COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY: 1754-1954

TO most New Yorkers, the advertisement that appeared in the Gazette one day in 1754 was apparently not very exciting. The ad's announcement was that a new College would be opened some time in July, but when the time came for registration, only eight young men signed up. In those days, the institution that was to become Columbia, fourth largest (25,000 students) and fourth richest ($113,589,957.37 in capital endowment) of U.S. universities, had not a single building to call its own. About the only thing it did have was a conviction: that "New York is the Center of English America, and the Proper Place for a Colledge."

This year, as Columbia celebrated its 200th anniversary, it could summon scholars from all over the world to attend its year-long series of conferences and convocations. But in spite of its international prestige, it has never lost its early sense that the city is its "proper place," nor has it forgotten that its special character is largely a matter of location. It is an Ivy Leaguer minus the ivy, an ivory tower without ivory, a polyglot campus of brick and stone that still draws two-thirds of its undergraduates from a radius of less than 100 miles. Its bicentennial theme--"Man's right to knowledge and the free use thereof--is wide as the world; but the university's own official title is still proudly local--Columbia University in the City of New York.

Mortifying & Humiliating. In the course of two centuries, the city itself has not always returned the compliment of such enthusiasm. It was true that George Washington let his stepson go there, and that Alexander Hamilton was an alumnus. But by 1814 the trustees were branding Columbia as "a spectacle, mortifying to its friends, humiliating to the city." In the 18503, Trustee Samuel Ruggles ruefully pointed out that of two universities that George III chartered, Goettingen had 89 professors and 1,545 students, while Columbia still languished with six professors and 140 students.

It was not until 1865, when bearded President Frederick A. P. Barnard took over, ear trumpet and all, that Columbia began to achieve something like its present stature. The only trouble was that though Dr. Barnard was long on ideas, he was perpetually short of money. An educational statesman, he advocated honors courses, modern languages, the admission of women ("conducive to good order"), uniform entrance requirements for U.S. colleges, and teacher training. He looked forward to the day when Columbia would be a great university, complete with such modern additions as schools of engineering, architecture and commerce. Nevertheless, Columbia stayed put in its former deaf & dumb asylum on East 49th Street. It remained for the Midas touch of millionaire President Seth Low and his autocratic successor Nicholas Murray Butler to put Barnard's ideas into practice on Morningside Heights.

Princes & Pontiffs. The Butler reign (1902-45) lasted for more than 40 years, and for Columbia it was an age of vast expansion. "It is literally true," Butler once wrote, "that beginning with Gladstone, Prince Bismarck, Cardinal Newman and Pope Leo XIII, it has been my happy fortune to meet, to talk with, and often to know in warm friendship almost every man of light and learning during the past half-century." Along with premiers, princes and pontiffs, Butler also went in for bankers. He had such a way with men of means, in fact, that Muckraker Upton Sinclair finally dubbed Columbia "the University of the House of Morgan."

Today, under able President Grayson Kirk (who succeeded President Eisenhower), Columbia carries on the pursuit of learning on a campus that resembles an oasis in a traffic jam. But it is part of the university's nature that it regards the screeching city not as a distraction but as a stimulus. Students are inclined to treat the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a sort of Columbia annex. There are exchange arrangements with both Union and Jewish Theological Seminaries. Broadway actors, corporation lawyers, Manhattan litterateurs have all given courses, and Columbia professors themselves are as much a part of town as gown.

Books & Presidents. At the heart of Columbia is Columbia College--one of the smallest (2,255 students) but still one of the most influential in the Ivy League. It was Columbia that first revolutionized its freshman and sophomore years by introducing what has subsequently become known as General Education, and out of the late John Erskine's famed humanities course came the inspiration for the entire Great Books movement.

Meanwhile, the university's professional schools and affiliated institutions (including the great $50 million Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center) have exercised an influence of their own. Columbia started the first U.S. School of Mines (1864), awarded the first M.D. in the North American colonies (1770), established the first school of library training, the first professorship of agriculture, the first graduate school of social work. It has turned out three Chief Justices of the U.S. (John Jay, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan F. Stone), enrolled in its law school the two Presidents Roosevelt ("You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual," huffed Butler after F.D.R. quit school for politics, "until you come back to Columbia and pass your law exams"). For better or worse, Columbia can also claim to have started the most powerful U.S. teachers' college--just across 120th Street, which TC's liberal-arts critics call "the widest street in the world."

Turbans & Slacks. Like New York City, Columbia is a melting pot. It is a land of the turban, the fez and the beret, as well as a casual assortment of G.I. shirts, flannel slacks and pin stripes. It bristles with institutes and centers for Russian, Middle East and East Asian studies, has a Maison Franc,aise, a Casa Italiana, a Deutsches Haus and a Casa Hispanica. Through the portals of Columbia, as through the Port of New York, passes the largest foreign enrollment in the U.S.

If the university has to a large extent assumed the character of the city, the process has also worked in reverse. Among its alumni are 3,000 New York City lawyers, 1,500 physicians, and 1,000 of the city's dentists. Its college and graduate schools have turned out ten New York governors (among them: Thomas E. Dewey, LL.B. '25), and 14 New York City mayors. Simon and Shuster, Harcourt and Brace, and Alfred Knopf all went there; so did Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein II. In the newspaper field, Columbia boasts a variety of opinion-makers, from the Times's Arthur Hays Sulzberger to the New York Post's Editor James Wechsler to Hearst Columnist George Sokolsky.

The present faculty, much more than a distinguished cluster of scholars, includes two Nobel Prizewinners (Physicists I. I. Rabi and Hideki Yukawa) and three winners of Pulitzer Prizes (Composer Douglas Moore, Historian Allan Nevins, Poet Mark Van Doren). It is also a reservoir of talent that serves the whole metropolis. Such men as Philosopher Irwin Edman, Critic Lionel Trilling and Classicist Gilbert Highet are full-fledged city celebrities. Economist Carl Shoup wrestles with city finances; Historian Harry Carman serves on the Board of Higher Education, and a slew of geologists and planners struggle with the city's water and traffic.

But of all Columbia's contributions to its home town, none is more impressive than the School of General Studies, where anyone from taxi driver to tycoon can get a complete liberal-arts education pretty much on his own schedule. Since 1947 some 1,500 students have won their B.A.s there, and of these, 68% have gone on to graduate work. With that school, 200-year-old Columbia has rounded out the promise that President Barnard made nearly a century ago--that "no seeker after knowledge shall fail to find here what he requires, and . . . that no sincere and earnest seeker after knowledge, of whatever age, sex, race or previous condition, shall be denied the privilege of coming here."

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