Clark University is an American private research university located in Worcester, Massachusetts, the second largest city in New England. It is adjacent to University Park about 50 miles west of Boston.
Founded in 1887 with a large endowment from its namesake Jonas Gilman Clark, a prominent businessman, Clark was one of the first modern research universities in the United States. Originally an all-graduate institution, Clark's first undergraduates entered in 1902. The university now offers 46 majors, minors, and concentrations in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering and allows students to design specialized majors and engage in pre-professional programs. It is noted for its programs in the fields of psychology, geography, physics, biology, and entrepreneurship and is a member of the Higher Education Consortium of Central Massachusetts which enables students to cross-register to attend courses at other area institutions including Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the College of the Holy Cross. As a liberal arts-based research university, Clark makes substantial research opportunities available to its students, notably at the undergraduate level through LEEP project funding, yet is also respected for its intimate environment as the second smallest university counted among the top 75 national universities by U.S. News & World Report and as one of 40 Colleges That Change Lives.
Graduate and professional programs are offered through the Graduate School, the Graduate School of Management, the Graduate School of Geography, the Frances L. Hiatt School of Psychology, the Gustaf H. Carlson School of Chemistry, the Adam Institute for Urban Teaching and School Practice, the International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE), and the School of Professional Studies.
The university competes intercollegiately in 17 NCAA Division III varsity sports as the Clark Cougars and is a part of the New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference. Intramural and club sports are also offered in a wide range of activities.
Clark was ranked no. 27 on the U.S. News list of Best Value Schools and no. 16 on the Forbes list of America's most entrepreneurial universities. Its faculty and alumni have founded numerous companies and organizations including Panera Bread, the American Psychological Association, and the American Physical Society, and have played leading roles in the development of modern rocketry, the wind chill factor, and the birth control pill. The university is also the alma mater of at least three living billionaires, in addition to its alumni having won two Pulitzer Prizes and an Emmy Award.
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History
Founding and early history
On January 17, 1887, successful American businessman Jonas Gilman Clark announced his intention to found and endow a university in the city of Worcester, filing a petition in the Massachusetts Legislature requesting a charter for Clark University. An Act of Incorporation was duly enacted by the legislature and signed by the governor on March 31 of that same year. Clark, who was a friend of Leland Stanford, was probably inspired by the plans for Stanford University and founded the University with an endowment of one million dollars, and later added another million dollars because he feared the university might someday face a lack of funds. Opening on October 2, 1889, Clark was the first all-graduate university in the United States, with departments in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology.
G. Stanley Hall was appointed the first president of Clark University in 1888. He had been a professor of psychology and pedagogy at Johns Hopkins University, which had been founded just a few years prior and was quickly becoming a model of the modern research university. Hall spent seven months in Europe visiting other universities and recruiting faculty. He became the founder of the American Psychological Association and earned the first Ph.D. in psychology in the United States at Harvard. Clark has played a prominent role in the development of psychology as a distinguished discipline in the United States ever since. Franz Boas, founder of American cultural anthropology and adviser for the first Ph.D. in anthropology which was granted at Clark in 1894, taught at Clark from 1888 until 1892 when he resigned in a dispute with President Hall over academic freedom and joined the faculty of Columbia University. Albert A. Michelson, the first American to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics, best known for his involvement in the Michelson-Morley experiment, which measured the speed of light, was a professor from 1889 to 1892 before becoming head of the physics department at the University of Chicago.
Jonas G. Clark died in 1900, leaving gifts to the University and campus library, but reserving half of his estate for the foundation of an undergraduate college. This had been strongly opposed by President Hall in years past but Clark College opened in 1902, managed independently of Clark University. Clark College and Clark University had different presidents until Hall's retirement in 1920. Clark University began admitting women after Clark's death, and the first female Ph.D. in psychology was awarded in 1908. Early Ph.D. students in psychology were ethnically diverse, with several early graduates being Japanese. In 1920, Francis Sumner became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology.
Clark University, along with Stanford and Johns Hopkins, was one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities, an organization of universities with the most prestigious profiles in research and graduate education, and was one of only three New England universities, along with Harvard and Yale, to be a founding member. Clark withdrew its membership in 1999, citing a conflict with its mission.
Clark Lectures
In order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Clark's opening, President Hall invited a number of leading thinkers to the University. Among them was Sigmund Freud who, accompanied by Carl Jung, delivered his five famous "Clark Lectures" there over the course of five days in September 1909, introducing psychoanalysis to an American audience. This was Freud's only set of lectures in the United States.
Clark celebrated the centennial of the visit in October 2009 and there is a seated sculpture of Freud by Robert Shure just outside the University Center; students pose with it and dress it up for various holidays and university occasions such as graduation.
Later history
In the 1920s Robert Goddard, a pioneer of rocketry, considered one of the founders of space and missile technology, served as a professor and chairman of the Physics Department. On November 23, 1929, noted aviator Charles Lindbergh visited campus and met with Goddard in the Physics Building. The Robert H. Goddard Library, a distinctive modern building in the brutalist style by architect John M. Johansen, was completed in 1969.
In 1963, student D'Army Bailey invited Malcolm X to campus to speak. He delivered a speech in Atwood Hall.
On March 15, 1968, The Jimi Hendrix Experience performed at Clark University as part of the band's American tour in support of Axis: Bold As Love. The Experience played in the Atwood Hall, which could accommodate more than six hundred students. Tickets for the concerts, which sold out, were modestly priced, with seats priced at $3.00, $3.50, and $4.00. The show was professionally recorded and Live at Clark University, a posthumous live album was released in 1999 by Dagger Records.
The Graduate School of Management (GSOM) was founded in 1982. In 1997, Clark announced the first PhD program in Holocaust Studies in the United States. This after the University convinced Debórah Dwork to leave Yale University and become Clark's first professor of Holocaust studies in the prior year.
2000s
The Mosakowsi Institute for Public Enterprise was established in fall 2007 thanks to a generous founding gift from two Clark alumni, William '76 and Jane '75 Mosakowski.
U.S. Secretary of State and former senator and democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke at Clark University on February 4, 2008, to an audience of approximately 3,500 in the Kneller Athletic Center.
In March 2009, Clark University convened a first-of-its-kind National Conference on Liberal Education and Effective Practice, co-sponsored by Clark's Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise and the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
In April 2009, then-President John Bassett denied Clark University Students for Palestinian Rights, a student group, to bring Norman Finkelstein to speak about the "Gaza Massacre" (2008-2009 Gaza War) because Finkelstein "would invite controversy and not dialogue or understanding". He also cited a conflict in scheduling regarding a conference on Holocaust and Genocide Studies presented by the university in the same month. However, following protests, which included a public protest in the center of campus, a petition campaign and outreach by alumni, students and faculty, Basset reversed his decision and allowed Finkelstein to speak April 27, the last day of classes for the semester. Finkelstein spoke to around 400 students, faculty and community members in Atwood Hall.
In April 2010, Clark University received the largest gift in its 123-year history, a $14.2 million offering from the late head of Hanover Insurance, one of the nation's biggest property and casualty insurers. The gift from John Adam is intended to strengthen Clark's graduate programs in education, promote college-readiness among minority students and bolster its research profile related to urban education. This donation created the Adams Education Fund, which will enhance Clark's nationally recognized model for urban secondary education and reform, teacher-training, and community education partnerships.
On July 1, 2010, former provost David Angel became the ninth president of Clark succeeding John Bassett, who went on to be president of Heritage University located on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Toppenish, Washington.
Clark University has an ongoing renovation project that will cover several buildings. In the summer of 2010, overhauls occurred in Bullock and Wright Hall dormitories.
Noam Chomsky spoke at Clark University on the topic of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Arab Spring April 12, 2011, in Atwood Hall. The visit was unprecedented not only for Chomsky's notoriety, but also because this was the first ever lecture given on a Spree Day at Clark.
