John Harvard dies at 31, Sept. 14, 1638
On this day in 1638, John Harvard, a 31-year-old clergyman from Charlestown, Massachusetts, died, leaving his library and half of his estate to a local college. The young minister’s bequest allowed the nascent college to firmly establish itself. In honor of its first major benefactor, the school adopted the name Harvard College.
As the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning, it has, for better or worse, been closely involved in American political life for more than two centuries.
Eight U.S. presidents — John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — were either onetime Harvard undergraduates or, like Bush or Obama, graduates of its equally prestigious business or law schools. Ban Ki-moon, the current secretary-general of the United Nations, earned a master’s of public administration there in 1984.
Although, Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texan born and bred, would privately rail at so-called pointy-headed liberals whom he associated largely with Harvard, he nevertheless kept quite a few them gainfully employed at high levels in his administration.
Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania and an unsuccessful contender for the GOP presidential nomination, once called Obama, who holds a diploma from Harvard Law School, “a snob” for wanting more Americans to attend college.
“There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them,” Santorum said at a Michigan campaign rally in 2012. “Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image,” he added.
Nowadays, Harvard’s Institute of Politics — established in 1966 as a memorial to President Kennedy and run as an offshoot of the John F. Kennedy School of Government — offers a biennial bipartisan orientation session to newly elected members of Congress. After each presidential election, it also convenes campaign managers, pollsters and strategists and other insiders to analyze the recently concluded race.
The government school’s faculty includes David Gergen, a former presidential adviser who served in top roles during the administrations of Richard M. Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
SOURCE: THE U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS