Beginning this month, all Tufts students and faculty can visit any museum at Harvard University free of charge, year-round. To be eligible for free admission, they simply need to show their Tufts ID. All current Tufts students and faculty are eligible.

While some of the Harvard museums are already free to the public, Tufts students and faculty will have free admission to all of them, including:

• The Harvard Museum of Natural History, home to the “Glass Flowers”
• The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the world’s oldest anthropology museums
• The Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, which includes a full-scale replica of an Iron Age home
• The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, one of the largest collections of its kind in the world
• The Harvard Art Museums, which contain art from antiquity to the present day

“We want to encourage all our students, as part of their Tufts education, to access the widest possible range of cultural and historical resources available to them,” said Cigdem Talgar, vice provost for education. “Harvard’s museums are an outstanding example of what is on offer to students who come to Boston to pursue their education.”

The inspiration for the free admission plan came from Noel Heim, a lecturer in the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences. He wanted to give the 225 students enrolled in his “Dinosaurs!” course an assignment related to the dinosaur fossils at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. He discussed the idea with his department chair, which ultimately led to Tufts paying an annual fee for student access to the Harvard museum network. Faculty who would like to bring their larger classes as a group are just asked to coordinate with the specific museum in advance.  

Heim said he hopes other departments and programs take advantage of this new resource for deepening their curricular offerings. “I also hope students just go on their own,” he said. “It’s so close and a great museum.”

Notable among the exhibits at Harvard is the unique collection of glass models of plants—known as the Glass Flowers—at the Museum of Natural History; other exhibits at this museum include collections of rare gems and minerals and six whale skeletons. The Museum of the Ancient Near East features casts of famous Mesopotamian monuments and tablets holding the earliest forms of writing. The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments contains more than 20,000 objects drawn from a broad range of scientific disciplines.

Admission to the museums also extends to Tufts students and faculty the opportunity to take classes offered to guests of the museum and to attend weekly lectures and special events, including ArtsThursdays. 

This initiative is part of ongoing efforts by the Office of the Provost to open up new opportunities for experiential learning for Tufts students.