Although Harvard Extension School was established in 1910 by A. Lawrence Lowell, its history traces to the founding of the Lowell Institute in 1836, which was created to provide free public lectures to the residents of Greater Boston. From its inception, Harvard Extension School was designed to serve the educational interests and needs of the local community, but has since expanded its educational reach to students locally, nationally, and internationally.
Growing out of the 1907 "Collegiate Courses," a collaboration between Harvard University and the Lowell Institute, Harvard Extension School developed through the creation of the Commission on Extension Courses, a consortium of Boston-area institutions of higher education, and the establishment of Harvard's Department of University Extension in 1910. From the Extension School's earliest years, Harvard faculty taught adult learners the same courses they taught under Harvard's regular curriculum, with the same standards of study and examination. Over time, the school's degree offerings evolved, culminating in the establishment of the Bachelor of Liberal Arts (A.L.B.) and the Master of Liberal Arts (A.L.M.) designations in 1979.
Harvard Extension School has been a leader in distance education for over 100 years, offering courses through radio, television, aboard U.S. Navy ships, and eventually online. Today, the school enrolls over 13,000 students and awards more than 1,300 degrees and 1,300 certificates annually.
Lowell Institute (1836 - 1907)
In 1835, John Lowell, Jr., a wealthy Boston businessman, became gravely ill during a camel trip across the Egyptian desert and wrote his will on the banks of the Nile River in Cairo. In it, he set aside half his estate in a trust to be used for "the maintenance and support of public lectures to be delivered in said Boston upon philosophy, natural history, and the arts and sciences...for the promotion of the moral and intellectual and physical instruction or education of the citizens of the said city of Boston." The lectures were supposed to be free for those of limited means, and for those who could afford to attend more "abstruse" or "erudite" lectures, the maximum charge was to be no more than the value of two bushels of wheat. In an equally egalitarian measure, the lectures were specifically open to women as well as to men. Lowell also directed that lectures be given "on the natural religion showing its conformity to that of our Savior," "on the historical and internal evidences in favor of Christianity," and "avoiding all disputed points of faith and ceremony" by directing the lecturers "to the moral doctrines of the Gospel."
John Lowell, Jr. died on March 4, 1836, shortly after arriving in Bombay, India. Upon his death, his well took effect as his cousin, John Amory Lowell, assumed the role of the first trustee to carry out John Lowell, Jr.'s wishes. On December 31st, 1939, Edward Everett delivered the inaugural address. Days later, the first Lowell Institute lectures were taught by Yale geology professor Benjamin Silliman in January 1940. The Lowell Institute became a prominent center for public education by providing free lectures on a variety of subjects by established scholars and professionals while helping to expand access to higher education in Boston.
Origins of Harvard University Extension (1907 - 1910) The lack of an endowment was one reason why Harvard President Charles William Eliot declined to begin a continuing education program in 1902. "I would strongly disapprove of starting the proposed institute without an endowment," Eliot said. "It should not be dependent on other institutions." In 1981, after more than forty years administering John Lowell Jr.'s trust, John Amory Lowell was succeeded by his son, Augustus Lowell. Subsequently, in 1900, he was succeeded as trustee by his son, A. Lawrence Lowell. At the time that he succeeded his father as trustee of the Lowell Institute, Lowell was a professor of government and trustee at Harvard University and MIT. He reorganized the lectures first as the School for Industrial Foremen at MIT, and then later renamed it the Lowell Institute School "under the auspices of MIT." The first year of the School had courses in "the higher branches" of mathematics, and the second year was devoted to theory and practice. Between 30 and 50 men graduated from the program each year.
A. Lawrence Lowell sought to expand the Lowell Institute to make university-level education more accessible to those who could not attend college as full-time students. In 1907, he collaborated with Harvard University to offer a variety of free public courses, termed "Collegiate Courses," where Harvard professors taught courses to adult learners in Greater Boston that they taught their Harvard students, maintaining standards and quality of examination. These courses were taught during late afternoons and evenings to facilitate accessibility. Most classes, taught by "the best Harvard professors," had roughly 20 students, and at "the end of the course the same examination is taken" that Harvard College students would take.