In summer 2012, Clark University underwent more renovations. The city of Worcester allowed the university to close Downing Street to unite the campus. The area was landscaped to become a pedestrian plaza. Johnson and Sanford halls were united to become the Johnson Sanford Center featuring new social, study, and multimedia spaces. The project included addition of an outdoor roof terrace and an elevator to all levels. The University has recently begun a project called LEEP to connect students and the world of academia to practical experience.
On October 16, 2014, President Bill Clinton spoke in Atwood Hall as a supporter of Martha Coakley's run for Governor of Massachusetts. While he was originally to be one of the first speakers, heavy rain that day delayed his flight, as a result he was in fact the last person to speak at the event. Tickets for the event could be booked for free on Clark's website, and they were completely booked within hours.
Summer 2016 saw the completion of a new Alumni and Student Engagement Center building, extending the campus across Main Street. The facility is a mixed-use building containing administrative offices, lecture halls, meeting rooms, and some retail space, and features a modern architectural look and a roof-top solar array.
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Campus
The campus is located on Main Street in the Main South neighborhood about 2 miles (3.2 km) west of downtown Worcester and 40 miles (64 km) west of Boston. The campus is compact, with most of the major buildings located within the space of a single city block.
The center of campus is known as the Green. The Green is a hub for student activity, and is where most Clarkies spend their time during the warm months. It is the location of Spree Day, the welcome back BBQ, several clubs' events and graduation. The buildings surrounding The Green include Atwood Hall, Jefferson Academic Center, Higgins University Center, Jonas Clark Hall, and the Goddard Library.
Administrative offices are housed in small buildings along Woodland Street, as is the president's house.
Academic facilities
Jonas Clark Hall, built in 1887, was Clark University's first building. It occupies the center of campus and houses the economics, psychology and education departments. Located in the basement of Jonas Clark Hall is the university's cogeneration plant which allows the university to recycle waste heat from electrical generation into hot water, heat, and steam. It was updated in 2013 to a more efficient 2.0 kWh natural gas engine.
Estabrook Hall, located on Woodland Street, is the second oldest building on Clark's campus. It was constructed as dormitories, it now functions as the language center and the music center. The top three floors are dedicated to languages including Spanish, French, German, Latin, and Hebrew, while the bottom floor and basement are practice rooms and music halls.
The Jefferson Academic Center houses various social science departments including Women's Studies, Geography, History, Geographical Information Sciences, Political Science, and Sociology.
Atwood Hall, attached to the Jefferson Academic Center, is the primary theater on campus and seats 658. The Grateful Dead (1967 and 1969), the Jimi Hendrix Experience (1968), Janis Joplin (1969), and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band (1974) have all played here. Atwood Hall originally served as the chapel for the university.
The Lasry Center for Bioscience (named for hedge fund manager Marc Lasry and his wife Cathy, both alumni) houses the biology department. It received a LEED Gold certification for its energy efficiency.
The Little Center is the alternate performing arts venue, with its largest room, the Michelson Theater seating 120.
The Academic Commons, also known as the AC, acts as a study area and lounge for the students, and incorporates a Sodexo coffeehouse named Jazzmans, a quiet study area, a computer room, and the Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprises. The Goddard Library is upstairs from the Academic Commons and houses more than 375,000 volumes.
Athletic facilities
The Kneller Athletic Center houses the basketball courts, swimming pool, raquet ball courts, handball courts, and the Bickman Fitness Center which was completely renovated in 2013. Major campus events, such as International Gala, the fall concert, and first year orientation are usually held in the Kneller as the basketball courts are the largest rooms on campus and can accommodate the entire student body.
Housing
Students entering Clark must live on campus for the first two years unless their primary address is within 25 miles (40 km) of campus. The residence halls at Clark are organized by those who live there. The halls include the following breakdowns:
- First Year Experience halls (Johnson-Sanford Center, Bullock and Wright)
- Mixed Class halls (Dana and Hughes)
- Single Sex hall (Dodd--female only)
- Suite-style and Apartment-style halls (Maywood and Blackstone)
Clark owns apartments that, while outside of the main campus area, exclusively house Clark students.
