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Harvard University is a full private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the Ivy League. Harvard College, its undergraduate division, was founded on September 8, 1636 by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making Harvard the oldest post-secondary school in the United States. Originally founded as New College, the college was renamed on March 13, 1639, after one of its biggest early patrons, John Harvard. In 1780, Harvard became a chartered university.
Considered one of the world's most prestigious universities, Harvard also has the largest endowment of any private university in the world. A faculty of about 2,300 professors serves about 6,650 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. Harvard is among the most selective universities in the United States: its overall undergraduate acceptance rate is around 10%, and its graduate schools are also extremely competitive.
Graduate schools include the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Business School, Medical School, Law School, Divinity School, Graduate School of Design, Graduate School of Education, School of Public Health, Dental School, and Kennedy School of Government. There is also a Division of Continuing Education. The Harvard School of Dental Medicine was established on July 17, 1867 as the first U.S. dental school.
The school color is a shade of burgundy referred to as crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.
The Harvard University Library System, centered around the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, with over 90 individual libraries and over 14.5 million volumes, is the largest university library system in the world and, after the Library of Congress, the second-largest library system in the United States. Harvard also has several important art museums, including the Fogg Museum of Art (with galleries featuring history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the present, with particular strengths in Italian early Renaissance, British pre-Raphaelite, and nineteenth-century French art), the Busch-Reisinger Museum (central and northern European art), and the Sackler Museum (ancient, Asian, Islamic and later Indian art); the Museum of Natural History, which contains the famous glass flowers exhibit; the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology; and the Semitic Museum.
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