The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Although founded as a preparatory and vocational school by Amos G. Throop in 1891, the college attracted influential scientists such as George Ellery Hale, Arthur Amos Noyes, and Robert Andrews Millikan in the early 20th century. The vocational and preparatory schools were disbanded and spun off in 1910, and the college assumed its present name in 1921.
In 1934, Caltech was elected to the Association of American Universities, and the antecedents of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech continues to manage and operate, were established between 1936 and 1943 under Theodore von Kármán. The university is one among a small group of Institutes of Technology in the United States which tends to be primarily devoted to the instruction of technical arts and applied sciences.
Caltech is frequently cited as one of the world's best universities Despite its small size, 33 Caltech alumni and faculty have won a total of 34 Nobel Prizes and 71 have won the United States National Medal of Science or Technology. There are 112 faculty members who have been elected to the National Academies. In addition, numerous faculty members are associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well as NASA
Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphasis on science and
engineering, managing $332 million in 2011 in sponsored research. Its
124 acre primary campus is located approximately 11 mi northeast of
downtown Los Angeles. First-year students are required to live on
campus, and 95% of undergraduates remain in the on-campus house system.
Although Caltech has a strong tradition of practical jokes and pranks,
student life is governed by an honor code which allows faculty to assign
take-home examinations. The Caltech Beavers compete in 13
intercollegiate sports in the NCAA Division III's Southern California
Intercollegiate Athletic Conference.
Throop University, Throop Polytechnic Institute and Throop College of Technology, before acquiring its current name in 1920. The vocational school was disbanded and the preparatory program was split off to form an independent Polytechnic School in 1907.
At a time when scientific research in the United States was still in its infancy, George Ellery Hale, a solar astronomer from the University of Chicago, founded the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1904. He joined Throop's board of trustees in 1907, and soon began developing it and the whole of Pasadena into a major scientific and cultural destination. He engineered the appointment of James A. B. Scherer, a literary scholar untutored in science but a capable administrator and fund raiser, to Throop's presidency in 1908. Scherer persuaded retired businessman and trustee Charles W. Gates to donate $25,000 in seed money to build Gates Laboratory, the first science building on campus.
Since 2000, the Einstein Papers Project has been located at Caltech. The project was established in 1986 to assemble, preserve, translate, and publish papers selected from the literary estate of Albert Einstein and from other collections.
In fall 2008, the freshman class was 42% female, a record for Caltech's undergraduate enrollment. In the same year, the Institute concluded a six-year-long fund-raising campaign. The campaign raised more than $1.4 billion from about 16,000 donors. Nearly half of the funds went into the support of Caltech programs and projects. In 2010, Caltech, in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and headed by Professor Nathan Lewis, established a DOE Energy Innovation Hub aimed at developing revolutionary methods to generate fuels directly from sunlight. This hub, the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, will receive up to $122 million in federal funding over five years. Since 2012, Caltech began to offer classes through MOOCs under Coursera, and from 2013, edX. Jean-Lou Chameau, the eighth president, announced on February 19, 2013, that he would be stepping down to accept the presidency at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Thomas F. Rosenbaum was announced to be the ninth president of Caltech on October 24, 2013, and his term began on July 1, 2014.
Columbia University is a private, Ivy League, research university in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It was established in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain and is the oldest college in New York State as well as the fifth chartered institution of higher learning in the country, making Columbia one of nine colonial colleges founded before the Declaration of Independence. After the revolutionary war, King's College briefly became a state entity, and was renamed Columbia College in 1784. A 1787 charter placed the institution under a private board of trustees before it was renamed Columbia University in 1896 when the campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its current location in Morning side Heights occupying land of 32 acres Columbia is one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities, and was the first school in the United States to grant the M.D. degree.
Columbia annually administers the Pulitzer Prize. Notable alumni and former students include five Founding Fathers of the United States; nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court; 20 living billionaires; 29 Academy Award winners; and 29 heads of state, including three United States Presidents. Additionally, some 100 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Columbia as students, faculty, or staff.
The university is organized into twenty schools, including Columbia
College, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the School
of General Studies. The university also has global research outposts in
Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago,
Asunción and Nairobi. It has affiliations with several other
institutions nearby, including Teachers College, Barnard College, and
Union Theological Seminary, with joint undergraduate programs available
through the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Sciences Po Paris,
and the Juilliard School.
Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, at which time Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college; however, not until the founding of Princeton University across the Hudson River in New Jersey did the City of New York seriously consider founding a college. In 1746 an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise funds for the foundation of a new college. In 1751, the assembly appointed a commission of ten New York residents, seven of whom were members of the Church of England, to direct the funds accrued by the state lottery towards the foundation of a college.
Classes were initially held in July 1754 and were presided over by the college's first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson was the only instructor of the college's first class, which consisted of a mere eight students. Instruction was held in a new schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. The college was officially founded on October 31, 1754, as King's College by royal charter of King George II, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. In 1763, Dr. Johnson was succeeded in the presidency by Myles Cooper, a graduate of The Queen's College, Oxford, and an ardent Tory. In the charged political climate of the American Revolution, his chief opponent in discussions at the college was an undergraduate of the class of 1777, Alexander Hamilton. The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, and was catastrophic for the operation of King's College, which suspended instruction for eight years beginning in 1776 with the arrival of the Continental Army. The suspension continued through the military occupation of New York City by British troops until their departure in 1783.
The college's library was looted and its sole building requisitioned for use as a military hospital first by American and then British forces. Loyalists were forced to abandon their King's College in New York, which was seized by the rebels and renamed Columbia College. The Loyalists, led by Bishop Charles Inglis fled to Windsor, Nova Scotia, where they founded what is now the University of King's College. The college's enrollment, structure, and academics stagnated for the majority of the 19th century, with many of the college presidents doing little to change the way that the college functioned. In 1857, the college moved from Park Place to a primarily Gothic Revival campus on 49th Street and Madison Avenue, where it remained for the next fifty years. During the last half of the 19th century, under the leadership of President F.A.P. Barnard, the institution rapidly assumed the shape of a modern university. By this time, the college's investments in New York real estate became a primary source of steady income for the school, mainly owing to the city's expanding population.
The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university located in Berkeley, California. It is the flagship campus of the University of California system, one of three parts in the state's public higher education plan, which also includes the California State University system and the California Community Colleges System.
It is considered by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings as one of six university brands that lead in world reputation rankings in 2015 and is ranked third on the U.S. News' 2015 Best Global Universities rankings conducted in the U.S. and nearly 50 other countries. The Academic Ranking of World Universities also ranks the University of California, Berkeley fourth in the world overall, and first among public universities. It is broadly ranked first in science, third in engineering, and fifth in social sciences, with specific rankings of first in chemistry, first in physics, third in computer science, fourth in mathematics, and fourth in economics/business. The university is also well known for producing a high number of entrepreneurs. Established in 1868 as the result of the merger of the private College of California and the public Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College in Oakland, UC Berkeley is the oldest institution in the UC system and offers approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines. The University of California has been charged with providing both classical and practical education for the state's people. Cal co-manages three United States Department of Energy National Laboratories, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Berkeley faculty, alumni, and researchers have won 72 Nobel Prizes nine Wolf Prizes, eight Fields Medals , 20 Turing Awards, 45 MacArthur Fellowships, 20 Academy Awards,11 Pulitzer Prizes and 105 Olympic gold medals To date, along with Berkeley Lab, UC Berkeley scientists and researchers have discovered 16 chemical elements of the periodic table more than any other university in the world. Lawrence Livermore Lab also discovered or co-discovered element 118, 115 and 117 Berkeley is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and continues to have very high research activity with $730.7 million in research and development expenditures in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2014. In 1866, the private College of California purchased the land comprising the current Berkeley campus. Because it lacked sufficient funds to operate, it eventually merged with the state-run Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Arts College to form the University of California, the first full-curriculum public university in the state.
Ten faculty members and almost 40 students made up the new University of California when it opened in Oakland in 1869. Frederick H. Billings was a trustee of the College of California and suggested that the college be named in honor of the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley. In 1870, Henry Durant, the founder of the College of California, became the first president. With the completion of North and South Halls in 1873, the university relocated to its Berkeley location with 167 male and 222 female students and held its first classes. Beginning in 1891, Phoebe Apperson Hearst made several large gifts to Berkeley, funding a number of programs and new buildings, and sponsoring, in 1898, an international competition in Antwerp, Belgium, where French architect Émile Bénard submitted the winning design for a campus master plan. In 1905, the University Farm was established near Sacramento, ultimately becoming the University of California, Davis. By the 1920s, the number of campus buildings had grown substantially, and included twenty structures designed by architect John Galen Howard. Robert Gordon Sproul served as president from 1930 to 1958. By 1942, the American Council on Education ranked UC Berkeley second only to Harvard University in the number of distinguished departments. UC Berkeley Students participate in a one-day Peace Strike opposing U.S. involvement in World War II. April 19, 1940
During World War II, following Glenn Seaborg's then-secret discovery of plutonium, Ernest Orlando Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory began to contract with the U.S. Army to develop the atomic bomb. UC Berkeley physics professor J. Robert Oppenheimer was named scientific head of the Manhattan Project in 1942. Along with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Berkeley is now a partner in managing two other labs, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. Researchers worked on computers, radar, and inertial guidance during World War II and the Cold War. Post-war defense research contributed to the rapid expansion of the faculty and campus under James Killian. The current 168-acre campus opened in 1916 and extends over 1 mile along the northern bank of the Charles River basin.
