Park Place and Rockefeller Center
In July 1754, Samuel Johnson (1696-1772; not to be confused with Dr.
Johnson, the British lexicographer, 1709-1784) held the first classes in a new school house adjoining Trinity Church, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. There were eight students in the class. In
1767 King's College established the first American medical school to grant the MD
degree.The American Revolutionary War brought the
growth of the College to a halt, forcing a suspension of instruction in 1776 that lasted
for eight years. Among the earliest students and trustees of King's College were John
Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States; Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury; Gouverneur Morris, the author of the final draft of the United States Constitution; and Robert R. Livingston, a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence. In 1784, the college
reopened as Columbia College, reflecting the patriotic fervor which had inspired the nation's quest for independence.In 1849, the College moved from Park Place, near the present site of City Hall, to 49th Street and Madison Avenue, where it remained for the next fifty years. During the last
half of the nineteenth century, Columbia rapidly assumed the shape of a modern university. Columbia Law School was founded in 1858, and the country's first mining school, a precursor of
today's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, was
established in 1864. Barnard College for women became affiliated with
Columbia in 1889; the
Medical School came under the aegis of the University in 1891, followed by Teachers College in 1893.The development of graduate faculties in political science, philosophy, and pure science established Columbia as one of the
nation's earliest centers for graduate education.
Morningside Heights
In 1896, the trustees officially authorized the use of yet another new name, Columbia University, and today the institution is
officially known as "Columbia University in the City of New York." At the same time the campus was moved again from 49th Street
to a more spacious campus in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan. The
campus, considered to be among the nation's most beautiful and architecturally significant, was designed by the famous
architectural firm, McKim, Mead, and White.During his tenure, President Butler once remarked that Columbia needed to attract more students from out of town because the
school was being overrun by Jews. Of course, this is the man of whom it was written:It was Butler's predecessor as university president, Seth Low, who moved
Columbia out of the area that was to become Rockefeller Center to its present location in Morningside Heights.In 1902, New York newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer donated a
substantial sum to the University for the founding of a school to teach journalism. The result was the 1912 opening of the
Graduate School of Journalism-- the only journalism school in the Ivy
League. The school remains the nation's most prestigious, and is the administrator of the coveted Pulitzer Prize and the duPont-Columbia Award in broadcast journalism.Columbia Business School was added in the early
20th century. During the first half of the 20th Century Columbia and
Harvard were considered the best research universities in the country and had the
largest endowments.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, to name just a few of
the great minds of the Morningside campus. The University's graduates during this time were equally accomplished - for example,
two alumni of Columbia's Law School, Charles Evans Hughes
and Harlan Fiske Stone (who also held the position of Law
School dean), served successively as Chief Justices of the United States. In the '50s, Dwight Eisenhower served as Columbia's president before becoming the President of the United States.Research into the atom by faculty members 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
would become the Manhattan Project. To this day, Columbia
University maintains its reputation as a leading research institute in the areas of Physics and Engineering.In 1893 the Columbia University Press was founded in order to "promote the study of economic, historical, literary, scientific
and other subjects; and to promote and encourage the publication of literary works embodying original research in such subjects."
Among its most distinguished publications are
The Columbia Encyclopedia, first published in 1935, and
The Columbia
Lippincott Gazetteer of the World, first published in 1952.
Student riots
Students protested in 1968 over the issue of whether Columbia would build its gymnasium in neighboring Morningside Park; this was seen by the protestors to be an act of
aggression aimed at the black residents of neighboring Harlem. For several days, students took over administration buildings,
occupied classrooms, and attacked the Columbia ROTC detatchment. Order was eventually
restored when, with the assistance of NYPD, the university president snuck back into his
office through a secret tunnel. The episode is generally seen as marking the point where the student body's and administration's
values appeared to diverge most sharply. Columbia ended up scrapping the plans for the controversial gym and built a subterranean
"Physical Fitness Center" under the north end of campus instead; this is the facility in use today. The architectural plans drawn
up for the abandoned Morningside Park gym project were eventually used at Princeton University to build Dillon Gym.