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Columbia University

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{{Infobox_University |image = Image:Cu-shield.png |name = Columbia University in the City of New York |motto = In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen
(In Thy light shall we see light) |established = 1754 |type = Private |president= Lee Bollinger |city = New York City |state = New York |country = USA |undergrad = 5,530 |postgrad = 14,692 |staff= 3,224 |campus = Urban, 36 acres (0.15 km²) Morningside Heights Campus, 26 acres (0.1 km²) Baker Field athletic complex, 20 acres (0.09 km²) Medical Center, 157 acres (0.64 km²) Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory |mascot = Royal Lion Image:Columbia university lion mascot.jpg |free_label = Athletics |free = 29 sports teams |endowment= $5.2 billion |website= www.columbia.edu }} Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. It was established in 1754 as King's College and is the fifth oldest chartered institution of higher education in the United States. During these early years, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert Livingston studied at Columbia.

The university is a member of the Ivy League. It is legally known as Columbia University in the City of New York, and is incorporated as The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. Its undergraduate schools are Columbia College, the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), and the School of General Studies.

The university is affiliated with Barnard College (an undergraduate liberal arts college for women and one of the Seven Sisters), Teachers College, Jewish Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary. Through affiliation agreements, it is the university which awards degrees to graduates of Barnard College and Teachers College.

Contents

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Campus

Most of Columbia's graduate and undergraduate studies are conducted in Morningside Heights on Seth Low's late-19th century vision of a university campus where all disciplines could be taught in one location. This campus was designed by acclaimed architects McKim, Mead, and White and is considered one of their best works.

Image:Nyc columbia.jpg

Image:Meadmoresculpture.jpg Image:Columbia College Walk.jpg

Columbia's main campus occupies more than six city blocks, 32 acres (132,000 m²), in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. The university owns 7300 apartments in Morningside Heights, which house faculty, graduate students, and staff. Health-related schools are located at the Columbia University Medical Center, twenty acres located about fifty blocks uptown. Columbia also owns the 26 acre Baker Field, which has the facilities for field sports, outdoor track, tennis, and rowing at the northern tip of Manhattan island (in the neighborhood of Inwood). There is a third campus on the west bank of the Hudson River, the 157 acre Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

Columbia's library system includes 8.7 million bound volumes [1].

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History

Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in the state of New York and the sixth-oldest in the United States. Columbia has grown over time to comprise twenty schools and affiliated institutions.

In the early 1750's, clergymen of the Episcopalian Trinity Church in New York City became alarmed by the Presbyterian founding of Princeton University (then known as the College of New Jersey) [2]. They established their own "rival" institution, King's College and elected as its first president Samuel Johnson. Classes began on July 17, 1754, with Johnson being the sole faculty member. A few months later, Great Britain's King George II officially granted a royal charter for the college on October 31, 1754.

Controversy surrounded the founding of the new college in New York, as it was a thoroughly Anglican institution dominated by the influence of Crown officials in its governing body such as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Crown Secretary for Plantations and Colonies. The fears of an Anglican episcopacy and Crown influence in America through King's College were confirmed by its vast wealth, far surpassing all other colonial colleges of the period. Until the American Revolution, King's College would remain a bastion of Loyalists. On the other hand, the College would produce the leading men of the Revolutionary generation.

After the American Revolutionary War, King's College was renamed in 1784 to Columbia College, and Samuel Johnson's son, William Samuel Johnson, became its president. In 1896, it was renamed to Columbia University.

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Park Place and Rockefeller Center

In July 1754, Samuel Johnson held the first classes in a new school house adjoining Trinity Church, Wall Street, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. There were eight students in the class. In 1767 King's College established the first American medical school to grant the MD degree.

The American Revolutionary War brought the growth of the College to a halt, forcing a suspension of instruction in 1776 that lasted for eight years. Among the earliest students and trustees of King's College were John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States; Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury; Gouverneur Morris, the author of the final draft of the United States Constitution; and Robert R. Livingston, a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. In 1784, the college reopened as Columbia College, reflecting the patriotic fervor which had inspired the nation's quest for independence.Image:Kings college 1770.gif

In 1849, the College moved from Park Place, near the present site of City Hall, to 49th Street and Madison Avenue, where it remained for the next fifty years. During the last half of the nineteenth century, Columbia rapidly assumed the shape of a modern university. Columbia Law School was founded in 1858, and the country's first mining school, a precursor of today's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, was established in 1864. Barnard College for women became affiliated with Columbia in 1889; the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons came under the aegis of the University in 1891, followed by Teachers College in 1893.

The development of the Graduate Faculties in Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science established Columbia as one of the nation's earliest centers for graduate education. By the close of the nineteenth century, Columbia was the world's leading producer of academic doctorates and was universally recognized as America's top research university.

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Morningside Heights

In 1896, the trustees officially authorized the use of yet another new name, Columbia University, and today the institution is officially known as "Columbia University in the City of New York." At the same time University president Seth Low moved the campus again from Rockefeller Center at 49th Street to its present location, a more spacious campus in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan.