The first Clark "residence halls" (Wright and Bullock) opened in 1959. Before that time, Estabrook Hall was the men's dormitory and small women's dorms stood in the current location of Little Center and Bullock Hall. Blackstone, the newest of the halls, opened in 2007.
As of fall 2007, gender blind/neutral housing is an option at Clark, meaning that students of different genders can room together.
Clark University released its Climate Action Plan December 15, 2009, detailing strategies for the University to reduce its carbon footprint while strengthening many of its existing sustainability practices. The plan sets two goals with respect to climate neutrality: First is an interim goal of reducing emissions to 20 percent below 2005-levels by 2015. The second goal is to achieve climate neutrality (net zero greenhouse gas emissions) by the year 2030.
Academics
Clark offers 32 undergraduate majors. It offers 57 study abroad and away programs in 34 different countries. Clark has 197 full-time faculty, representing a 10:1 student-faculty ratio. Ninety-six percent of Clark's faculty have doctoral or terminal degrees.
The university is included in The Princeton Review's The Best 380 Colleges: 2016 Edition and was one of 209 institutions included in their list of Colleges That Pay You Back.
In recent years, Clark has been noted especially for its geography and psychology departments, with the latter having a distinctive humanistic orientation. The School of Geography was founded by then President Wallace Walter Atwood in 1921, and is the first institution in the United States established for graduate study in this science. It has granted more doctoral degrees than any other geography program in the country. The geography department is best known for its strength in human-environment geography and for the development of the IDRISI geographic information systems software, named for the famous 12th century explorer and cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi by Prof. Ron Eastman. It was ranked #1 for undergraduate geography by Rugg's Recommendations on Colleges and has consistently been ranked in the top 10 in the nation by other publications. The geography department also offers a graduate-level degree in GIS as part of the Fifth-Year Free program. The department's mission is ambitious: "to educate undergraduate and graduate students to be imaginative and contributing citizens of the world, and to advance the frontiers of knowledge and understanding through rigorous scholarship and creative effort."
In recent years, Clark has received widespread media coverage for its "Fifth-Year Free" program. Under Clark's BA/MA program with the fifth year free, undergraduates who maintain a B+ average are eligible for tuition-free enrollment in its one-year graduate programs, meaning that they can get a Master of Arts degree for the price of a bachelor's degree. Students apply to master's degree programs in their junior year, begin meeting requirements in their senior year and typically complete those requirements in the fifth year. Bachelor's degrees are granted en route to the master's degree.
Admissions
Admission to Clark is rated "more selective" by U.S. News & World Report.
For Fall 2014, Clark received 7,304 freshmen applications; 3,946 were admitted (54.0%) and 548 enrolled. The average high school grade point average (GPA) of the enrolled freshmen was 3.60, while the middle 50% range of SAT scores were 550-663 for critical reading, 558-670 for math, and 560-660 for writing. The middle 50% range of the ACT Composite score was 25-31.
Student life
Student body
As of fall 2015, Clark's student body comprised 2,301 undergraduates and 1,064 graduate and professional students. The undergraduate student body is composed primarily of students from outside Massachusetts, with 68% of undergraduates from out-of-state: this includes international students, who make up 15% of undergraduates. In addition, 20% of the undergraduate student body is classified as ALANA (Asian-, Latino-, African-, and Native-American) and 61% of undergraduates are female.
Residential life
The majority of the undergraduate student body, 70%, lives on campus. Clark requires undergraduates to do so for their first two years, with first-years being assigned housing based on their responses to a Housing Preferences Form. Once first-years have been assigned housing, a seniority system, whereby seniors have the first choice of spaces left, juniors have the second, and sophomores the third, ensures that seniors and juniors are usually able to live on campus if they wish to. Nonetheless, some choose to live in off-campus apartments in the immediate neighborhood of Clark, along with the graduate students outside the 7% that live on campus.
