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.

Clark faculty, alumni, and affiliates have included business executives and inventors of the wind chill factor and the birth control pill.

[15] 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.

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.

[20] In order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Clark's opening, President Hall invited a number of leading thinkers to the university.

[21] 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.

[26] 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.

[35] The university has recently begun a project called LEEP to connect students and the world of academia to practical experience.

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 rooftop solar array.

The upper floors are primarily home to classrooms and offices for the Language, Literature, and Culture department, which includes Spanish, French, German, Latin, and Hebrew.

[46] Atwood Hall originally served as the chapel for the university, and in recent decades has been the scene for several notable concerts and speeches.

On October 16, 2014, President Bill Clinton spoke in Atwood as a supporter of Martha Coakley's run for Governor of Massachusetts.

Notable alumni of SOM include Libérat Mfumukeko, secretary-general of the East African Community, and Matt Goldman, co-founder of the Blue Man Group.

[59] The Graduate School of Geography (GSG), founded in 1921 by Wallace Walter Atwood, offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.

[62][63] Alumni of SPS include Olta Xhaçka, Albanian Minister of Defense, and Keith R. Hall, former director of the National Reconnaissance Office.

Notable alumni include Francis Sumner, the father of black psychology, and Arnold Gesell, noted child psychologist.

[90] 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 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.

Men's sports include baseball, basketball, cross country, lacrosse, soccer, swimming and diving, and tennis; women's sports include basketball, cross country, field hockey, crew, lacrosse, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, and volleyball.

The university also offers a variety of club and intramural sports such as soccer, ice hockey, ultimate frisbee, quidditch, volleyball and basketball.

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 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.

[26] The George Perkins Marsh Institute conducts collaborative, interdisciplinary research on human-environment relationships and the human dimensions of global environmental change.

The center's broad range of security issues includes: terrorism; disaster management; law and human rights; resource availability; and public health.

Clark Labs continues to develop and distribute TerrSet (formerly IDRISI), a geographic information system (GIS) software package that is in use at more than 40,000 sites in over 180 countries worldwide.

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.

Leading actor Matthew McConaughey's character, Arthur Brennan, is a physics professor and scenes were filmed in and around Clark's Sackler Sciences Center.

[113] 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.