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By the eighteenth century the mighty Province of New-York could boast of bustling commerce, pastoral villages and-believe it or not-a delightful climate, but as late as the 1740's there were in the whole of the populace but 15 college-educated souls. King George II, in response to citizens' petitions, chartered King's College in 1754. Eight young men paid the princely sum of 25 shillings-the cost of 100 gallons of the finest Madeira-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 gate while College president Myles Cooper slipped out the back in his nightshirt and hightailed it home to England. 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.
By 1857 the school had outgrown its downtown quarters and moved up to Madison Avenue and 49th Street, an area now overrun by advertising executives and Radio City Rockettes. During its stay in midtown, Columbia began to take on the shape of a modern university. The School of Law opened in 1858, the College of Physicians and Surgeons a year later, the Engineering School in 1864 and-of special interest-the three branches of what would later become the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences: the Graduate Faculties of Political Science (1880), of Philosophy (1890), and of Pure Science (1892). From the start, the Graduate School-or "the Jewel in Columbia's Crown" as it was informally called-was committed to scholarship in the liberal arts and sciences, the heart of any great university. The doors were opened to women at a time when study in law, medicine, engineering, and even library science was denied. Our first Ph.D. was awarded to Charles Wells Marsh in 1882 for his study: "Geology of Water Supplies and Water Analysis". In 1886, upon acceptance of her dissertation, "Multiple Integers," Winifred H. Edgerton became the first woman to receive a Columbia Ph.D. and in 1912 George Edmund Haynes became the first African-American Columbia Ph.D. for his research into "The Negro at Work in New York City".
The late 19th century brought traffic, congestion, and all manner of urban temptations to Madison Avenue and the trustees set out to find a location more congenial to the life of the mind. One clear afternoon in the autumn of 1891 a group of them journeyed up the Boulevard (later renamed Broadway) to the sylvan former grounds of the Bloomingdale Lunatic Asylum in Morningside Heights. A guidebook of the day gushed that "it occupies a most beautiful and commanding site...the central building is always open to visitors and the view from the top of it, being the most extensive and beautiful of any in the vicinity of the city, is well worthy of attention." The Columbia fathers were suitably impressed and signed on immediately, contracting with the superstar architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White to design an Urban Academic Acropolis, a Colossus on the Hudson. The University was in its new home by 1897 and has remained on the Heights ever since. The campus attracts tourists and filmmakers alike and is beloved by millions of movie fans as the place where the Ghostbusters joined forces against slime and Woody Allen pondered the relationship between Friedrich Nietszche and the Ice Capades.
Once at Columbia, students are instantly aware that they may be in the Ivy League but they're not in an Ivory Tower. Outside the open gates of College Walk stretches a city of mind-boggling wealth and heart-breaking poverty, frustrating challenges and outlandish rewards, hustle, bustle, hurly, burly, sturm, drang, shadow, substance- the eternally intoxicating, enduringly alluring, most exasperating and exhilarating of all college towns-the incomparable City of New York. Much too complicated and daunting to take on as a whole, New York is in fact a collection of neighborhoods, each with its own charms and flavor. The Columbia student can hop on a bus or a subway or his or her own two feet and in no time can be scarfing down schnitzel in Yorkville or duck webs in Chinatown, can be considering the mummies at the Met or Mondrian at MOMA, can be looking punk in Tribeca or retro in Soho, can be enjoying a retrospective on Betty Boop or Bullwinkle on the East Side or buying bagels at a bodega on the West, can be cheering on the Mets, the Jets, or the Nets in due season, can be appreciating the natural settings of the Cloisters or the Palisades, or can be simply strolling the relatively quiet streets of Morningside Heights on his or her way back from the grocery or Grant's Tomb. We never forget that "in the City of New York" is not just our address, but our last name. The University and the City are each in debt to the other's greatness and our students benefit from both and contribute to an even more brilliant future. Columbia has nurtured Enrico Fermi and I.I. Rabi, Franz Boas and John Dewey, Margaret Mead and Margaret Bourke-White, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Art Garfunkel and Pat Boone, Brian de Palma and Jim Jarmusch, Donna Shalala and Sha-Na-Na, Isaac Asimov and Anne Tyler, Meyer Schapiro and Jacques Barzun, George Segal and Georgia O'Keeffe, Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, Madeleine Albright and Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Brent Scowcroft, and Bessie Delaney and Sadie Delaney and Brian Dennehy and Paul Auster and Herman Wouk and Telly Savalas and Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein and Teddy Roosevelt and Lou Gehrig and 60 Nobel Laureates.
And the best is yet to come.
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