# Harvard University



## VirginiaHuguenot (Sep 7, 2005)

Harvard University, the oldest educational institution in America, was founded by Massachusetts Puritans on September 8, 1636.


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## Puritanhead (Sep 7, 2005)

Oh how times have changed


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## Anton Bruckner (Sep 21, 2005)

wow. Harvard was founded by Puritans. Those Puritans are probably rolling over in their graves.


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## smallbeans (Sep 21, 2005)

We're back, though. There is now an RUF on campus and that should bear some serious fruit as the years go by. Think of reformed Harvard alums!


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Sep 7, 2006)

Harvard University was founded 370 years ago on September 8, 1636.


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## lwadkins (Sep 7, 2006)

Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami to speak at Harvard and National Cathedral.

Wow have things changed!


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## lwadkins (Sep 7, 2006)

He will speak at Harvard on 9/10 and be at the Cathedral on 9/11 !!!


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Sep 11, 2006)

Former Iran president condemns bin Laden, praises Hezbollah for 'resistance' against Israel 

The Associated Press

Published: September 10, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami condemned Osama bin Laden and suicide bombing but also defended groups such as Hezbollah for what he characterized as resistance against Israeli colonialism.

In a 30-minute speech given under tight security at Harvard University, Khatami repeatedly praised the concept of democracy but said American politicians since World War II have been infatuated with "world domination."

Khatami said he was one of the first world leaders to condemn "the barbarous acts" of Sept. 11. Responding to a question from the audience about bin Laden, Khatami said he had two problems with the al-Qaida leader behind the attacks.

"First, because of the crimes he conducts," he said, "and second because he conducts them in the name of Islam, the religion which is a harbinger of peace and justice."

Khatami was met by protesters when he arrived at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Many angrily called on him to stand up for human rights.

Police estimated that 200 people were in the crowd that blamed him for failing to stop government crackdowns on student activists in Tehran during his two terms in office.

Several human rights organizations say the crackdowns are believed to have been initiated by his rivals and approved by Iran's ruling Muslim clerics.

"His speech is on ethics and violence. It would be very bizarre if he came here to speak on ethics and violence and did not acknowledge and discuss his own record in Iran," said Eric Lesser, 21, president of Harvard College Democrats, which teamed with their Republican peers for the protest. "Students were arrested and thrown in prison for speaking their mind in the same way we're doing right now."

Khatami was considered a reformer during his two terms as president that ended last year. His visit to the United States has been criticized by many, particularly amid concerns about Iran's nuclear program.

There were no major problems, but police presence was heavy, Cambridge police spokesman Frank Pasquarello said. One man was detained, although it was not immediately clear why.

Harvard has been criticized for the timing of its invitation to Khatami, who is taking a two-week tour of the United States.

Khatami is the most senior Iranian to travel outside New York in the United States since Islamic fundamentalists seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held Americans hostage for 444 days. He was invited to the United States by the U.N.-sponsored Alliance of Civilizations, of which he is a founding member. The group strives to foster cross-cultural understanding between Western and Islamic states.


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Oct 5, 2006)

Harvard committee recommends returning religion to curriculum

October 4, 2006 
CNN.com

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- Harvard University, founded 370 years ago to train Puritan ministers, should again require all undergraduates to study religion, along with U.S. history and ethics, a faculty committee is recommending.

The surprisingly bold recommendations come after years of rancorous internal debate over what courses should be required of all Harvard students. The current core curriculum has been criticized for focusing on narrow academic questions rather than real-world issues students would likely confront beyond the wrought-iron gates of Harvard Square.

The report calls for Harvard to require students to take a course in "reason and faith," which could include classes on topics such as religion and democracy, Charles Darwin or a current course called "Why Americans Love God and Europeans Don't."

"Harvard is no longer an institution with a religious mission, but religion is a fact that Harvard's graduates will confront in their lives," the report says, noting 94 percent of incoming students report discussing religion and 71 percent attend services.

"As academics in a university we don't have to confront religion if we're not religious, but in the world, they will have to," Alison Simmons, a philosophy professor who co-chaired the committee, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

The report, which has been circulated to faculty and whose contents were first reported Wednesday by The Harvard Crimson student paper, also says Harvard students also "need to have an understanding of American history, American institutions, and American values," calling for a requirement to study the United States in a comparative context with other countries.

