City College of New York
The City College of the City University of New York is a public research university within the City University of New York system in New York City. Founded in 1847, City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. It is the oldest of CUNY's 25 institutions of higher learning and is considered its flagship institution.
The main campus is located in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood. City College's 35-acre campus spans Convent Avenue from 130th to 141st Streets. It was initially designed by an architect George B. Post. City College's satellite campus, City College Downtown in the Cunard Building has been in operation since 1981, offering degree programs for working adults.
Among the precedents set by City College that helped shape the culture of American higher education are the following: what has been said by the college to be the first student government in the nation in 1867; the first national fraternity to accept members without regard to religion, race, color or creed ; the first degree-granting evening program ; and, with the objective of racially integrating the college dormitories, "the first general strike at a municipal institution of higher learning" led by students. The college has a 48% graduation rate within six years. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity."
History
Early 19th century
The City College of New York was founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847 by wealthy businessman and president of the Board of Education Townsend Harris. A combination prep school, high school / secondary school and college, it would provide children of immigrants and the poor access to free higher education based on academic merit alone. It was one of the early public high schools in the United States.The Free Academy was the first of what would become a system of municipally supported colleges – the second, Hunter College, was founded as a women's institution in 1870; and the third, Brooklyn College, was established as a coeducational institution in 1930. In 1847, New York State Governor John Young had given permission to the state Board of Education to found the Free Academy, which was ratified in a statewide referendum. Founder Townsend Harris proclaimed, "Open the doors to all… Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect."
Horace Webster, a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, was the first president of the Free Academy. At the Free Academy's formal opening on January 21, 1849, Webster said:
The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.
File:Shepard1.jpg|thumb|right|Original St. Nicholas Terrace entrance to Shepard Hall, the main building of CCNY, in the early 1900s, on its new campus in Hamilton Heights, looking up and westward from St. Nicholas Avenue
In 1847, a curriculum was adopted that had nine main fields: mathematics, history, language, literature, drawing, natural philosophy, experimental philosophy, law, and political economy. The academy's first graduation took place in 1853 in Niblo's Garden Theatre.
Even in its early years, the Free Academy had a framework of tolerance that extended beyond the admission of students from every social stratum. In 1854, Columbia University denied distinguished chemist and scientist Oliver Wolcott Gibbs a faculty position because of his Unitarian religious beliefs. Gibbs had been a professor at the Free Academy since 1848. He later went on to an appointment at Harvard College.
In 1849 the prep school Townsend Harris Hall Prep School opened on campus, launched as a one-year preparatory school for CCNY. In the early 1900s, as more Jewish students were enrolling, President John H. Finley liberalized students' obligations by rescinding mandatory chapel attendance.
Late 19th century
In 1866, the Free Academy, a men's institution, was renamed the College of the City of New York. In 1929, the College of the City of New York became the City College of New York. Finally, the institution became known as the City College of the City University of New York when the CUNY name was formally established as the umbrella institution for New York City's municipal-college system in 1961. The names City College of New York and City College, however, remain in general use.With the name change in 1866, lavender was chosen as the college's color. In 1867, the short-lived academic senate was formed. Rudy identified this as seeming to be "the first experiment with student self-government attempted in an American college", although other scholars have identified earlier examples such as student literary societies. Having struggled over the issue for ten years, in 1895, the New York State Legislature voted to let the City College build a new campus. A four-square block site was chosen, located at West Harlem's Manhattanville, within the area which was enclosed by the [|North Campus Arches]; the college, however, quickly expanded north of the Arches.
Like President Webster, the second president of the newly renamed City College was a West Point graduate. The second president, General Alexander S. Webb, assumed office in 1869, serving for almost the next three decades. One of the Union Army's heroes at Gettysburg, General Webb was the commander of the Philadelphia Brigade. In 1891, while still president of the City College, he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism at Gettysburg. A full-length statue of Webb, in full military uniform, stands in his honor at the heart of the campus.