MIT, with five schools and one college which contain a total of 32 departments, is often cited as among the world's top universities. The Institute is traditionally known for its research and education in the physical sciences and engineering, and more recently in biology, economics, linguistics, and management as well. The "Engineers" sponsor 31 sports, most teams of which compete in the NCAA Division III's New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference; the Division I rowing programs compete as part of the EARC and EAWRC.
In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a Conservatory of Art and Science, but the proposal failed. A proposal by William Barton Rogers a charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, signed by the governor of Massachusetts on April 10, 1861. Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:
As of 2015, 85 Nobel laureates, 52 National Medal of Science
recipients, 65 Marshall Scholars, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 38 MacArthur
Fellows, 34 astronauts, and 2 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with
MIT. The school has a strong entrepreneurial culture, and the
aggregated revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would rank as the
eleventh-largest economy in the world The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories Two days after the charter was issued, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Collthe eges Act to fund institutions to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes , and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these Boston Tech years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.
MIT was informally called Boston Tech. The institute adopted the
European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory
instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the
institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under
President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical,
marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were
built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one
thousand.
Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford, former Governor of and U.S. Senator from California and leading railroad tycoon, and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford admitted its first students on October 1, 1891 as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Tuition was free until 1920.
The main campus is in northern Santa Clara Valley adjacent to Palo Alto
and between San Jose and San Francisco. Stanford also has land and
facilities elsewhere. Its 8,180-acre campus is one of the largest in
the United States. The university is also one of the top fundraising
institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more
than a billion dollars in a year.
The university struggled financially after Leland Stanford's 1893 death and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, Provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates' entrepreneurial ism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley. By 1970, Stanford was home to a linear accelerator, and was one of the original four ARPANET nodes.
Stanford's academic strength is broad with 40 departments in the three academic schools that have undergraduate students and another four professional schools. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 108 NCAA team championships, the second-most for a university, 476 individual championships, the most in Division I, and has won the NACDA Directors' Cup, recognizing the university with the best overall athletic team achievement, every year since 1994-1995. Stanford faculty and alumni have founded many companies including Google, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Sun Microsystems, Instagram, Snapchat, and Yahoo!, and companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world. It is the alma mater of 30 living billionaires, 17 astronauts, and 20 Turing Award laureates. It is also one of the leading producers of members of the United States Congress. 60 Nobel laureates and 2 Fields Medalists are affiliated with Stanford University Stanford was founded by Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate, U.S. senator, and former California governor, together with his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford. It is named in honor of their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died in 1884 from typhoid fever just before his 16th birthday. His parents decided to dedicate a university to their only son, and Leland Stanford told his wife, The children of California shall be our children. The Stanfords visited Harvard's president, Charles Eliot, and asked whether he should establish a university, technical school or museum. Eliot replied that he should found a university and an endowment of $5 million would suffice Leland Stanford, the university's founder, as painted by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier in 1881 and now on display at the Cantor Center
The university's Founding Grant of Endowment from the Stanfords was issued in November 1885.Besides defining the operational structure of the university, it made several specific stipulations: The trustees shall have the power and it shall be their duty:
To establish and maintain at such University an educational system, which will, if followed, fit the graduate for some useful pursuit, and to this end to cause the pupils, as easily as may be, to declare the particular calling, which, in life, they may desire to pursue; ...
To prohibit sectarian instruction, but to have taught in the University the immortality of the soul, the existence of an all-wise and benevolent Creator, and that obedience to His laws is the highest duty of man.
To have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation.
To afford equal facilities and give equal advantages in the University to both sexes.
