In 1885, Butler studied in Paris and Berlin and became a lifelong friend of future Secretary of State Elihu Root.

In 1919, Butler amended the admissions process to Columbia in order to limit the number of Jewish students (it became the first American institution of higher learning to establish an anti-Jewish quota).

A faculty apartment building on 119th Street and Morningside Drive was also renamed in Butler's honor, as was a major prize in philosophy.

A polemical attack on Butler's time at Columbia University appeared in The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education, by Upton Sinclair.

Butler was a delegate to each Republican National Convention from 1888 to 1936; when Vice President James S. Sherman died six days before the 1912 United States presidential election, Butler was designated to receive the electoral votes that Sherman would have received: the Republican ticket won only 8 electoral votes from Utah and Vermont, finishing third behind the Democrats and the Progressives.

[18] In June 1936, Butler traveled to the Carnegie Endowment Peace Conference in London where, at the meeting, fundamental problems of money and finance were explored.

[19] According to historian Stephen H. Norwood, Butler failed to "grasp the nature and implications of Nazism... influenced both by his antisemitism, privately expressed, and his economic conservatism and hostility to trade unionism.

He compared the Italian Fascist leader to Oliver Cromwell[21] and, in the 1920s, he noted "the stupendous improvement which Fascism has brought".

In December 1916, Butler, Roosevelt and other philanthropists, including Scottish-born industrialist John C. Moffat, William Astor Chanler, Joseph Choate, Clarence Mackay, George von Lengerke Meyer, and John Grier Hibben, purchased the Château de Chavaniac, birthplace of the Marquis de Lafayette in Auvergne, to serve as a headquarters for the French Heroes Lafayette Memorial Fund,[24][25] which was managed by Chanler's ex-wife, Beatrice Ashley Chanler.

His wife died in 1903 and he married again in 1907 to Kate La Montagne, granddaughter of New York property developer Thomas E.

The first letters of each line of the resulting acrostic spelled out the message: "Nicholas Murray Butler is a horses [sic] ass".

[35] Randolph Bourne lampooned Butler as "Alexander Macintosh Butcher" in "One of our Conquerors", a 1915 essay he published in The New Republic.

In The American Mercury, the critic Dorothy Dunbar Bromley referred to Butler's pronouncements as "those interminable miasmas of guff".