Alma Mater is a bronze sculpture by Daniel Chester French which is located on the steps of the Low Memorial Library on the campus of Columbia University, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City.

[6] Given the commission, French's stated aim was to create "a figure that should be gracious in the impression that it should make, with an attitude of welcome to the youths who should choose Columbia as their College.

[10] At the ceremony, a prayer was given by Henry C. Potter, the 7th Bishop of New York and a trustee of the university, before the statue was formally presented to President Nicholas Murray Butler by Dean John Howard Van Amringe.

[11] In 1904, a four-foot plaster reproduction of Alma Mater was borrowed by the university from French to be displayed at the Grand Sculpture Court of the St. Louis World's Fair.

During the student protests in 1970 in reaction to the Cambodian campaign and the Kent State shootings, the statue came to represent the failures of the university's administration, which included the continued gentrification of the Morningside Heights neighborhood.

[19] On September 3, 2024, on the first day of classes after a semester of historic occupation of campus by pro-Palestinian protesters, the Alma Mater statue was doused with red paint.

The Columbia Daily Spectator described the statue as "characterized by a queenly dignity and repose", and stated that it "expresses the highest type of intellectual womanhood.

Every student will love her and her influence will be altogether one of sweet nobility... [Alma Mater] is distinguished by a pure and poignant serenity, by a monumental feeling penetrated with a sort of gentle sprightliness; for the expression which he puts into the modeling of the limbs can scarcely be characterized by a word of more sensitive application.

[24] More recently, The New York Times has dubbed Alma Mater the "grand old lady" of Columbia University, who "reigns in queenly splendor in front of Low Library.

"[25] The AIA Guide to New York City described it as "an evocative statue" where "the enthroned figure extends her hand in welcome as she looks up from the mighty tome of knowledge lying open in her lap.

From the top of the stairs, members of the select Columbia community could turn and look out over New York, secure in the belief that they were contributing to the rapid transformation of their city into a world center of intellectual and professional endeavor.

[9]The statue represents a personification of the traditional image of the university as an alma mater, or "nourishing mother", draped in an academic gown and seated on a throne.

She wears a laurel wreath on her head and holds in her right hand a scepter made of four sprays of wheat which are capped by a King's Crown, a traditional symbol of the university.