History of Columbia University

[1] Although Dutch New Amsterdam and the entire island of Manhattan had officially been ceded to the Kingdom of Great Britain in February 1674 with the Treaty of Westminster, no serious discussions as to the founding of a university in the renamed Province of New York began until the early eighteenth-century.

This delay is often attributed to the multitude of languages and religions practiced in the province, which made the founding of a seat of learning difficult because Colleges during the colonial period were regarded as a religious, no less a scientific and literary institution.

[4] In 1686[5] Governor of New York Thomas Dongan, 2nd Earl of Limerick unsuccessfully petitioned James II of England for a grant of the Duke's, known as King's Farm, to maintain his Jesuit College, which eventually failed.

[9] In 1746 an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise a sum of £2,250 by public lottery for the foundation of a new college, despite the fact that the University had neither a founding denomination nor a location for its first campus.

In 1751, the assembly appointed a commission of ten New York residents, seven of whom were Church of England members, to direct the funds accrued by the state lottery towards the foundation of a college.

[1] Controversy surrounded the founding of the new college in New York, as it was a thoroughly Church of England institution dominated by the influence of Crown officials in its governing body, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Secretary of State for the Colonies.

In the political controversies which preceded the American Revolution, his chief opponent in discussions at the College was an undergraduate of the class of 1777, Alexander Hamilton.

On one occasion, a mob came to the College, bent on doing violence to the president, but Hamilton held their attention with a speech, giving Cooper enough time to escape.

"[22] On May 5, 1784, the Regents held their first meeting, instructing Treasurer Brockholst Livingston and Secretary Robert Harpur (who was Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at King's) to recover the books, records and any other assets that had been dispersed during the war, and appointing a committee to supervise the repairs of the college building.

In addition, the Regents moved quickly to rebuild Columbia's faculty, appointing William Cochran instructor of Greek and Latin.

When James Duane, the Mayor of New York and a member of the Regents, heard that the younger Clinton was leaving the state for his education, he pleaded with Cochran to offer him admission to the reconstituted Columbia.

[22] During the period under the Regents, many efforts were made to put the University on respectable footing, resolving to organize the college into the four faculties of Arts, Divinity, Medicine, and Law.

The staff of the entire university - which included numerous aforementioned professors, a president, a secretary, and a librarian – operated under the yearly budget of £1,200.

[23] During this period no president was able to be appointed due to the college's inadequate funds, which rendered it unable to offer a salary as would induce a suitable person to accept the office.

The Regents finally became aware of the college's defective constitution in February 1787 and appointed a revision committee, which was headed by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton.

[32] Because the school had no athletic program, student life during this period was mainly focused around literary groups such as the Philolexian Society, which was founded in 1802.

During the 1820s, the College renovated its campus and continued to seek grants from the state while it slowly expanded the scope of its academic catalog, adding Italian courses in 1825.

[39] By July, 1854 the Christian Examiner of Boston, in an article entitled "The Recent Difficulties at Columbia College", noted that the school was "good in classics" yet "weak in sciences", and had "very few distinguished graduates".

[40] When Charles King became Columbia's president in November 1849, the College was in large amounts of debt, having exceeded their annual expenditure by about $2200 for the past fifteen years.

[41] By this time, the College's investments in New York real estate, particularly the Botanical Garden, became a primary source of steady income for the school, mainly owing to the city's rapidly increasing population.

[42] In 1857, the College moved from Park Place to a primarily Gothic Revival campus on 49th Street and Madison Avenue, at the former site of the New York Institute for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, where it remained for the next fifty years.

[43] Most unfortunately, "the ends of rows of coffins filled with the bones of the unknown dead, are still to be seen protruding from the bank of earth left by the cutting through of the 4th Avenue"[44] along the east side of campus.

[49] 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.

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).

In 1902, New York newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer donated a substantial sum to the University for the founding of a school to teach journalism.

In 1947, the program was reorganized as an undergraduate college and designated the School of General Studies in response to the return of GIs after World War II.

[56] In 1995, the School of General Studies was again reorganized as a full-fledged liberal arts college for non-traditional students (those who have had an academic break of one year or more) and was fully integrated into Columbia's traditional undergraduate curriculum.

[59] 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.

[60][61][62] 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 became the Manhattan Project.

The School introduced an MPA in Environmental Science and Policy in 2001 and, in 2004, SIPA inaugurated its first doctoral program — the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Sustainable Development.