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Clark University, in Worcester , Massachusetts in the United States , is a private teaching and research institution founded in 1887 by the industrialist Jonas Clark. It is the smallest research university in the nation and in 2005 was rated "hottest school for student research" by the Kaplan-Newsweek Guide. Clark was the second oldest all-graduate institution. It is one of only three New England universities, with Harvard and Yale , to be a founding member of the Association Of American Universities . Clark withdrew membership from the Association of American Universities in the late 1990s, due to a shift in focus from research to undergraduate education. HISTORY AND BACKGROUND Clark's first president was G. Stanley Hall , founder of the American Psychological Association , who 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. Clark was the location for Sigmund Freud 's famous "Clark Lectures" in 1909, introducing Psychoanalysis to this country. Franz Boas , founder of American cultural anthropology, taught briefly at Clark between 1888 and 1892 before resigning (in a dispute with Hall over academic freedom) and moving to Columbia University . Albert Abraham 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, served as a professor from 1889 to 1892 . In the 1920s Robert Goddard , a pioneer of rocketry, considered one of the founders of space and missile technology, served as chairman of the Physics Department. Located in an industrial, residential neighborhood ("Main South") of the New England mill town of Worcester, Clark benefited for many years from the patronage of the wealthy factory owner families in the town, who saw the numerous colleges in their city as a cultural endowment that might lift the factory-working population of the city to a more sophisticated level. At the same time, it is home to several notable radical scholars, including Richard Peet in Geography, Cynthia Enloe and Robert Ross in Government, and to many generations of students strongly critical of the status-quo. Small class sizes, the inner-city location, and the liberal-arts undergraduate mission have encouraged intensive debate and some interesting initiatives. For example, Clark has a long history of community involvement and partnering. In 1985, the university engaged in a partnership with community groups and business organizations to revitalize Clark neighborhoods. Clark’s 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. RECENT DEVELOPMENTS In recent years, Clark has received great 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 into its one year graduate programs, meaning that they can get a master of arts degree for the price of a bachelor's degree. However, the program has been criticized for forcing students to complete much of their master's classes during their senior year, giving you a degree but perhaps not a master's-level education. Clark has flourished, marketing its programs off-campus and accepting a student body largely from out of the city and often from out of the state. Its graduate programs recruit students worldwide. Clark has developed a reputation as a free-thinking institution. In recent years, Clark has been noted especially for its Geography and Psychology departments, with the latter having a distinctive, if increasingly unfashionable "humanistic" orientation ( Humanistic Psychology ).The School of Geography was founded by then President Wallace Attwood 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 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. Its 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." The total bill students will receive from Clark University for the 2006-2007 academic year will be $37,100, including tuition, room and board. This figure includes a 6.5 percent increase in tuition from the 2005-2006 academic year, a matter of much contention on the campus. NOTABLE ALUMNI
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