Harvard University
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Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and, with an endowment that closed fiscal year 2024 at roughly $53.2 billion, the wealthiest academic institution in the world.
Harvard comprises a small undergraduate college and twelve graduate and professional schools spread across campuses in Cambridge, Allston, and Boston. The university enrolls roughly 25,000 students, employs more than 20,000 faculty and staff, and operates a research enterprise that received about $686 million in federal sponsored funding in fiscal 2024 before the freeze imposed by the Trump administration in spring 2025.
In artificial intelligence, Harvard occupies an unusual dual position. As a research producer it is smaller than MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, or Carnegie Mellon by raw faculty headcount, but it has invested heavily in the field through the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the new Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence, founded in 2021 with a $500 million gift from Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. As an alumni network it is arguably the single most consequential institution in modern AI: Bill Gates (Microsoft, an early backer of OpenAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, parent of FAIR), and Dustin Moskovitz (whose Open Philanthropy is by some measures the largest private funder of AI safety research) all left Harvard before completing their undergraduate degrees.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Founded | September 8, 1636 (by vote of the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court) |
| Named for | John Harvard, who bequeathed half his estate and his library in 1638 |
| Type | Private research university |
| Endowment | $53.2 billion (FY2024, as of June 30, 2024) |
| Operating revenue | $6.5 billion (FY2024) |
| Operating budget | $6.4 billion in expenses (FY2024) |
| President | Alan M. Garber (31st president, interim from January 2, 2024; permanent from August 2, 2024) |
| Provost | John F. Manning (since 2024) |
| Academic staff | ~2,400 ladder faculty; over 4,600 total faculty |
| Undergraduate enrollment | ~7,100 (Harvard College, fall 2024) |
| Graduate and professional enrollment | ~17,500 |
| Total enrollment | ~24,600 (excluding Extension and Summer programs) |
| Campus | Cambridge, Massachusetts (main); Allston (HBS, SEAS, athletics); Boston (Longwood Medical Area) |
| Athletic conference | Ivy League (NCAA Division I) |
| Colors | Crimson |
| Mascot | John Harvard (the statue) |
| Website | harvard.edu |
The Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony voted on October 28, 1636 (a date sometimes recorded as September 8 under the modern calendar) to appropriate 400 pounds toward "a schoale or colledge" at New Towne, the settlement that would be renamed Cambridge in 1638 in honor of the English university where many of the colony's Puritan settlers had been educated. The new institution was founded chiefly to train clergy for the colony, a "church in the wilderness" project.
For its first three years the school had no name beyond New College. In 1638 a young clergyman named John Harvard, who had been educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, died of tuberculosis in Charlestown and bequeathed half his estate (about 779 pounds sterling) and his personal library of approximately 400 books to the fledgling college. The General Court formally renamed the institution Harvard College on March 13, 1639. The first class of nine students graduated in 1642.
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the college trained a Puritan elite that included most of the leading figures of colonial Massachusetts. By the time of the American Revolution, eight of the signers of the Declaration of Independence held Harvard degrees. The Harvard Medical School was founded in 1782, the Divinity School in 1816, and the Law School in 1817.
The transformation of Harvard from a respected New England college into a modern research university is conventionally dated to the inauguration of Charles W. Eliot as president in October 1869. Eliot, then a 35-year-old chemist, served forty years until 1909, the longest tenure of any Harvard president. He abolished compulsory chapel, dropped the Greek language requirement, introduced letter grades, and replaced the traditional fixed curriculum with the elective system that gave Harvard students near-complete choice over their courses by 1885. He also expanded the graduate and professional schools, founded the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1872, and elevated the Law and Medical schools to genuinely advanced training.
Under Eliot's successor A. Lawrence Lowell (1909 to 1933) the residential house system was created, mirroring Oxford and Cambridge colleges. James B. Conant (1933 to 1953) opened admissions to a wider socio-economic pool through the introduction of the Scholastic Aptitude Test as a meritocratic filter and oversaw Harvard's massive contribution to wartime science, including the Radio Research Laboratory.
The Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, now Harvard Business School, was founded in 1908 with the economic historian Edwin F. Gay as its first dean. The Kennedy School of Government grew out of the Graduate School of Public Administration created in 1936 and was renamed in 1966 in memory of John F. Kennedy. SEAS was elevated from a division of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to a full school in 2007 and renamed for hedge-fund manager John A. Paulson after his $400 million gift in 2015.
The most consequential structural change of the modern era was the formal absorption of Radcliffe College into Harvard on October 1, 1999, ending the long "non-merger merger" arrangement that had governed undergraduate coeducation since 1977. Female undergraduates became members only of Harvard College, and the former Radcliffe became the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a research and fellowship body.