In 1909, Lowell was elected president of Harvard University, a position that enabled him to further his visions for the Lowell Institute and higher learning in Boston. At a meeting of the Boston City Club in 1909, A. Lawrence Lowell said that John Lowell, Jr. had wanted to found a "popular university" and that in order to fulfill that vision it had to be connected to an already existing educational institution. As president, A. Lawrence Lowell wanted to serve the "many people in our community, who have not been to college, but who have the desire and the aptitude to profit by so much of a college education as, amid the work of earning their living, they are able to obtain."
The popularity of the Collegiate Courses convinced Lowell that they should be taken in a more systematic approach. In his dual roles as trustee at the Lowell Institute and Harvard University, he formed the Commission on Extension Courses in January 1910. This was a consortium of Boston-area institutions of higher education, including Boston College, Boston University, MIT, Tufts, Wellesley, Simmons College, and the Museum of Fine Arts. Courses taken at the Boston Normal School also counted for credit at one period. Each institution committed to providing courses comparable to Lowell's Harvard University Collegiate Courses, and additionally agreed to award the degree of Associate in Arts to students who completed the equivalent of a college program. Members of the Commission were required to be the president of the university, or an executive there. The Commission also received financial support from the Boston Chamber of Commerce, and it was at a meeting of the Education Committee of the Chamber that the Commission's creation was announced.
Lowell advocated for the formation of the Department of University Extension at Harvard University, which was ultimately approved by Harvard Overseers on February 23, 1910. He appointed James Hardy Ropes, the Hollis Dean of Divinity, to the position of first Dean of the Department of University Extension and additionally naming Ropes the Chairman of Commission on Extension Courses.
In the spring of 1910, a few months before the first students would enroll, A. Lawrence Lowell wrote to the Boston School Department asking which courses the University Extension could offer that the School Department would accept as qualifications for a teaching position at Boston Latin or one of the other high schools in the city. In September of that year, the School Committee voted to accept the Extension's Associate of Arts degree as sufficient to teach in a high school. It was noted that elementary school teachers could take the courses in the evenings and qualify for a better paying high school teaching position. The same was true for other young workers as well, Ropes said.
When the University Extension was announced it garnered major media coverage in Boston. the Boston Globe declared the Extension program to be "one of the hopeful signs of the times--this democratization of education," congratulating the University Extension for "the fine opportunities offered to those who hunger and thirst after knowledge."
Early Years and Growth (1910 - 1930s)
University Extension courses, which were "identical with the regular classes offered by Harvard professors," began at the end of September 1910. They offered, according to the Boston Globe, "an opportunity for an education...such has never been obtainable hitherto." Unlike similar extension programs at Columbia University and University of Pennsylvania, the University Extension courses were taught by "the most experienced teachers that can be secured." Early courses included classes on English literature, principles of economics, psychology, and applied and experimental electricity, with laboratory experiments.
In his roles as the Department of University Extension's first dean and Chairman of Commission on Extension Courses, James Hardy Ropes said that "our aim will be to give the young people of Boston who have heretofore been prevented from securing a college education the same instruction they would receive were they undergraduates at Harvard." He added that "many persons who wish that they had a college education will be able to get gradually an effective substitute for it--in some respects more effective than the ordinary college education because of the greater eagerness and maturity of such students." Students under 20 were not permitted, unless they had been graduated from high school, but adults were not required to have a high school diploma.
The Boston Globe opined that the early program of courses was "a comprehensive course of study...which should attract the young men and women of metropolitan Boston who deprived though various circumstances of the opportunity to go to college." A. Lawrence Lowell, as both president of Harvard and trustee of the Lowell Institute, saw the University Extension as "a trust for the community, for the public, and we are nothing but a successive series of servants to the public."
Lowell recognized that Extension courses were administered through the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences with identical courses that could be counted toward a degree from Harvard College or the Radcliffe Institute. Although he believed University Extension courses to match these institution in rigor and quality, he noted that Extension students differed from other Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences students in that they were not required to live in residence, and did not need to take an entrance examination for admission to their program. To distinguish the Extension degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Bachelor of Arts degrees, he implemented the Associate in Arts (A.A.) degree for Extension students, intended to be equivalent to a four-year bachelor's degree. In 1913, the Department of University Extension conferred its first Associate in Arts degrees. The recipients, John Coulson of Harvard University and Ellen Marie Greany of Radcliffe College, became the first students to be granted Extension degrees by Harvard University.
When the National University Extension Association was created in 1915, Harvard was a charter member.