Through our work as students and private tutors (through our Cambridge, MA tutoring company, Veritas Tutors), we have come to understand that the best teachers are those who inspire passion and curiosity for scholarship. We have also realized that the Internet, despite its cache of information, has very poor pedagogical resources. It is easy to find information of many types, but it is not so easy to understand that information.

We hope not only to increase the amount of raw information on the Internet, but also to synthesize and to annotate that knowledge to allow everyone understand the material as well as the process of analysis. In short, we hope to inspire genuine, in-depth thought in each of our users, because the yearning for a lifetime of learning is far more empowering than any single fact or bit of information.

The following quote about knowledge—the internalization of information—is an effective springboard into the project:


Here, Jefferson makes a wonderful point about transference of knowledge, but he does not take the next logical step. Of course one individual has the ability to create and inspire the flame of knowledge, but those new flames are also bestowed with that rousing authority. As such, inspiring education has the exponential capacity to affect the entire world only if that transmission is allowed to happen freely, without boundaries.

In that way, our mission is identical to that of Harvard College, and other great universities of the world, as stated here:


I could not have said it better myself.

Aside from out desire to foist Harvard terminology on the world at-large, we recognize that the term "Final Club" is well-known as well as polarizing on the Harvard Campus. Final Clubs are akin to Yale’s Secret Societies or Princeton’s Eating Clubs. But, love them or hate them, Harvard Students, we figured, would be likely to follow a link including those words. Apparently it worked, because you are reading this right now.

There is also a larger significance to the choice. Final Clubs, like Harvard courses, are enclosed—isolated from the surrounding community. Our desire is to transcend that artificial boundary and allow at least a part of the inspiring Ivy League knowledge to diffuse through the world-wide community of curious minds.

Also, as my mother surmised when I was a wee freshman, "Final Clubs? Is that where you go to study for exams?"

While those Final Clubs are more designed for debochery and nepotism, TheFinalClub.org is certainly a destination for academic pursuits.

First and foremost, we (unlike some other note-taking companies) actually encourage people to read these classic works of literature, philosophy, and history. We do not provide summaries or modernizations that "dumb-down" the work, because we respect the intelligence our audience to engage with the original, brilliant language of these great authors. We merely guide our readers, as any great teacher would, through these works by glossing difficult passages and highlighting areas of particular brilliance.

Furthermore, we even encourage each of our readers to contribute his or her own opinion (by voting or posting) in order to foster genuine intellectual discourse in and among all academic disciplines.

In order to comply with current copyright law, we are only displaying works in the public domain (i.e. — generally defined as books by authors who have been deceased over 70 years.) If you hold the copyright to a book or short story and would like to offer it to our site, please email us and our editors will gladly review your submission.

As you can see, Andrew Magliozzi, a young writer and co-founder of TheFinalClub.org, has posted a short story of his own on the site for commentary. Please play nice.

Each course blogs is written by an undergraduate student at Harvard with knowledge of and passion for the topics and readings of that course. As such, bloggers are directed to use each lecture topic as a springboard for communicating their own thoughts, research, and opinions on the subject. Read one to see what we mean!

Obviously, we cannot pay enough bloggers to write about every course at Harvard. So, we encourage our undergraduate site users to volunteer their time and knowledge by posting without pay. That's right, public blogs are completely volunteer projects, just like wikipediaâ except with our site, you can be sure that every public blog post was written by an enrolled Harvard student.

Not yet. For now, we are limiting our contributors to those with "fas.harvard.edu" email addresses in order to maintain a higher degree of authorial honesty.

But, if our product becomes popular and we expand to your school, you can begin writing about your own classes.

If you are a Harvard student who would like to contribute a new course blog, please contact us.

The most important thing you can do is use the site and tell all of your friends to do the same. Please, contribute your ideas to our message boards as well and help us prevent spam by voting down or flagging inappropriate postings. By voting, you can help the best ideas rise to the top of the site.

No. In addition to all of the publicly accessible material that we continually post, we hope to provide even better instructional materials at affordable prices. Overall, we feel that a for-profit structure is best for driving innovation in all aspects of our educational technology.

First, there really is nothing like this available anywhere. Wikipedia is a good start, but it is not designed to "educate" as much as aggregate information. Some sites do attempt to teach, but we have found that they do so very poorly.

Our desire is to inspire creative thought, not just to help people achieve higher marks on their exams and papers.

As Harvard students, we probably watched Good Will Hunting a few too many times. In essence, we hope to make Matt Damon’s claim a reality. We want enable people to get a Harvard education with only a $1.50 in late fees from the public library.

By disseminating high-quality academic instruction, we hope to enrich the lives of curious students of any age or background. The ability to read, analyze, and contemplate academic information is applicable to many aspects of life. Learning does not necessarily make you a better person; it does, however, enable "better informed" decisions and actions.

Finally, we hope to inspire brilliant individuals in all fields to become next great self-made authors, physicists, philosophers, or mathematicians. Who knows, maybe a savvy German patent clerk or an hermetic Indian will do something great with the resources we provide. Perhaps the next William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, or Ramanujan will be inspired by TheFinalClub.org

The point is, great accomplishments will not come from us; they will come from you, our dedicated users.