THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
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A private research institution in New York City, Columbia University is also referred to as Columbia and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York. Columbia University is the oldest higher education school in New York and the fifth-oldest in the nation. It was founded in 1754 as King’s College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan. It belongs to the Ivy League and is one of nine colonial colleges that were established before the Declaration of Independence. One of the best universities in the world is Columbia.
George II of Great Britain issued a royal charter that founded Columbia. Following the American Revolution, it was renamed Columbia College, and in 1787 it was put under the control of a private board of trustees led by former pupils Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. The campus was relocated to Morningside Heights in 1896, and the name was changed to Columbia University. The laser and maser, the first nuclear pile, the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas, the first evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift, the first evidence for the brain-computer interface, the laser and maser, nuclear magnetic resonance, the first nuclear reaction, and much of the initial planning and research for the Manhattan Project during World War II were all accomplished by Columbia scientists and scholars.
Twenty schools make up Columbia, including 16 graduate schools and four undergraduate ones. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and accelerator labs with Big Tech companies like Amazon and IBM are a few examples of the university’s research initiatives In the United States, Columbia University was the first institution to award the MD degree and is a founding member of the Association of American Universities The Pulitzer Prize is also annually administered by the university. The third-largest private research library in the United States is Columbia University Library, which has more than 15 million books By 2022, the university will have one of the greatest endowments of any academic institution, at $13.3 billion. Seven Founding Fathers of the United States, four U.S. presidents, 33 foreign heads of state, two secretaries-general of the United Nations, ten justices of the United States Supreme Court, one of whom is currently sitting, 101 Nobel laureates, 125 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 53 living billionaires, 22 Olympic medalists, 33 Academy Award winners, and 125 Pulitzer Prize winners are among its alumni, faculty, and staff as of December 2021.
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The Colonial era
The first president of Columbia, Samuel Johnson The idea of establishing a college in the Province of New York was discussed as early as 1704, when Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Church of England’s missionary organization, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, convincing it that New York City was the perfect place to do so However, the City of New York didn’t give college formation much thought until the College of New Jersey (later called Princeton) was established in New Jersey, across the Hudson River The general assembly of New York approved a law in 1746 to raise money for the establishment of a fresh college A commission of ten New Yorkers, seven of whom belonged to the Church of England, was appointed by the assembly in 1751 to allocate lottery proceeds toward the establishment of a college.
The college’s first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson, oversaw the inaugural session of classes in July 1754. The college’s initial course had only eight pupils, and Dr. Johnson was its sole instructor. A brand-new schoolhouse next to Trinity Church, which is now lower Broadway in Manhattan, served as the location for instruction. The college was formally established on October 31, 1754, as King’s College by royal charter of George II, making it the fifth-oldest college in the country and the oldest in the State of New York.
Myles Cooper, an ardent Tory and graduate of The Queen’s College, Oxford, succeeded Dr. Johnson as president in 1763. His main rival in academic debates during the tense political context of the American Revolution was Alexander Hamilton, a student from the class of 1777. Samuel Clossy, an Irish anatomist, was named professor of natural philosophy in October 1765 and then, in 1767, the college’s first professor of anatomy with the advent of the Continental Army in 1776, the American Revolutionary War broke out, having disastrous effects on King’s College, which had to cease classes for eight years. The suspension persisted until British forces left New York City during their military occupation in 1783 American and British forces plundered the college’s library and commandeered its lone building for use as a military hospital.
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Century eighteen
1890 King’s College Hall the institution went to the State of New York after the Revolution to regain its vigor, vowing to make whatever adjustments to the school’s charter that the state may request In order to help the college, the legislature passed “an Act for granting certain privileges to the College previously called King’s College” on May 1, 1784. In an effort to show its support for the new Republic, the legislature mandated that “the College within the City of New York heretofore called King’s College be forever hereafter called and known by the name of Columbia College a reference to Columbia, a substitute name. The Act established a board of regents to oversee the revival of King’s College.
In February 1787, the Regents finally recognized that the college’s constitution needed to be revised. They convened a committee under the leadership of John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. A new charter for the college was enacted in April of the same year, giving a separate board of 24 trustees the authority.
William Samuel Johnson, the doctor’s son, was chosen by a unanimous vote to lead Columbia College on May 21, 1787. Johnson had previously served as a university official and had taken part in the First Continental Congress and had been selected as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. A revived Columbia flourished for a while in the 1790s under the leadership of Federalists like Hamilton and Jay, with New York City serving as both the national and state capitals and the nation being governed by succeeding Federalist administrations. President George Washington and Vice President John Adams both attended the college’s graduation ceremony on May 6, 1789, as a mark of respect for the numerous former students who had participated in the American Revolution.
