Harvard's changing seals trace its drift from Puritan college to Veritas
Harvard's founders feared leaving New England's churches with an illiterate ministry. The colonial legislature voted the college into being in 1636, and a dying clergyman's gift of £780 and about 320 books earned it his name. Over the following centuries, its seals, presidents and curriculum record a slow turn from Puritan training ground toward secular research giant.
The Great and General Court of Massachusetts Bay authorised the school in 1636, and its first headmaster, Nathaniel Eaton, started the next year. In 1638 it acquired the first known printing press in English North America, and that same year John Harvard, an English emigrant minister, left it his money and library on his deathbed. By 1639 it bore his name. A 1643 publication stated its aim plainly: to keep learning alive and supply the churches with educated ministers once the current ones had died. The curriculum copied Cambridge in England, where many colonial leaders had studied.
The oldest known seal, dated 1650, shows three open books on a shield and the Latin words In Christi Gloriam, dedicating the college to Christ's glory. A redesign adopted in 1885, drawing on an 1843 version by President Josiah Quincy, placed Veritas, truth, on the books while keeping a ring reading for Christ and the Church. Leadership shifted too: John Leverett, appointed in 1708, was the first president who was not a clergyman, and the 1807 appointment of Samuel Webber marked a move toward more liberal theology.
Charles William Eliot, president from 1869 to 1909, reduced Christianity's privileged place in the curriculum and let students choose more of their studies, while professional schools multiplied around the college. Massachusetts' 1780 constitution had already called it a university. James B. Conant, in charge from 1933 to 1953, saw college as a ladder for talent rather than a birthright of wealth; under him the faculty issued the 268-page General Education in a Free Society in 1945, and the medical school admitted women that year.
Radcliffe, its women's counterpart, merged fully in 1999, and Drew Gilpin Faust became the first female president in 2007. Today Harvard's endowment of $55.7 billion is the largest of any academic institution, and its library of more than 20 million volumes is the biggest academic collection anywhere. The main campus covers 209 acres around Harvard Yard in Cambridge.
Source: Harvard University