Drew Gilpin Faust, who served from 2007 to 2018, was Harvard's first female president. Lawrence S. Bacow followed (2018 to 2023), and Claudine Gay was inaugurated in July 2023. Her brief tenure ended on January 2, 2024 amid controversy over congressional testimony and plagiarism allegations (see Recent controversies below). Provost Alan M. Garber, a physician and health economist, took over the same day on an interim basis and was confirmed as the 31st permanent president on August 2, 2024.
Harvard is organized as a federation of one undergraduate college (Harvard College, administratively part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) and twelve graduate and professional schools, plus the Radcliffe Institute. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is itself a complex unit that includes Harvard College, the Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, SEAS, and the Division of Continuing Education (which contains Harvard Extension and Harvard Summer schools).
| School | Founded | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) | 1890 (as a faculty unit) | Largest faculty; oversees Harvard College and the Griffin GSAS |
| Harvard College | 1636 | Undergraduate liberal arts college |
| Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) | 1872 | PhD-granting school within FAS, renamed in 2023 after $300M gift |
| John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) | 2007 (as a school) | Computer science, applied math, bioengineering, electrical engineering, environmental science |
| Harvard Medical School (HMS) | 1782 | Located in the Longwood Medical Area in Boston |
| Harvard Divinity School (HDS) | 1816 | Non-denominational graduate theology school |
| Harvard Law School (HLS) | 1817 | One of the largest US law schools by enrollment |
| Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) | 1920 | Education research, policy, and leadership programs |
| Harvard Business School (HBS) | 1908 | First dean Edwin F. Gay; founded the case method |
| Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) | 1936 | Architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture |
| Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health | 1922 (renamed 2014) | Renamed after a $350M gift from the Chan family in 2014 |
| Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) | 1936 (renamed 1966) | Public policy, government, leadership |
| Harvard School of Dental Medicine | 1867 | Located in the Longwood Medical Area |
| Harvard Extension School | 1910 | Open-enrollment continuing-education school within FAS |
| Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study | 1999 | Successor to Radcliffe College; fellowship and research institute |
Harvard's geographic footprint covers three districts. The historical core is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, anchored on Harvard Yard, a roughly 25-acre walled green that contains the oldest buildings (Massachusetts Hall, built 1718, is the oldest surviving structure) and most of the freshman dormitories. The twelve undergraduate residential houses, the FAS science buildings, the Law School, and the Kennedy School all sit in or adjacent to the Cambridge campus, along Massachusetts Avenue and the Charles River.
The Allston campus, on the south bank of the Charles in the city of Boston, has been Harvard's main expansion zone since the early 2000s. It contains Harvard Business School (which has occupied Allston since 1927), Harvard Stadium and the bulk of varsity athletics, the Harvard Innovation Labs, and the new Science and Engineering Complex (SEC) for SEAS, a 544,000-square-foot building that opened in 2020 after pandemic-related delays and now houses most SEAS lab space, including computer science, bioengineering, and applied physics groups. The Kempner Institute is also based in the SEC.
The Longwood Medical Area in Boston, several miles south of Cambridge across the Charles, contains Harvard Medical School, the School of Dental Medicine, the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and the affiliated teaching hospitals (Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women's, Beth Israel Deaconess, Boston Children's, Dana-Farber, McLean, and others), which together employ thousands of Harvard faculty.
Artificial intelligence at Harvard is concentrated in three overlapping units: the Computer Science area within SEAS, the Statistics department within FAS, and the cross-school Kempner Institute. Smaller AI-adjacent groups also operate in the Medical School, the Kennedy School (Belfer Center), and the Law School (Berkman Klein Center).
The John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is Harvard's youngest school, formally established in 2007 from what had been a division of FAS. It was renamed in 2015 after Paulson's $400 million gift, then the largest single donation in Harvard's history. Computer science, the largest area within SEAS, has expanded dramatically over the past two decades: CS50, the introductory computer science course taught by David J. Malan, has consistently been one of the largest courses at the university, and computer science is now one of the most popular concentrations at Harvard College.
SEAS also runs joint degree programs with HBS (the MS/MBA in Engineering) and HLS, and offers AB and SB undergraduate degrees, MS and PhD graduate degrees, and a coterminal AB/SB program. The dean of SEAS as of 2024 is computer scientist David C. Parkes, an authority on multi-agent systems, mechanism design, and the use of machine learning in economics.