File:Bookplate-College of the City of New York.jpg|thumb|right|College library bookplate with an early version of the college seal from the era when the institution was named the College of the City of New York, 1866–1929
The college's curriculum under Webster and Webb combined classical training in Latin and Greek with more practical subjects like chemistry, physics, and engineering. General Webb was succeeded by John Huston Finley, as third president in 1903. Finley relaxed some of the West Point-like discipline that characterized the college, including compulsory religious chapel attendance.
Phi Sigma Kappa placed its then-sixth chapter on the campus in 1896; alumni provided scholarships to new students entering the CCNY system for generations. Delta Sigma Phi, founded at CCNY in 1899, claimed to be the first national organization of its type to accept members without regard to religion, race, color or creed. Previously, fraternities at CCNY had excluded Jews. The chapter flourished at the college until 1932 when it closed as a result of the Great Depression. The founding of Zeta Beta Tau at City College in 1898 was Richard Gottheil's initiative to establish a Jewish fraternity with Zionist ideals. It is now defunct.
Early 20th century
Education courses were first offered in 1897 in response to a city law that prohibited the hiring of teachers who lacked a proper academic background. The School of Education was established in 1921. The college newspaper, The Campus, published its first issue in 1907, and the first degree-granting evening session in the United States was started.In the years when top-flight private schools were restricted to the children of the Protestant establishment, thousands of brilliant individuals attended City College because they had no other option. CCNY's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles "Harvard of the Proletariat", the "poor man's Harvard", and "Harvard-on-the-Hudson." Irving Howe claims that when the philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen was a student at CCNY at the turn of the 20th century, the faculty was "not very glittering" and the school was considered "at once grubby and exalted."
Separate Schools of Business and Civic Administration and of Technology were established in 1919. In 1947, the college celebrated its centennial year, awarding honorary degrees to Bernard Baruch and Robert F. Wagner. A 100-year time capsule was buried in North Campus.
Until 1929, City College had been an all-male institution. In 1930, CCNY admitted women for the first time, but only to graduate programs. In 1951, the entire institution became coeducational.
In its heyday of the 1930s through the 1950s, CCNY became known for its political radicalism. It was said that the old CCNY cafeteria in the basement of Shepard Hall, particularly in alcove 1 in Shepherd Hall, was the only place in the world where a fair debate between Trotskyists and Stalinists could take place. Being part of a political debate that began in the morning in alcove 1, Irving Howe reported that after some time had passed he would leave his place among the arguing students in order to attend class. When he returned to the cafeteria late in the day, he would find that the same debate had continued but with an entirely different cast of students.
The municipality of New York was considerably more conformist than CCNY students and faculty. The Philosophy Department, at the end of the 1939/40 academic year, invited the British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell to become a professor at CCNY. Members of the Roman Catholic Church protested Russell's appointment. A woman named Jean Kay filed suit against the state Board of Higher Education to block Russell's appointment, on the grounds that his views on marriage and sex would adversely affect her daughter's virtue, although her daughter was not a CCNY student. Russell wrote, "a typical American witch-hunt was instituted against me." Kay won the suit, but the board declined to appeal after considering the political pressure exerted.
Russell took revenge in the preface of the first edition of his book An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, which was published by the Unwin Brothers in the United Kingdom. In a long précis that detailed Russell's accomplishments including medals awarded by Columbia University and the Royal Society and faculty appointments at Oxford, Cambridge, UCLA, Harvard, the Sorbonne, Peking, the LSE, Chicago, and so forth, Russell added, "Judicially pronounced unworthy to be Professor of Philosophy at the College of the City of New York."
With so many left-wing students attending CCNY in the 1930s, the College was sometimes labeled “the little Red schoolhouse.” Consistent with those times, City College alumni, students, and professors volunteered to fight for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War, including thirteen, among them the 1939 class president Jack Freeman, who were killed in Spain.
After the United States entered World War II, the College mobilized. The New York Times reported that by January 1943, in excess of 80% of the student body was involved in some type of war-related service. The historian S. Willis Rudy wrote that “more than fifteen thousand City College men served in the armed forces of the nation. More than three thousand were commissioned officers. Over 380 received the Order of the Purple Heart for wounds sustained in defense of their country. Fully 850 were cited by the United States or the governments of its allies for meritorious service. Over 250 City College men laid down their lives on battlefields in every theatre of operations all over the world.”