Student protests at Columbia University are another example. The Madison Avenue campus’s Gothic Revival library and law school structures Around 1900, Low Memorial Library University of The college and The College of Physicians and Surgeons, a brand-new institution established by the Regents of New York, reached an agreement in November 1813 to combine their medical programs to form Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons For the bulk of the 19th century, the college’s enrollment, organization, and academics were stagnant, and several of its presidents did little to alter this situation. The college relocated from the King’s College campus in Park Place to a campus that was predominantly Gothic Revival on 49th Street and Madison Avenue in 18 University president Seth Low relocated the college from 49th Street to its current location in 1896, a larger campus in the rapidly-growing Morningside Heights neighborhood Nicholas Murray Butler, Low’s successor, led Columbia for more than 40 years and helped establish the “multiversity” model that other universities would use. Columbia quickly rose to become the nation’s leading research institution In order to train home economists and manual art teachers for the underprivileged children, Butler built Teachers College with benefactor Grace Hoadley Dodge before becoming the president of Columbia University The graduate school of education for the institution is currently linked with Teachers College.
In the 1940s, after the first nuclear pile was built to launch what would become the Manhattan Project, research into the atom by faculty members John R. Dunning, I. I. Rabi, Enrico Fermi, and Polykarp Kusch put Columbia’s physics department in the spotlight on a global scale In an effort to reduce the number of Jewish candidates to Columbia College, Seth Low Junior College was founded by Columbia University in 1928. Due to the negative consequences of the Great Depression, the college was forced to close in 1936. Its students were then taught at Morningside Heights, even though they didn’t belong to any one college but rather to the university as a whole.
University Extension was a night school that offered night classes to anyone who was interested in attending for a charge. In response to the GIs’ return from World War II, the program was reformed into an undergraduate college and given the name School of General Studies in 1947 The School of General Studies was once more reorganized as a full-fledged liberal arts college in 1995 and was fully integrated into Columbia’s traditional undergraduate curriculum for non-traditional students (those who have taken an academic break of one year or longer or are pursuing dual degrees) In the same year, University Extension was replaced by the Division of Special Programs, which was later renamed the School of Continuing Education and is currently the School of Professional Studies. Although the School Initially exclusively provides non-degree programs for lifelong learners and high school students, the School of Professional Studies currently provides degree programs in a wide variety of professional and interdisciplinary subjects.
The School of International and Public Affairs was established in 1946 using the resources of the colleges of political science, economics, and history in response to the subject of international relations being a significant scholarly emphasis of the university following World War II. In 1954, Columbia University celebrated its 200th-anniversary Large-scale student activism was prevalent at Columbia during the 1960s, and it peaked in the spring of 1968 when hundreds of students took over university buildings. Grayson Kirk, the president of Columbia University, was compelled to resign as a result of the incident, and the University Senate was established. Although many university schools had long since welcomed women, Columbia College only did so in the fall of 1983, following a decade of fruitless merger talks with Barnard College, the university’s only college for women. All Barnard graduates get diplomas that have been signed by the presidents of Columbia University and Barnard College. Barnard College and Columbia University are still linked with one another.
The institution underwent considerable academic, structural, and administrative changes as it evolved into a significant research university in the late 20th century. The university was divided into independent faculties that had departments for Political Science, Philosophy, and Pure Science for the majority of the 19th century. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was created in 1979 from the union of three faculties In order to achieve academic integration and centralized governance for these schools, the faculties of Columbia College, the School of General Studies, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the School of the Arts, and the School of Professional Studies were merged into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1991. The School of International and Public Affairs, once a part of the Faculty, separated from the Faculty in 2010.
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Early Morning Heights
On the Morningside Heights campus that Seth Low envisioned for a university campus where all disciplines might be taught at one spot in the late 19th century, the majority of Columbia’s graduate and undergraduate programs are held. The architects McKim, Mead & White planned the campus using Beaux-Arts design ideas. The main campus of Columbia University is located in Morningside Heights, New York City, and spans more than six city blocks, or 32 acres (13 ha). This area is home to a variety of academic institutions. In Morningside Heights, the university owns more than 7,800 apartments that are home to staff, graduate students, and teachers. There are around twenty undergraduate residence halls on campus or in Morningside Heights, either newly constructed or renovated facilities. The oldest tunnels at Columbia University are part of a vast network that dates back more than a century.
The chief executive officer of Columbia University is the president, who is chosen by the trustees with input from the executive committee of the University Senate and who works at the trustees’ pleasure. The provost, senior executive vice president, executive vice president for health and biomedical sciences, several other vice presidents, general counsel, university secretary, and deans of the faculties support the president in leading the university. All of these individuals are appointed by the trustees on the nomination of the president and serve at their discretion On June 1st, 2002 Lee C. Bollinger was named the 19th president of Columbia University. He was instrumental in directing the University of Michigan throughout his tenure as president.