The recommendations are the latest chapter in a lengthy, tumultuous saga over revamping the university's core curriculum, which dates to the 1970s. Former President Lawrence Summers made reform a priority in 2001, but the work of several committees bogged down and initial recommendations were criticized as weak. Summers resigned earlier this year, forced out by faculty anger at his handling of a range of matters, including the curriculum review.

Harvard's core has shied away from the "Great Books" approach to general education, focusing on "approaches to knowledge" rather than "bodies of knowledge." But the report notes few Harvard students plan to become academics, while more than half plan to attend business, law or medical school. The new recommendations are clearly geared toward rounding out the liberal arts education of those students.

In addition to ethics, "reason and faith" and the "United States and the World," students would be required to do coursework in two other areas: science and technology, and "Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change."

The recommendations also include making writing and analytical reasoning part of the general requirements, and retaining foreign language work.

The recommendations, by a six-member faculty panel, offer only general guidelines about the kinds of classes that would count. The draft may be revised and would be adopted only after passing a vote by Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The State University of New York and George Mason University have adopted general education requirements that include mandatory American history.

In the Ivy League, Columbia University has a significant core curriculum with courses that include material on religion, and Dartmouth currently requires a course in the analysis of religion, though that will change next year, according to its Web site. But Harvard would be the only school in that group requiring students to take courses in both religion and U.S. history.

Public colleges in Colorado, along with Ohio University and Arizona State, are among the other universities currently reviewing general education requirements, said Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a generally conservative academic group that has urged universities to toughen general education requirements.

"From the looks of this new proposal, it is extremely good news," Neal said. "It appears Harvard has rejected the 'anything goes' distribution requirements in place at so many colleges in favor of a more structured, rigorous and cohesive core curriculum."


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Nov 8, 2006)

Being non-religious no excuse for being religiously illiterate

By David C. Steinmetz

The Orlando Sentinel
November 8, 2006

The Puritan settlers who founded Harvard College in 1636 did so for religious reasons. They were convinced that the Calvinist God they worshipped wanted to be loved with the mind as well as with the heart. And so in the midst of clearing the wilderness, building houses and establishing communities, they erected a small college, dedicated to the pursuit of truth. They were buoyed in this endeavor by the serene confidence that all truth was, in one way or another, God's truth.

The Puritans were particularly interested in the education of a learned ministry for the church. Unlike the Irish Roman Catholics who came to Boston later, they venerated the pulpit over the altar. The pulpit was for them the "throne of God" because the sermon was the principal means through which men and women heard in their own time and place the voice of the living God.

Because preaching was such serious business for Puritans, their ministers were expected to read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew and to have mastered the fine points of dogmatic theology in Latin. Indeed, the standard Puritan compliment for a well-crafted sermon was that it had been "well studied."

Even Harvard undergraduates who were not destined for the ministry were expected to read in Latin the classic exposition of Christian faith and morals by the great Puritan divine, William Ames. Harvard's God was no mere spectator of history, but the Calvinist God who ordered history by his mysterious providence to the ends he intended.

Over time the Calvinist consensus at Harvard broke down, although Harvard still retains symbols of its explicitly Christian past: e.g., the Memorial Church with a full-time minister, a Divinity School, and even in places like Sanders Theater reminders of its original motto, "Truth for Christ and the Church."

Harvard, like many other American institutions of higher learning, became increasingly secular throughout the 20th century. Which is not to say that religion disappeared entirely from the Harvard landscape. Almost every form of religion and irreligion that flourishes on American soil can be found somewhere in the great intellectual mix that is the Harvard faculty and student body.

Still, a fairly large proportion of the members of any academic community - including Harvard - is made up of people who are not religious. Some have concluded that religion is nothing more than superstition by another name, while others have found it impossible to reconcile a scientific account of the world with the religious views of their childhood. Such people are not only disinclined to practice a religion; they are often disinclined to study it.

Which is why the recommendation of a Harvard faculty committee that undergraduates should be required to study religion came as such a surprise. Was the committee in the grip of a nostalgia for the Puritan Harvard of Increase Mather?

Not exactly. What the committee observed was that most Harvard graduates assume positions of responsibility in the world outside the academy. Only a relatively small group become academics.