Student organizations
There are more than 130 student clubs and organizations at Clark. All these are headed by the Clark Undergraduate Student Council which disseminates more than $750,000 in budgets to the various clubs and their events.
Media and publications
The Scarlet is Clark University's student newspaper. It is published weekly and has four sections: News, Opinions, Living Arts, and Sports. Clark's literary magazine, Caesura, is published annually and features artwork, poetry, prose, essays, and creative non-fiction submitted by undergraduate and graduate students. STIR Magazine, Clark's life, culture, and style magazine was founded by Diana Levine as a student project in 2004. STIR began with a three-person staff and in black and white, and now has about 30 core students who contribute to its production in full color. The Scholarly Undergraduate Research Journal (SURJ) is Clark's student-run undergraduate research journal. It publishes undergraduate academic work and is intended to provide undergraduates with "experiences in the peer review and academic publication processes." Peer reviewers consist of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty. The Freudian Slip, is a satire/humor publication founded in 2015. It publishes semi-weekly satirical articles about local and worldwide events. It is also the first University publication published exclusively online.
There is also a student-run internet radio station, Radio of Clark University (ROCU), with over 100 student DJs.
Events
Spree Day is one of the most beloved Clark events, and the worst kept secret on campus. Spree Day originated in 1903 to coincide with St. Patrick's Day. The university previously used Spree Day as a day without classes with university sponsored drinking and carnivals. Now, Spree Day occurs on a "secret" day. The university cancels classes, ropes-off The Green and, hires inflatables, bands, and holds a food fair that allows the student body to relax in the warming New England weather. It is traditional to not tell first-year students about Spree Day, instead, the Senior class awakens the first-years by running through their dorms banging pots and pans.
Many Clarkies, uninterested in the events the University puts on, usually throw large parties and use the day to take a break from classes. This led the University's Office of Leadership and Programming to lead an effort to scrap Spree Day in early 2013 for the more tame and wildly unpopular FreudFest. FreudFest would have consolidated International Gala, Spree Day, and the Spring comedy act into one Thursday-Sunday span in April, with no days of canceled classes. Within hours of the announcement that Spree Day would be no more, students mounted a massive campaign to "Free Spree" and save Spree Day activities. With a massive social media and email campaign, sit-ins at the Student Leadership and Programming office, and a funding veto by Student Council President Andrew Schuschu, the decision was reversed within a week, and festivities occurred as usual in April. This did lead to a Spree Day committee being formed to reform the event to a safer day for the university.
While Spree Day is a day of fun and relaxation, Clark University also holds the Academic Spree Day in the Spring semester. This event has an academic nature and is the day when Clark undergraduates present their research and creative work annually
Athletics
Clark University fields 17 NCAA Division III varsity teams which compete intercollegiately as the Clark Cougars in the New England Women's and Men's Athletic Conference. Men's sports include baseball, basketball, cross country, lacrosse, crew, soccer, swimming and diving, and tennis; women's sports include basketball, cross country, field hockey, crew, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, and volleyball.
The university also offers a variety of club and intramural sports such as capoeira, equestrian, hockey, snowboarding, softball, tae kwon do, track and field, and ultimate frisbee. This contributes to Clark's 65 percent student participation rate in athletics.
Clark and the community
In 1985, the university engaged in a partnership with community groups and business organizations to revitalize Clark neighborhoods. Its efforts in the University Park Partnership program include refurbishing dilapidated or abandoned homes, reselling them to area residents, and subsidizing mortgages for new home buyers.
In 1997, Clark opened a secondary public school, the University Park Campus School (UPCS), that is also a professional development school for Clark's teacher education program. Because of its long hours and demanding curricula, UPCS has been lauded as a model for collaboration between a university and an urban district. Students are able to attend Clark University free of charge upon graduation, provided they meet certain residency and admissions requirements. In the May 16, 2005, issue of Newsweek, UPCS was named the 68th best high school in the nation. UPCS was featured in a page-one story entitled Town-grown triumph: In poorest part of Worcester, Clark helps put children on path to college of the November 22, 2007, edition of The Boston Globe.