To maintain on the Palo Alto estate a farm for instruction in agriculture in all its branches
The Stanford chose their country estate, Palo Alto Stock Farm, in northern Santa Clara County as the site of the university, so that the University is often called "the Farm" to this day.
The campus master plan was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and later his sons. The Main Quad was designed by Charles Allerton Coolidge and his colleagues, and by Leland Stanford himself. The cornerstone was laid on May 14, 1887, which would have been Leland Stanford Junior's nineteenth birthday.
In the summer of 1886, when the campus was first being planned, Stanford brought the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Francis Amasa Walker, and prominent Boston landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted westward for consultations. Olmsted worked out the general concept for the campus and its buildings, rejecting a hillside site in favor of the more practical flatlands.
The Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge were hired in the Autumn and Charles Allerton Coolidge then developed this concept in the style of his late mentor, Henry Hobson Richardson. The Richardsonian Romanesque style, characterized by rectangular stone buildings linked by arcades of half-circle arches, was merged with the Californian Mission Revival style desired by the Stanfords. However, by 1889, Leland Stanford severed the connection with Olmsted and Coolidge and their work was continued by others.The red tile roofs and solid sandstone masonry are distinctly Californian in appearance and famously complementary to the bright blue skies common to the region, and most of the more recent campus buildings have followed the Quad's pattern of buff colored walls, red roofs, and arcades, giving Stanford its distinctive
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, established 1636, whose history, influence and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.Established originally by the Massachusetts legislature and soon thereafter named for John Harvard Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning and the Harvard Corporation is its first chartered corporation. Although never formally affiliated with any denomination, the early College primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy.
Harvard is a large, highly residential research university The
nominal cost of attendance is high, but the University's large endowment
allows it to offer generous financial aid packages. It operates
several arts, cultural, and scientific museums, alongside the Harvard
Library, which is the world's largest academic and private library
system, comprising 79 individual libraries with over 18 million volumes Harvard's
alumni include eight U.S. presidents, several foreign heads of state,
62 living billionaires, 335 Rhodes Scholars, and 242 Marshall Scholars.
To date, some 150 Nobel laureates and 5 Fields Medalists have been
affiliated as students, faculty, or staff
Its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century Harvard had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's long tenure transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university; Harvard was a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900 James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College.
The University is organized into eleven separate academic units ten faculties and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study with campuses throughout the Boston metropolitan area its 209-acre main campus is centered on Harvard Yard in Cambridge, approximately 3 miles northwest of Boston; the business school and athletics facilities, including Harvard Stadium, are located across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston and the medical, dental, and public health schools are in the Longwood Medical Area. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $36.4 billion.
In the early years the College trained many Puritan ministers It
offered a classic curriculum on the English university model many
leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge but
conformed Puritanism. It was never affiliated with any particular
denomination, but many of its earliest graduates went on to become
clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches.
Harvard was formed in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was initially called "New College" or "the college at New Towne". In 1638, the college became home for North America's first known printing press, carried by the ship John of London In 1639, the college was renamed Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard, who was an alumnus of the University of Cambridge. He had left the school £779 and his library of some 400 books. The charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650. Throughout the 18th century, Enlightenment ideas of the power of reason and free will became widespread among Congregationalist ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties When the Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and the president of Harvard Joseph Willard died a year later, in 1804, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the chair in 1805, and the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency of Harvard two years later, which signaled the changing of the tide from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas
In 1846, the natural history lectures of Louis Agassiz were acclaimed both in New York and on the campus at Harvard College. Agassiz's approach was distinctly idealist and posited Americans' participation in the Divine Nature and the possibility of understanding intellectual existences Agassiz's perspective on science combined observation with intuition and the assumption that a person can grasp the divine plan in all phenomena. When it came to explaining life-forms, Agassiz resorted to matters of shape based on a presumed archetype for his evidence. This dual view of knowledge was in concert with the teachings of Common Sense Realism derived from Scottish philosophers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, whose works were part of the Harvard curriculum at the time.
The popularity of Agassiz's efforts to soar with Plato probably also derived from other writings to which Harvard students were exposed, including Platonic treatises by Ralph Cudworth, John Norrisand, in a Romantic vein, Samuel Coleridge. The library records at Harvard reveal that the writings of Plato and his early modern and Romantic followers were almost as regularly read during the 19th century as those of the official philosophy of the more empirical and more deistic Scottish school
