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
History of Harvard University Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as sister school of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. In the 1920s Edward Harkness (1874–1940), a Yale man with oil wealth, was ignored by his alma mater and so gave $12,000,000 to Harvard to establish a house system like that of Oxford University. Yale later took his money and set up a similar system. In addition to the usual department, specialized research centers proliferated, especially to enable interdisciplinary research projects that could not be handled at the department level. However, the departments kept jealous control