The UPCS collaborative is one of several sponsored by Clark's Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education focused on urban teacher education and school reform.
Research
Clark has eight research institutes and centers.
The William and Jane Mosakowski Institute for Public Enterprise seeks to improve through the successful mobilization of use-inspired research the effectiveness of government and other institutions in addressing social concerns. The institute focuses on important social issues, including focal areas such as education reform, environmental sustainability, access to healthcare, human development, well-being and global change.
The George Perkins Marsh Institute conducts collaborative, interdisciplinary research on human-environment relationships and the human dimensions of global environmental change.
The Strassler Family Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies an interdiscplinary center, founded in 1998, which focuses on the causes and effects of Holocausts and Genocides around the world. It is housed in Lasry House, donated by investor Marc Lasry and his wife Cathy in honor of their fathers Irwin Cohen and Moise Lasry. Debórah Dwork is the founding director and also Rose Professor of Holocaust History at Clark.
The Jacob Hiatt Center for Urban Education develops models of urban schooling, teaching and teacher education through local partnership, in order to learn from these models and expand the knowledge-base of effective practice through research.
The Center for Risk and Security (CRS) at the George Perkins Marsh Institute conducts in-depth studies of homeland security issues using a risk-analysis perspective. The Center's broad range of security issues includes: terrorism; disaster management; law and human rights; resource availability; and public health.
The Center for Technology, Environment and Development (CENTED), founded in 1987, is a center for the study of natural and technological hazards in the United States. Projects include theoretical work on hazard analysis, hazard taxonomies, vulnerability, environmental equity, corporate risk management, emergency planning and hazardous waste transportation.
The Center for Community-Based Development (CCBD) is the research arm of the IDCE Program. CCBD works with host country colleagues and institutions to help local communities increase productivity and conserve natural resources. CCBD disseminates its approach and research through publications and training courses, both at Clark and overseas.
Clark Labs is engaged in the research and development on geospatial technologies including the development of computer software and analytical techniques for GIS and remote sensing with an emphasis on monitoring and modeling earth system dynamics. Clark Labs continues to develop and distribute IDRISI, a geographic information system (GIS) software package that is in use at more than 40,000 sites in over 180 countries worldwide. Its chief is Dr. J. Ronald Eastman, creator of IDRISI.
People
Clark's first president, G. Stanley Hall, founded the American Psychological Association in July 1892 at Clark, but the university's most famous alumnus was graduate student and professor Robert H. Goddard, a pioneering rocket scientist who conducted many experiments on campus. Grayson L. Kirk, a president of the Council on Foreign Relations during the Cold War and the president of Columbia University during the student protests of 1968 received his master's degree from the university, as did D'Army Bailey a prominent civil rights activist and the founder of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. Clark is also notable for being the site of Sigmund Freud's only lectures in the United States and for being the university where Chinese poet Xu Zhimo earned his BA.
In popular culture
Gus Van Sant's The Sea of Trees did filming on Clark University's campus. Leading actor Matthew McConaughey's character, Arthur Brennan, is a physics professor and scenes were filmed in and around Clark's Sackler Sciences Center. Clark was also a shooting location for the thriller Black Car, an independent film about a law student out for revenge, with Clark as the law school. The novel Something for Nothing, a semi-comic take on the struggles of a professor new to academia written by economist Michael W. Klein, is set at the fictional "Kester College," which like Clark University has a large main building that legend says was designed so that it could be converted into a factory should the college fail. Klein began his teaching career at Clark. Burning Annie, an independent comedy, was written and produced by two Clark alumni and is a semi-autobiographical film based on the experiences of one at Clark. One of the main characters in Annie Baker's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick, an African American movie usher named Avery, is a Clarkie with a full-ride to attend the university. On March 15, 1968, the Jimi Hendrix Experience played in Clark's Atwood Hall. The show was professionally recorded and in 1999 the album Live at Clark University was released with five songs and interviews from the members of the band.
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