History of Harvard University have rightly left behind" and "abhorrent and an affront to the values of our university". As late as the 1950s, Wilbur Bender, then the dean of admissions for Harvard College, was seeking better ways to "detect homosexual tendencies and serious psychiatric problems" in prospective students. History of Harvard University Harvard College, around which Harvard University eventually grew, was founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. For centuries, its graduates dominated Massachusetts' clerical and civil ranks and beginning in the 19th century its stature became national, then international, as a
President of Harvard University see President#Title. Harvard was founded for the training of Puritan clergy, and even though its mission was soon broadened, nearly all presidents through the end of the 18th century were in holy orders. All presidents from Leonard Hoar through Nathan Pusey were graduates of Harvard College (i.e., they were undergraduates at the university). Of the presidents since Pusey, Bok took his undergraduate degree at Stanford, Rudenstine at Princeton, and Summers at MIT, but each earned a graduate degree at Harvard. Drew Gilpin Faust is the first president since the seventeenth century with no earned Harvard degree. John Winthrop served as