Harvard's AI research community is comparatively small but high-impact. The following Harvard faculty have notable work at the intersection of AI, computer science, and statistics. Several hold joint or split appointments with industry labs.
| Name | Position | Research area |
|---|---|---|
| Boaz Barak | Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science (Harvard); Member of Technical Staff (OpenAI) | Theoretical computer science, foundations of deep learning, AI safety |
| Sham Kakade | Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science and Statistics; co-director, Kempner Institute | Statistical machine learning, reinforcement learning, foundations of LLMs |
| Cynthia Dwork | Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science | Differential privacy, algorithmic fairness, cryptography |
| David Parkes | John A. Paulson Dean of SEAS; George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science | Multi-agent systems, mechanism design, AI for economics |
| Stuart Shieber | James O. Welch Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science | Computational linguistics, natural language processing, open access |
| Finale Doshi-Velez | Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science | Interpretable machine learning, healthcare AI, reinforcement learning |
| Yiling Chen | Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science | Social computing, prediction markets, algorithmic game theory |
| Stratos Idreos | Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science; co-director, Harvard Data Science Initiative | Data systems, self-designing systems, ML for systems |
| Bernardo Sabatini | Alice and Rodman W. Moorhead III Professor of Neurobiology (HMS); co-director, Kempner Institute | Synaptic neuroscience, neural circuits, neuro/AI interfaces |
| Sitan Chen | Assistant Professor of Computer Science | Theoretical foundations of machine learning, sampling, diffusion models |
A recurring story in Harvard's AI program over the past several years has been the migration of senior CS faculty toward industry labs. Boaz Barak gave up his tenured Harvard professorship to work at OpenAI in 2024, then returned to a part-time arrangement so he could continue both roles. Several other CS faculty have taken extended leaves at companies including Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta. Harvard SEAS has responded by trying to formalize joint-appointment structures rather than fight the pull of industry compensation.
The Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence is Harvard's flagship AI research unit. It was announced on December 7, 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan pledged $500 million over fifteen years through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to fund the new institute. The pledge represented prorated annual funding of about $33 million, more than ten percent of all the nonfederal sponsored research support Harvard received in fiscal 2021. The institute is named after Karen Kempner Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg's mother) and his maternal grandparents, Sidney and Gertrude Kempner.
The Kempner Institute is led by two faculty co-directors: Sham Kakade, the statistical machine-learning theorist who joined Harvard from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research; and Bernardo Sabatini, a Harvard Medical School neurobiologist who studies synaptic plasticity. Their stated mission is to integrate the study of natural intelligence (neuroscience and cognitive science) with artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning) by recruiting faculty, training graduate fellows, and operating shared computing infrastructure. The institute formally launched in September 2022 with talks from Zuckerberg, Chan, and other AI leaders, and is housed in the Allston Science and Engineering Complex.
The Kempner Institute supports up to ten new faculty appointments at the SEAS-FAS-HMS intersection, a graduate fellowship program, and a postdoctoral fellows program. It maintains its own GPU cluster, which by 2024 had grown into one of the larger academic compute environments in the United States, providing Harvard researchers with hundreds of NVIDIA H100 GPUs for large language model and other deep-learning experiments.
Harvard's contribution to AI policy and ethics flows largely through the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School. The Berkman Center was founded in 1996 by Jonathan Zittrain and Charles Nesson at Harvard Law School as the Center on Law and Technology, was renamed for the Berkman family in 1998, became a university-wide initiative in 2008, and added the Klein name in 2016 after a $15 million gift from Michael R. Klein. Berkman Klein has hosted significant projects on algorithmic bias, AI governance, and the social implications of large language models. Faculty director Jonathan Zittrain has been a public voice on platform liability and AI accountability.
The Belfer Center at the Kennedy School runs an Intelligence Project and a Technology and Public Purpose program (founded by former U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2019) that produces policy work on AI for national security and on relations with China on advanced computing. Harvard also runs the Embedded EthiCS program in the CS curriculum, which integrates philosophy graduate students into computer science classes to teach ethics in context.
Harvard has not produced as many academic AI researchers per capita as MIT or Stanford, but the alumni who left without graduating include several of the most consequential figures in commercial and philanthropic AI.
| Person | Harvard tie | AI relevance |
|---|---|---|
| Bill Gates | Enrolled 1973, left 1975 (no degree); honorary degree 2007 | Co-founder of Microsoft; Microsoft was the largest early investor in OpenAI; Gates Foundation funder of AI for global health |
| Mark Zuckerberg | Enrolled 2002, left 2005 (no degree); honorary degree 2017 | Founder and CEO of Meta; funded the Kempner Institute; Meta operates FAIR, the Llama series, and Reality Labs |
| Dustin Moskovitz | Enrolled 2002, left 2005; Facebook's first CTO; co-founder of Asana | With wife Cari Tuna, funds Open Philanthropy, the largest philanthropic backer of AI safety research |
| Holden Karnofsky | AB Social Studies, 2003 | Former co-CEO of Open Philanthropy; joined Anthropic in January 2025 to work on responsible scaling policy |
| Eric Schmidt | AB Electrical Engineering, 1976 | Former Google CEO; co-author of "The Age of AI" with Henry Kissinger; major personal funder of AI research initiatives |
| Sheryl Sandberg | AB Economics, 1991; MBA HBS 1995 | Former COO of Meta during the rise of FAIR and the Llama program |
| David Malan | AB Computer Science, 1999; PhD CS, 2007 | Creator and instructor of CS50, Harvard's introductory CS course used as the gateway for thousands of new programmers each year |
Note on absences: Yann LeCun, Stuart Russell, Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Ng, and Demis Hassabis are sometimes incorrectly associated with Harvard. None of them earned degrees there. They are accordingly omitted from the table above. Paul Christiano, the AI alignment researcher who founded the Alignment Research Center and now leads AI safety at NIST's CAISI, did his undergraduate degree at MIT, not Harvard, and his PhD at UC Berkeley; he is sometimes confused with the Harvard-affiliated researchers in AI safety.
