The Harvard Crimson

Its archives (back issues) are online, all the way back to its beginning, in 1873. They're a little tricky to search  comprehensively in their current forms, but here are options:

  • Keyword search via Google, but be sure to add this tag in the search bar along with your search terms: site:thecrimson.com.

If you're looking for something recent, look under Tools to set a rough date parameter to your Google search. It works -- imperfectly -- but it's a hack to try.

  • The Crimson has a small,, hard-to-spot search box here, hidden between ads. 
  • You can Browse by year, and then drill down by month and date. It's a lot of steps, but works if you know approximately when an event occurred (like the University Hall occupation in 1969). Content can be inconsistent or incomplete.

Harvard-related magazines

Harvard Magazine

This is an alumni publication which has been produced independently since 1898 (i.e., not as a development/fundraising arm of the University).

Online, you can browse issues and search the back issues as far back as 2001.

What else does the site offer?

Harvard Gazette

The official news website for Harvard University, it's produced by the Harvard Public Affairs and Communications office. It covers campus life and times, University issues and policies, innovations in science, teaching, and learning, and broader national and global topics. Online coverage goes back as far as 1996.

To browse by a topic (like "Campus and Community") or initiate a search, look for the icon of a looking glass and several horizontal lines, indicating where users can search across the site and in archives at the top left of the screen.

Harvard College Class Profiles

Harvard University Fact Book

A general resource on such topics as admissions, tuition and financial aid, endowment, degrees awarded, and more.

The Graduating Class By the Numbers: 2023

How transformative is a Harvard education? Over the span of four years, what attitudes, self-perceptions, views of Harvard and the world do seniors exit the Gates with?

Tip: You can also find earlier years of the senior survey by searching Google. Try harvard senior survey and then, add a year, like 2021 or 2019, e.g.

Crimson Freshman Surveys

Between 2013 and 2021, The Crimson published a detailed profile of each incoming class when it arrived.

If you're interested in seeing what some groups of first years before you have looked like, believed in, and aspired to, you can scan the last five years of profiles below. 

(Note: This annual tradition seems to have been suspended in August 2022, so there is no  Class of 2026 profile. However, The Crimson produced individual articles on the class demographics during fall of 2022, which you can search there.  The Harvard University Fact Book, above, will also provide some numbers.)

Harvard University Websites

Harvard College Home Page

Questions you might consider:

As a type of primary source, how do pages from this site

  • construct aspiration (Admissions) and possibility (Financial Aid);
  • describe the ideal educational experience (Academics);
  • and envision community and belonging (Life at Harvard)? 

Office of Career Services

Questions you might consider:

  • As a type of primary source, how does the OCS educate for, connect to, and advise students about summer and postgraduate opportunities available to them?
  • How does it define and promote a vision of success with certain intellectual, personal, preprofessional, and social dimensions?

Diversity and Inclusion at Harvard University

In Fall 2016, then-President Drew Faust created a University-wide task force composed of faculty, students, and staff. Their charge was to consider a set of important and interrelated questions designed to advance the Harvard community on the path from diversity to belonging.

Their work culminated in a report called Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion (March 27,  2018).

This report has continued to inform efforts at diversity and inclusion across the Harvard landscape, including the ways Student Life in the College is imagined.

Questions you might consider:

  • How does Harvard, famous for its exclusivity, seek to "embrace difference" and what does or should or might that look like on the ground?
  • What defines success in this work?

Local and National News Outlets

Factiva (from Dow Jones)

A library database that's best for searching news from (about) 1980 forward; the database includes the Boston Globe (1987-) and the Boston Herald (1991-), the two major MA papers.

Harvard has such a national (and international) significance, of course, that its happenings are covered in major papers well beyond Massachusetts, often on the front pages of publications like the New York Times or in important educationally-focused news publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education. Factiva covers these publications, too.

What else should you know?

  • For best results, search as you do in HOLLIS: with operators (AND, OR), and when useful, with truncation (*).
  • By default, Factiva only searches  the most recent 3 months unless you change the date range before you execute your search. We recommend just searching All Dates for a general topic and refining from there.
  • By default, Factiva displays the most recently published information at the top of results sets. Just resort results by Relevance when you need to.
  • If duplicates (stories republished across many newspapers) bother you, turn the option off.

Harvard College Open Data Project

The Harvard College Open Data Project is a student-faculty partnership that aims to increase transparency and solve problems on campus using publicly available Harvard data.

In addition to the raw data, the HODP site contains analysis and  data visualizations for many areas of interest to  Expos Studio 20 topics. Some examples: