Columbia University was first founded as King’s College by a royal charter of England’s King George II in 1754. In that year, eight young men paid the princely sum of 25 shillings per semester to attend classes in the one-room schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, where the mission was no less than to “enlarge the Mind, improve the Understanding, polish the whole Man, and qualify them to support the brightest Characters in all the elevated stations in life . . . .” These lofty pursuits were interrupted in 1776, a year after early student radical Alexander Hamilton held off revolutionaries at the college gates. The school reopened in 1784 and was grandly renamed Columbia, then the term for the entire North American continent, perhaps after a popular ditty of the time: Columbia! Columbia! to Glory Arise, The Queen of the World, and the Child of the Skies.

Columbia’s commitment to graduate education dates back to 1880, when the Trustees established the nation’s first Ph.D. program in political science under the auspices of the newly created Graduate Faculty of Political Science. The Faculties of Philosophy and Pure Science were added in 1890 and 1892, respectively. The first Ph.D. degree was awarded in 1882 to Charles Wells Marsh for a dissertation on “Geology of Water Supplies and Water Analysis.” In 1886, Winifred H. Edgerton became the first woman to receive a Columbia Ph.D. degree, after acceptance of her dissertation, “Multiple Integers,” in mathematics. George Edward Haynes became the first African-American to receive a Columbia Ph.D. degree in 1912, after acceptance of his dissertation in social economy, “The Negro at Work in New York City.” In 1884, a young philosopher completed a dissertation on “A Study in the History of Logical Doctrine.” The author of that dissertation, Nicholas Murray Butler, went on to serve as President of Columbia University from 1902 to 1945. Under his leadership, Columbia emerged as a model research university—a company of scholars, thinkers, and investigators working with apprentice graduate students to expand the frontiers of knowledge. Butler Library is named after him.

The preeminence of Ph.D. studies at Columbia today is reflected in the size and diversity of the Graduate School—one of the largest private graduate schools in the country. A faculty of more than 800 instructs some 3,800 students. Thirty-one Ph.D. programs are offered in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and an additional 30 interdepartmental and interschool Ph.D. programs link the Graduate School with the University’s schools in architecture, business, engineering, journalism, law, physicians and surgeons, public health, social work, and with Teachers College.