President Kennedy died ______ years before the day the speech was made.

This Monday morning we continue our series on higher education in the U.S. and it seems only appropriate that, on this twentieth anniversary of the death of President John F. Kennedy, we examine his alma mater, Harvard University.
    Harvard University is situated along the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The university is now a sprawling complex of more than four hundred buildings, housing classrooms, museums, laboratories and libraries. Harvard’s world famous Medical Institutions are located across the river, in Boston, the largest city in the New England region and a major American academic center. Harvard has educated six presidents of the United States—John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Rutherford Hayes, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Kennedy. If its graduates have brought Harvard ac claim, so have its teachers. The Harvard faculty has produced 27 Nobel laureates and more than 20 winners of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. Today the university has more than 16,000 students and over 2,300 full-time faculty members. Harvard opened its doors to a mere 12 students in 1636. During its first half century, the college focused on educating men for the ministry, particularly the congregational church, a Protestant denomination. Professor Donald Fleming teaches history at Harvard. He is also an expert on the history of the University. Professor Fleming says, even in its earliest years, the College was not limited to preparing church men.
    "They made clear that they were training people for all of the professions. It’s true that they didn’t want to have an illiterate clergy, but they always thought that the graduates would go into the other professions, surely into medicine and law as well as into the church.
    During the 18th and 19th centuries, Harvard grew, both in size and in reputation. The curriculum was broadened, especially in the sciences, and Harvard developed from an undergraduate college into a university. But Professor Fleming says that the period of greatest expansion followed the election of Charles Elliot as president in 1869.
    Elliot is credited with transforming Harvard from a small college into a modern university during his 40 years of leadership. The student body tripled. The faculty grew from 49 to almost 300 members. Elliot also oversaw the growth of Harvard’s endowment from 2 million dollars to more than 22 million dollars. Today with the fund of more than 2 billion dollars, Harvard is the most richly-endowed single educational institution in the nation. The endowment enables the school to attract many of the country’s best students by offering scholarships. Admission to Harvard is based on academic criteria without consideration of the student’s economic situation. Once admitted, a student must demonstrate financial need. The school then supplies financial aid. Some students still receive scholarships for academic distinction. But Professor Fleming says that most scholarships are based on need.
    "I think Harvard puts more money into scholarships for students than any other American institution, and has a better sociological mix, a higher proportion of people from low-income families than almost any other American university, precisely because there are the funds to support them even though they don’t have family funds at all".
    Harvard is consistently ranked as one of the best schools in America and the world. And it is considered a leading international research institution. The university owes its reputation as a center for academic excellence to its professional and graduate schools, as well as to its undergraduate program The Medical, Law, Business and Divinity Schools are leaders in their fields, attracting top students from around the world, in Harvard history, the 1800s are viewed as years of physical growth and academic diversity. Professor Fleming believes one of the major achievements of the 20th century is the university’s richly mixed student body. Beginning in the 1930s, Harvard made a conscious effort to recruit students from all over the United States, not just the eastern part of the nation. More recently, the University has pursued policies to increase the number of women and minority students on campus. A long tradition of modification and change continues, but the commitment to academic excellence remains at the heart of a Harvard education.