2. Our International Tradition

Born by royal charter as King's College two decades before the American Revolution, reborn as Columbia to celebrate newly won independence from England, our University stands more than ever before in the global spotlight as it enters the first century of the third millennium.

The little schoolhouse accommodating eight students and one teacher (President Samuel Johnson), then twenty-four students and a faculty of three (President Myles Cooper and two British colleagues), has evolved into one of the world's great independent centers of learning and research, with 21,000 students from 145 nations, and more than 2,600 teachers, a quarter of whom were born outside the United States.

Over the years, our graduates have brought Columbia's global tradition to important arenas of law and commerce, science and medicine, communications and the arts--and diplomacy, from America's first secretaries of state, Robert R. Livingston (1765, M.A. 1768, King's College) and John Jay (1764, King's College) to the current secretary of state, Madeleine Albright '68SIPA '76GSAS '95HON.

Our alumni, from Alexander Hamilton to Wellington Koo, helped build great nations. Bhimrao R. Ambedkar was the chief author of the constitution of India. Pivley Ka Lsak Seme founded the African National Congress. Franklin D. Roosevelt emerged from our Law School, ultimately to become a leader of the free world during perilous times of depression and war.

Two Columbians won the Nobel Peace Prize--Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, for negotiating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, and, a quarter-century later, Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler, who also served as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

These and many other accomplishments are not surprising. In classrooms, libraries, and research centers, Columbia's world vision has been passed from generation to generation. Within a year after World War II, which had propelled the United States from isolationism to high global responsibilities, Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the first of our University-wide regional institutes (the Russian Institute, predecessor to the Harriman Institute) opened their doors, anticipating by a dozen years a national commitment--the National Defense Education Act, which would provide federal funds for area studies centers.

Robert R. Livingston	John Jay
Wellington Koo	Nicholas Murray Butler
Pivley Ka Lask Seme	Madeleine Albright

International learning, central to our acclaimed undergraduate Core Curriculum as well as to SIPA, also pervades the dynamic curricula of our Law School and Business School; indeed, every school and college in the University is enriched by a strong global perspective.

Columbia's profoundly international character--exemplified by the renowned area studies programs, the stimulating presence of thousands of international students, and the global impact of the University's pioneering research--is strengthened even more by that venerable motto of good fortune: location, location, location.

Students and faculty daily interact with the world's premier international city, the crossroads of international finance and culture, the hub of global media and telecommunications, the nexus of intergovernmental deliberation and action, the gateway City of New York. Columbians actively participate in the international life of our city. And world leaders, visiting America's first port of call, come to our campus to lecture and learn.

As we welcome international students, scholars, and visiting dignitaries, we in turn send Columbia students abroad to dozens of distinguished centers of higher education, from Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, to Berlin, Kyoto, and Buenos Aires. At the same time, the mutually beneficial flow of faculty who teach and study abroad, and who come from abroad to Columbia, is one of our most precious growing assets. This constant interchange of students and faculty assures that Columbia is in no danger of becoming an insular institution, vision-impaired by national boundaries.

International learning and research are fundamental to our heritage, to our mission today, and to our planning for the future.