate teams, more than any other college in the country, and competes in the Ivy League, where athletic scholarships are forbidden. Its rivalry with Yale in football has been played 139 times as of 2024, reaching back to their first meeting in 1875, a line of contests almost as old as the college's research ambitions.