History
Columbia University is the oldest institution of higher education in the State of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. The University was originally established under a royal charter from George II in 1754 as King’s College and started with a class of eight students in a schoolhouse next to Trinity Church in lower Manhattan. Among the early students were several people who played prominent roles in the founding of the United States, including Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Robert Livingston, and Gouverneur Morris.
The American Revolution temporarily suspended instruction in 1776, with the Continental and British armies using its buildings in turn. The College was reopened in 1784 as Columbia College and in 1787, a self-perpetuating Board of Trustees was created under a charter that underwent a series of revisions, the last of which occurred in 1810. The University operates today under that amended charter. During its first century, Columbia remained a small undergraduate college with limited enrollments and a fixed curriculum that emphasized Greek and Latin. Over the next half century, Columbia evolved into a research university. The University first offered instruction leading to the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the 1870s.
The University’s total enrollment grew from less than 100 in 1850 to more than 12,000 by 1914, and the faculty expanded from 15 to over 900. In 1896 the Trustees formally designated Columbia a university, and in 1912 the name was legally changed to “The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York” by order of the Supreme Court of New York State.
In 1857 the campus was moved to 49th Street and Madison Avenue. As it grew in size and complexity, it moved in 1897 to Morningside Heights on a campus designed by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White. The College of Physicians and Surgeons which was originally located in lower Manhattan moved to facilities near Union Square in the 1850s and then to two different locations in mid-Manhattan. In 1928 it settled in its current location in Washington Heights, creating the country’s first academic medical center in alliance with the Presbyterian Hospital.
To accommodate the need for additional facilities, the University is developing a third campus on 17 acres in Manhattanville, dedicated in October 2016. This campus includes the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, which houses the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, and the Lenfest Center for the Arts, both of which opened in 2017. The University Forum and Academic Conference Center opened in 2018. In January 2022 a new home for the Columbia Business School was opened consisting of the Henry R. Kravis Hall and the David Geffen Hall.
Columbia University has two additional campuses: the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, which was created in 1949 and occupies a separate estate in Palisades, New York, and Nevis Laboratories, which are located on a 68-acre estate in Irvington, New York. More recently, Columbia Global Centers have been established in various cities around the world to facilitate engagement of Columbia students, faculty, and alumni with experts and scholars outside the United States.
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