Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature,[13] NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin[14] as a non-denominational all-male institution near City Hall based on a curriculum focused on a secular education.

[24] NYU is a global university system[25] with degree-granting portal campuses at NYU Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates and NYU Shanghai in China, and academic learning centers in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Washington, D.C.[26][27][28] Past and present faculty and alumni include 39 Nobel Laureates, 8 Turing Award winners, 5 Fields Medalists, 31 MacArthur Fellows, 26 Pulitzer Prize winners, 3 heads of state, 5 U.S. governors, 12 U.S. senators, and 58 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, declared his intention to establish "in this immense and fast-growing city ... a system of rational and practical education fitting and graciously opened to all.

These New Yorkers believed the city needed a university designed for young men who would be admitted based upon merit rather than birthright or social class.

In the 1980s, under the leadership of President John Brademas,[38] NYU launched a billion-dollar campaign that was led by Naomi B. Levine[39] and was spent almost entirely on updating facilities.

President Sexton would step down at the end of his term in 2016, in the wake of a vote of no confidence in March 2013,[47] closely followed by controversy over having received a vacation home loan from NYU.

In the 1930s, the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and the realists Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton had studios around Washington Square.

[56] Started in 2001, this campaign was the university's largest in its history, in which they planned to "raise $1 million per day for scholarships and financial aid, faculty building, new academic initiatives, and enhancing NYU's physical facilities.

Notably, the Skirball Center has hosted important speeches on foreign policy by John Kerry[citation needed] and Al Gore.

Bobst Library offers one Multidisciplinary Reference Center, a Research Commons, 28 miles (45 km) of open-stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study.

[85] The story was reported by Washington Square News before becoming an overnight national sensation, which helped Stanzak receive financial assistance from NYU until graduation.

Two pieces called Alligator and Visionary are part of the Commons' permanent public art collection by the well-known sculptor Tom Otterness.

As of 2012[update], NYU operates 12 academic sites in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America, including undergraduate academic-year and summer study away programs in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Washington, D.C.[104] One of the most noteworthy sites is the 57-acre (230,000 m2) campus of NYU Florence, located at Villa LaPietra in Italy.

[121] Anticipated enrollment figures were not achieved, financial irregularities were alleged, and President Pari Sara Shirazi was dismissed from her post by NYU in November 2011.

[123] In a letter to the Tisch Asia community dated November 8, 2012, Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell announced that the campus would close after 2014 with recruitment and admission of new students suspended with immediate effect.

In addition, NYU was named the National Program of the Year for UltraViolet Live, the annual inter-hall competition that raises funds for Relay For Life.

In May 2008, the NYU Sustainability Task Force awarded $150,000 in grants to 23 projects that would focus research and efforts toward energy, food, landscape, outreach, procurement, transportation and waste.

The expansion started in earnest in 2017 with the groundbreaking of 181 Mercer Street, a new multi-purpose building that will act as the flagship athletic facility for NYU, while also accompanying a 350-bed Residence Hall, 58 general purpose classrooms and a 350-seat theater.

[140] The roughly 800,000-square-foot (74,000 m2), $1.1 billion building is directly adjacent to the south eastern corner of the Washington Square campus and represents a significant focus on the university owned super blocks.

In order to meet the plans outlined goals on time, the university would have to significantly increase spending, fundraising and construction over the next decade.

The SGA has been involved in controversial debates on campus, including a campus-wide ban on the sale of The Coca-Cola Company's products in 2005 to protest its refusal to investigate apparent human rights violations at their Colombian bottling plant[204][205] and the Graduate Student Organizing Committee unionization in 2001 and subsequent strike in 2005.

[213] The Plague was founded in 1978[214] by Howard Ostrowsky along with Amy Burns, John Rawlins, Joe Pinto and Dan Fiorella,[215] and is currently published once per semester.

At the Bronx University Heights Campus, seniors used to grab unsuspecting freshmen, take them to a horse-watering trough, and then dunk them head-first into what was known colloquially as "the Fountain of Knowledge".

[247] NYU's sports teams include baseball, men's and women's varsity basketball, cross country, fencing, golf, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and wrestling.

[252] NYU students also compete in club and intramural sports, including badminton, baseball, basketball, crew, cycling, equestrianism, ice hockey, lacrosse, martial arts, rugby, softball, squash, tennis, triathlon, and ultimate.

The university is also associated with a great number of important inventions and discoveries, such as cardiac defibrillator and artificial cardiac pacemaker (Barouh Berkovits), closed-chest cardiac defibrillator (William B. Kouwenhoven), laser (Gordon Gould), atom bomb (Frederick Reines), polio vaccine (Albert Sabin), RFID (Mario Cardullo), telephone handset (Robert G. Brown), wireless microphone (Hung-Chang Lin), first digital image scanner (Russell A. Kirsch), television (Benjamin Adler), light beer (Joseph Owades), non-stick cookware (John Gilbert),[264] black hole thermodynamics (Jacob Bekenstein), polymer science (Herman Francis Mark), microwave (Ernst Weber), X-ray crystallography (Paul Peter Ewald), barcode (Jerome Swartz), structure of the DNA (Francis Crick), tau lepton (Martin Lewis Perl), processes for creating food coloring, decaffeination and sugar substitute (Torunn Atteraas Garin), processes for the mass production of penicillin (Jasper H. Kane), X-ray generator and rotational radiation therapy (John G. Trump), nuclear reactor and hydrogen bomb (John Archibald Wheeler), and contact lenses (Norman Gaylord), among many others.

The first patents for touch screen cash machine (Richard J. Orford),[265][266] and zoom lens (Leonard Bergstein),[267] were also obtained by NYU alumni.

Some of the most prolific inventors in American history are NYU alumni, for example Jerome H. Lemelson whose 605 patents involved the cordless telephone, fax machine, videocassette recorder and camcorder, among others; Samuel Ruben whose inventions include electric battery; James Wood who invented cable-lift elevator, fabricated the steel cables for the Brooklyn Bridge and contributed to the development of lockmaking, submarine, electric generator, electric motor, transformer and the design of the refrigerator; and Albert Macovski whose innovations include the single-tube color camera and real-time phased array imaging for ultrasound.

[268] Before and during World War II, NYU's Tandon School of Engineering worked on problems whose solution led to the development of radar, and later broke ground in electromagnetic theory, electronics in general, and solved re-entry problems of the crewed space capsules,[269] as well as helped develop and design the NASDAQ Automated Quote System and trading floors.

Many of the world's most renowned companies, such as IBM (Charles Ranlett Flint), Twitter (Jack Dorsey), Bloomberg L.P. (Charles Zegar), Jacobs Engineering Group (Joseph J. Jacobs), Hudson Group (Robert B. Cohen), MTV (Tom Freston), Barnes & Noble (Leonard Riggio), Northrop Grumman (William T. Schwendler), Automatic Data Processing (Henry Taub), Duracell (Samuel Ruben), Bugle Boy (William C. W. Mow), Virgin Mobile USA (Dan Schulman), among many others, were founded or co-founded by NYU alumni.