Around you spreads the oldest university campus in the United States, founded in 1636. Harvard was founded in 1636, just six years after Boston itself, by the Massachusetts Bay Colony General Court, which appropriated four hundred pounds for a school and college. It was named for John Harvard, a Puritan minister who died in 1638 and left half his estate and his entire library of four hundred books to the college.
The Yard you are standing in is the original campus, surrounded by the oldest surviving buildings: Massachusetts Hall, built in 1720, is the oldest building on the Harvard campus and the second-oldest academic building still in use in the United States. The John Harvard statue in the center of the yard is known as the statue of three lies: it is not John Harvard, it is not a portrait from life, and the founding date on the base — 1638 — is wrong; Harvard was founded in 1636. The statue depicts an idealized Puritan minister, made in 1884 by sculptor Daniel Chester French.
Harvard's alumni include eight presidents, more than 150 Nobel laureates, and dozens of heads of state. The tradition of rubbing John Harvard's bronze shoe for good luck has polished it to a bright gold. Rub it if you like; every other tourist has.