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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 Alexander Hamilton, an early student radical, 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 graduate 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. Columbia is distinguished among Ivy League universities for its breadth and number of M.A. programs. Responding early to increasing demand, departments such as Anthropology and English and Comparative Literature introduced part-time M.A. programs, designed for students who did not wish to pursue the Ph.D., in the late 1970’s. They were followed shortly by full-time departmental programs introduced in the early 1980’s (such as Statistics in 1983). Columbia first offered interdisciplinary, cross-departmental Liberal Studies Master of Arts programs in 1987 (American Studies, East Asian Studies, Islamic Studies, and Medieval Studies), followed by Jewish Studies (1988), South Asian Studies (1991), Modern European Studies (1992) and Human Rights Studies (1998). Introduced through the School of General Studies, the Liberal Studies programs moved to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1995. During the 1990’s, interdisciplinary M.A. degrees not in the LSMA program were introduced in fields as diverse as Earth and Environmental Science Journalism (1996), Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies (1998), Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (1998), and Philosophical Foundations of Physics (1999). Columbia continues to increase its interdisciplinary offerings in M.A. programs: the latest is Climate and Society (2004).
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