columbia university

Columbia University (officially Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private Ivy League research university in Upper Manhattan, New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain, it is the oldest institution of higher learning in New York State, as well as one of the country's nine colonial colleges.^[6] After the revolutionary war, King's College briefly became a state entity, and was renamed Columbia College in 1784. A 1787 charter placed the institution under a private board of trustees before it was renamed Columbia University in 1896 when the campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its current location in Morningside Heights occupying land of 32 acres (13 ha).^[7][8] Columbia is one of the fourteen founding members of the Association of American Universities, and was the first school in the United States to grant the M.D. degree.^[7][9]

The university is organized into twenty schools, including Columbia College, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the School of General Studies. The university also has global research outposts in Amman, Beijing,Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Asunción and Nairobi.^[10] It has affiliations with several other institutions nearby, including Teachers College, Barnard College, and Union Theological Seminary, with joint undergraduate programs available through the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Sciences Po Paris,^[11] and theJuilliard School.^[12]

Columbia annually administers the Pulitzer Prize.^[13] Notable alumni and former students (including those from King's College) include five Founding Fathers of the United States; nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court;^[14] 20 living billionaires;^[15] 29 Academy Award winners;^[16] and 29 heads of state, including three United States Presidents.^[17]Additionally, to date, some 101 Nobel Prize laureates have been affiliated with Columbia as students, faculty, or staff, second in the world in Nobel affiliates to Harvard University.^[18]

In 1896, the trustees officially authorized the use of yet another new name, Columbia University, and today the institution is officially known as "Columbia University in the City of New York." At the same time, university president Seth Low moved the campus again, from 49th Street to its present location, a more spacious campus in the developing neighborhood ofMorningside Heights.^[33] Under the leadership of Low's successor, Nicholas Murray Butler, who served for over four decades, Columbia rapidly became the nation's major institution for research, setting the "multiversity" model that later universities would adopt.^[7]

Research into the atom by faculty members John R. Dunning, I. I. Rabi, Enrico Fermi and Polykarp Kusch placed Columbia's Physics Department in the international spotlight in the 1940s after the first nuclear pile was built to start what became theManhattan Project.^[34] In 1947, to meet the needs of GIs returning from World War II, University Extension was reorganized as an undergraduate college and designated the Columbia University School of General Studies.^[35]

Alma Mater

During the 1960s Columbia experienced large-scale student activism, which reached a climax in the spring of 1968 when hundreds of students occupied buildings on campus. The incident forced the resignation of Columbia's President, Grayson Kirk and the establishment of the University Senate.^[36][37]

Though several schools within the university had admitted women for years, Columbia College first admitted women in the fall of 1983, after a decade of failed negotiations with Barnard College, the all-female institution affiliated with the university, to merge the two schools.^[38] Barnard College still remains affiliated with Columbia, and all Barnard graduates are issued diplomas authorized by both Columbia University and Barnard College