Image:Columbia low plaza 3old.jpg

The building often depicted as emblematic of Columbia is the centerpiece of the Morningside Heights campus, the Low Library. Constructed in 1895, the building is still referred to as the "Low Library" although it has not functioned as a library since 1934. It currently houses the office of the President and some archival collections. Patterned on the Parthenon and Pantheon, it is surmounted by the largest all-granite dome in the United States.[3]

Image:Columbia University library.jpg

Under the leadership of Low's successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, Columbia rapidly became the nation's major institution for research, setting the "multiversity" model that later universities would adopt. On the Morningside Heights campus, Columbia centralized on a single campus the College, the School of Law, the Graduate Faculties, the School of Mines (predecessor of the Engineering School), and the College of Physicians & Surgeons. Butler went on to serve as president of Columbia for over four decades and became a giant in American public life (as one-time vice presidential candidate and a Nobel Laureate). His introduction of "downtown" business practices in university administration led to innovations in internal reforms such as the centralization of academic affairs, the direct appointment of registrars, deans, provosts, and secretaries, as well as the formation of a professionalzed university bureaucracy, unprecedented among American universities at the time.

In 1902, New York newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer donated a substantial sum to the University for the founding of a school to teach journalism. The result was the 1912 opening of the Graduate School of Journalism-- the only journalism school in the Ivy League. The school is the administrator of the Pulitzer Prize and the duPont-Columbia Award in broadcast journalism.

Columbia Business School was added in the early 20th century. During the first half of the 20th Century Columbia and Harvard had the largest endowments in the country.

By the late 1930s, a Columbia student could study with the likes of Jacques Barzun, Paul Lazarsfeld, Mark Van Doren, Lionel Trilling, and I. I. Rabi. The University's graduates during this time were equally accomplished - for example, two alumni of Columbia's Law School, Charles Evans Hughes and Harlan Fiske Stone (who also held the position of Law School dean), served successively as Chief Justices of the United States. In the '50s, Dwight Eisenhower served as Columbia's president before becoming the President of the United States.

Research into the atom by faculty members John R. Dunning, I. I. Rabi, Enrico Fermi and Polykarp Kusch placed Columbia's Physics Department in the international spotlight in the 1940s after the first nuclear pile was built to start what would become the Manhattan Project.

In 1893 the Columbia University Press was founded in order to "promote the study of economic, historical, literary, scientific and other subjects; and to promote and encourage the publication of literary works embodying original research in such subjects." Among its publications are The Columbia Encyclopedia, first published in 1935, and The Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer of the World, first published in 1952.

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Student demonstrations

Main article: Columbia University protests of 1968

Students protested in 1968 over the issue of whether Columbia would build its gymnasium in neighboring Morningside Park; this was seen by the protestors to be an act of aggression aimed at the Black residents of neighboring Harlem. A second issue sparking the 1968 student protest was the Columbia Administration's failure to resign its institutional membership in the Pentagon's weapons research think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA].

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Athletics

While Columbia is no longer an athletics powerhouse, sports at Columbia have a long tradition. Crew was Columbia's first sport, and the first non-English school to win the Henley Regatta. The Columbia football team is one of the nation's oldest and won the Rose Bowl in 1934. Its wrestling team is the nation's oldest. Due to space constraints, most of Columbia's outdoor athletic teams practice and compete uptown at Baker Field in Inwood, Manhattan. Some of the rowing teams use the Orchard Beach Lagoon as their home course. Home meets for cross country running are held at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

Columbia has been home to some famous athletes - Eddie Collins and Lou Gehrig played baseball and Sid Luckman played football there. Columbia's fencing team in the late 20th century was one of the nation's most successful, with NCAA team championships in 1987, 1988, 1989, 1992 and 1993. In recent years, the women's cross country team has held the Heptagonal Championship title. In 2004, both the men's and women's teams won the race.

The university's recent notoriety in sports, however, lies with its football team, which set an NCAA record of most consecutive football games without a win. After a losing 44 games, it broke the streak by beating Princeton at Columbia's homecoming game in 1988. Their dubious record was superseded by Prairie View A&M in the 1990s.

Although Columbia routinely finishes at or near the bottom of the Ivy League standings in most sports, the university remains among the top 20 universities in terms of its number of NCAA Division I varsity sports offerings.

For a listing of organizations, see the article Clubs and Organizations of Columbia University.

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Awards and honors

As of 2005, 73 Columbia University affiliates have been honored with Nobel Prizes for their work in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace, and economics. For a complete list, see [4]

Other awards/honors won by current faculty include:

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Notable Columbia alumni

Three current United States Senators, sixteen current Chief Executives of Fortune 500 companies, and thirty-seven Nobel Prize winners have degrees from Columbia. Three of the eleven richest Americans have a degree from Columbia. In culture and the arts, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling, Robert Nozick, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Auster are among Columbia's alumni.

See also List of Columbia University people

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In film, television and the arts

Movies featuring scenes shot on Morningside campus include:


Movies or shows with significant portrayals of Columbia alumni or students:

Currently shooting on or around the University's campus:

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See also

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External links


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es:Universidad de Columbia eo:Universitato Kolumbio fr:Université Columbia ko:컬럼비아 대학교 id:Universitas Columbia he:אוניברסיטת קולומביה hu:Columbia Egyetem nl:Columbia-universiteit ja:コロンビア大学 pl:Columbia University pt:Universidade de Columbia ru:Колумбийский университет fi:Columbian yliopisto sv:Columbia University zh:哥伦比亚大学

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