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Today Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard University. Undergraduate students are members of the college, which is headed by the "Dean of Harvard College." He reports to the "Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences" since students of Harvard College, along with those of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, receive instruction from that faculty.
In accordance with the American norm, the emotional heart of the university remains the college and people often conflate the two; therefore, see Harvard University for a description of the college's campus, athletics, admissions, "concentrations," extracurricular activities, and so forth.
History
The name Harvard College dates to 1638. In that year, the two-year-old school, which had yet to graduate its first students, was named in honor of the recently deceased John Harvard, a minister from nearby Charlestown, who in his will had bequeathed to it his library and a sum of money. In the understanding of its members at the time, the name "Harvard College" probably referred to the first (as they foresaw it) of a number of colleges which would someday make up a university along the lines of Oxford or Cambridge. The American usage of the word college had not yet developed: to the founders of Harvard, a college was an association of teachers and scholars for education, room, and board. Only a university could examine for and grant degrees; nonetheless, unhampered by this technicality, Harvard graduated its first students in 1642.
But no further colleges were founded beside it; and as Harvard began to grant higher degrees in the late eighteenth century, people started to call it "Harvard University". "Harvard College" survived, nonetheless; in accordance with the newly-emerging American usage of the words, it was the undergraduate division of the university -- which was not a collection of similar colleges, but a collection of unique schools, each teaching a different subject.
Harvard's principal governing board (which happens to be the oldest continuous corporation in the western hemisphere) still goes by its original name of "The President and Fellows of Harvard College" even though it has charge of the entire university and the "fellows" today are simply external trustees such as govern most American educational bodies — not residential educators like the fellows of an Oxbridge college.
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