While it is possible for academics to avoid religion if they are not religious, it is not equally possible for non-academic graduates to imitate them. Religion is a powerful social force in the modern world, too powerful and too pervasive to be ignored by decision-makers, including decision-makers who are Harvard alumni.

What the committee recommends is that undergraduates engage in a critical study of religion. In its view, such study belongs to the essential knowledge that defines the Harvard vision of a liberally educated man or woman, one equipped to set policy in a world more like Baghdad and Belfast than Harvard Square.

The committee's recommendation (which has not yet been adopted) should not be misinterpreted as the thin edge of the wedge for the re-Christianization of Harvard. Nothing could be further from the truth. It expresses rather the hard-won recognition that being non-religious is no excuse, if it ever was, for being religiously illiterate.

This is not exactly what the Puritans had in mind. The Puritans, after all, wanted Harvard undergraduates to be religious. The faculty committee only wants them to be religiously informed.

However, if Harvard adopts the recommendation of its faculty committee (by no means a sure thing) it will send a strong signal to other institutions of higher learning in America that religious illiteracy among its graduates may have become a luxury our society can no longer afford.

---

ABOUT THE WRITER

David C. Steinmetz is the Amos Ragan Kearns professor of the history of Christianity at the Divinity School of Duke University and a 1967 graduate of Harvard. He wrote this commentary for the Orlando Sentinel.


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## Romans922 (Nov 8, 2006)

Harvard has RUF? What is their website?


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Nov 8, 2006)

Romans922 said:


> Harvard has RUF? What is their website?



See here and here. There is also an RPCNA church in Cambridge.


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## elnwood (Nov 8, 2006)

Wow. There are tons of colleges and universities in Massachusetts, and only one RUF? That's surprising.


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## VirginiaHuguenot (Dec 14, 2006)

Harvard drops religion course requirement

December 14, 2006 
CNN.com

BOSTON, Massachusetts (Reuters) -- Harvard University said Wednesday it had dropped a controversial proposal that would have required all undergraduates to study religion as part of the biggest overhaul of its curriculum in three decades.

Efforts to revamp Harvard's curriculum, which has been criticized for focusing too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues, have been in the works for three years.

A proposal for a "reason and faith" course requirement, which would have set Harvard apart from many other universities and made it unique among its peers in the elite Ivy League, was unveiled in a preliminary report in October.

"We have removed 'reason and faith' as a distinct category," a faculty task force said in a revised report, excepts of which were obtained by Reuters.

"Courses dealing with religion -- both those examining normative reasoning in a religious context and those engaging in a descriptive examination of the roles that religion plays today and has historically played -- can be readily accommodated in other categories," it said.

Harvard professor Louis Menand, who co-chaired the committee that drafted the plan, said religion competed with other, equally valid subjects.

"It is an important subject, but nationalism is an important subject, and race is an important subject and markets is an important subject," said Menand, whose book "The Metaphysical Club" won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 2002.

"If we are going to go to that level of specificity of what we require there are probably half a dozen other things that can compete with it. So we thought we had to bump up the subject descriptions to include more things than religion."

The task force comprising six professors and two students released the report to faculty last week. A final report will be presented in January to faculty, who have a chance to add suggestions and decide whether to implement the requirements.

"We feel we are pretty close to done and the faculty seems interested in what we have proposed," Menand said.

The proposals include a course requirement on "what it means to be a human being," which is expected to broadly cover a number of areas in the humanities. They also proposed two science courses among several other requirements.

These include a course examining the United States in context of the rest of the world and courses on global societies, cultural traditions, and human nature and the human condition.

The curriculum shake-up, the first major overhaul since Harvard formulated its current "core" course requirements in the 1970s, had been advanced by former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who resigned his post in June after a faculty revolt over unrelated issues.

Course requirements at America's eight Ivy League schools vary widely, but if Harvard's proposal for a "faith and reason" requirement had been accepted it would have been the only one where a course in religion was required.

It would have also marked a nod to Harvard's roots as a school founded to train Puritan ministers 370 years ago.


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## elnwood (Dec 14, 2006)

Do we really want students to be forced to take a religion class taught by Harvard? I think not, unless we want them to be taught the gospel of secular humanism.


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