Harvard's endowment closed fiscal year 2024 (ended June 30, 2024) at $53.2 billion, up from $50.7 billion at the end of fiscal 2023. The Harvard Management Company (HMC), the in-house investment subsidiary that manages the endowment, reported a 9.6 percent investment return for fiscal 2024, recovering from two years of stagnation or decline. The endowment is not a single fund but a pool of more than 14,000 separate funds, most of them legally restricted to specific schools, departments, professorships, or financial-aid programs.
In FY2024 the endowment distributed about $2.4 billion to support university operations, equal to roughly 37 percent of total operating revenue ($6.5 billion). Net student income (after financial aid) contributed about $1.4 billion, or 21 percent. Federal sponsored research funding was the third-largest revenue source at about $686 million. The university recorded a $45 million operating surplus in fiscal 2024, down from $186 million in fiscal 2023, on revenues of $6.5 billion and expenses of $6.4 billion.
HMC, founded in 1974, was for many years run as an internal hedge fund with substantial in-house trading operations. Under CEO N.P. "Narv" Narvekar, who arrived in 2016 from Columbia, HMC was restructured into a more conventional outsourced-investment model, with much of the in-house trading staff laid off and most asset management delegated to external managers. The endowment is heavily exposed to private equity, hedge funds, real assets, and other illiquid alternatives.
Harvard has consistently ranked in the top handful of universities globally across the major rankings (US News, QS, Times Higher Education, Shanghai ARWU). It is conventionally treated as a peer of MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and Oxford-Cambridge in overall reputation, and as a peer of Yale and Stanford in law, of MIT and Stanford in economics, and of Johns Hopkins and UCSF in medicine. In computer science specifically, Harvard ranks below the top tier (typically MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU) but inside the top ten to fifteen US programs, depending on subfield and methodology. CSRankings, a metrics-based ranking, has historically placed Harvard CS in the 15-25 range overall but higher in specific areas such as theory, machine learning theory, and computational economics.
Claudine Gay was inaugurated as Harvard's 30th president and the first Black president of the university on July 1, 2023. On December 5, 2023, she appeared with the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania at a House Education Committee hearing on antisemitism in higher education following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the resulting war in Gaza. Asked by Representative Elise Stefanik whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Harvard's code of conduct, Gay replied that it would depend on context, an answer that was widely criticized as evasive. The University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill resigned within days.
In the weeks that followed, conservative activists publicized multiple instances of alleged plagiarism in Gay's 1997 PhD dissertation and other publications. The Harvard Corporation initially issued a unanimous statement of support, but on January 2, 2024, Gay resigned. Her tenure of six months and two days is the shortest in Harvard's history. Provost Alan M. Garber assumed the presidency on an interim basis the same day and was confirmed as the 31st permanent president on August 2, 2024.
In the spring of 2025 the Trump administration moved aggressively against Harvard over its handling of pro-Palestinian campus protests and what the administration described as inadequate enforcement of Title VI civil-rights protections for Jewish students. In April 2025 the federal government announced a freeze on roughly $2.2 billion in multi-year research grants and $60 million in contracts. In May 2025 the administration cut a further $450 million in grants, bringing the total frozen or terminated to nearly $3 billion.
Harvard sued the federal government in April 2025, arguing the freeze violated the First Amendment and the procedural requirements of Title VI. On September 3, 2025, US District Judge Allison Burroughs issued a decision in favor of Harvard, blocking the administration from withholding the contested funds and ordering restoration of access to most frozen grants. By October 2025 Harvard reported that a majority of frozen federal funding had been restored. The dispute continued through 2025 over visa policy, indirect-cost reimbursement rates, and other issues, but the immediate threat to ongoing research projects was substantially reduced by the autumn court ruling.
During the freeze the university used unrestricted endowment income, philanthropic gifts, and short-term borrowing to keep affected research projects (including major laboratory operations at Harvard Medical School and SEAS) running. The episode also accelerated discussions inside Harvard about reducing the share of operating revenue derived from federal sources.