Northeastern University
Northeastern University is a private research university with its main campus in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded by the Boston Young Men's Christian Association in 1898 as an all-male institute before being incorporated as Northeastern College in 1916, gaining university status in 1922.
With more than 38,000 students, Northeastern is the largest university in Massachusetts by enrollment. The university's main campus in Boston is located within the center of the city along Huntington Avenue and Columbus Avenue near the Fenway–Kenmore and Roxbury neighborhoods. It offers undergraduate and graduate programs, and most undergraduates participate in a cooperative education program. Northeastern is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education and is a member of the Boston Consortium for Higher Education. It is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".
Northeastern maintains satellite campuses in Charlotte, North Carolina; Seattle, Washington; San Jose, California; Oakland, California; Portland, Maine; Burlington, Massachusetts; Miami, Florida; New York City; London; and Toronto and Vancouver in Canada. In 2019, it purchased the New College of the Humanities, establishing an additional campus in London, England. The university's sports teams, the Northeastern Huskies, compete in NCAA Division I as members of the Coastal Athletic Association in 18 varsity sports. The men's and women's hockey teams compete in Hockey East, while the men's and women's rowing teams compete in the Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges and Eastern Association of Women's Rowing Colleges, respectively.
History
Founding
In May 1896, directors of the Boston Young Men's Christian Association, the first in the U.S., established an Evening Institute for Younger Men, to merge, coordinate and improve its classes that had evolved over the past 40 years. Included among roughly 30 courses offered were algebra, bookkeeping, literature, French, German, Latin, geography, electricity, music, penmanship and physiology. In addition, a banjo club, camera club, orchestra, and weekly parliamentary debates and discussions were promoted. A good education for "any young man of moral character" with a YMCA membership was promised. Located in a new headquarters building at the corner of Boylston and Berkeley streets in Boston, the institute held its first classes in 1898. After a fire, a new YMCA building was constructed on Huntington Avenue in 1913.The School of Law was also formally established in 1898 with the assistance of an advisory committee, consisting of James Barr Ames, dean of the Harvard Law School; Samuel Bennett, dean of the Boston University School of Law; and Judge James R. Dunbar. In 1903, the first Automobile Engineering School in the country was established, followed by a Polytechnic School in 1904 and a School of Commerce and Finance in 1907. Day classes began in 1909. In 1916, a bill was introduced into the Massachusetts Legislature to incorporate the institute as Northeastern College. After considerable debate and investigation, it was passed in March 1916.
In 1909, the Polytechnic School began offering co-operative engineering courses to eight students. A four-year daytime program had been established consisting of alternating single weeks of classroom instruction and practical work experience with mostly railroad companies that agreed to accept student workers. In 1920, the Co-operative School of Engineering, which later became the College of Engineering, was first authorized to grant degrees in civil, chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering. The cooperative program, the second of its kind in the U.S. after one in Cincinnati, Ohio, was eventually adopted by all departments.
Early days
On March 30, 1917, veteran educator Frank Palmer Speare, who had served as director of the institute, was inaugurated as the first president of the newly incorporated Northeastern College. Five years later the college changed its name to Northeastern University to better reflect the increasing depth of its instruction. In March 1923, the university secured general degree-granting power from the Legislature, with the exception of the medical and dental degrees.The College of Liberal Arts was added in 1935. Two years later the Northeastern University Corporation was established, with a board of trustees composed of 31 university members and 8 from the YMCA. Following World War II, Northeastern began admitting women. In 1948, Northeastern separated itself completely from the YMCA.
1959 - 1975
By 1959, when Carl Ell who had expanded the university stepped down as president, Northeastern had a local identity as an independent technical university serving a commuter and adult population. That reputation began changing during the presidency of Asa S. Knowles, from 1959 to 1975. Facing a postwar educational boom, the university broadened undergraduate offerings, increased graduate offerings, modernized administrative and faculty structures, created a Faculty Senate, launched its first-ever capital campaign, reorganized and expanded adult and continuing education, and increased the number of colleges. The university created the College of Education, University College, now called the College of Professional Studies, and the colleges of Pharmacy and Nursing, which both later merged into the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. The creation of the College of Criminal Justice followed, and then the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, the first college in the United States dedicated to the field of computer science.Between 1959 and 1975, Northeastern's student population not only grew considerably larger, but also more diverse. At the beginning of this period, most of the student body was composed of white males from New England, the majority of whom came from the Boston-area public schools and primarily studied business or engineering. By 1974–75, women accounted for 33 percent of the nearly 14,000 undergraduates students, while 5 percent were black. Over 900 students came from different foreign countries. Of the graduating class of 2,238, 513 were in Liberal Arts, 462 in Engineering, 389 in Business, 227 in Pharmacy and Allied Health, and the remainder were roughly divided among Education, Boston-Bouvé, Nursing and Criminal Justice.
To attract more women, the university refurbished existing facilities, constructed new women's dormitories and encouraged their participation in all programs. The merger with Boston-Bouvé, a women's college dedicated to physical health, and the creation of the College of Nursing, traditionally a female profession, also contributed to the increase. Though there was an explicit nondiscrimination policy on the books, throughout its history Northeastern had only a handful of black students. In the early 1960s, with financial assistance from the Ford Foundation in New York in the form of scholarships and co-ops to black high school students, Northeastern began actively recruiting black students. By 1975, black student-led organizations included the Afro-photo Society, Student Grill, Health Careers Club, The Onyx, Muhindi Literary Guild, the Outing Club, Black Engineering Society, and the first recognized black fraternity at the university, the Omicron chapter of Iota Phi Theta. In addition, the number of foreign students increased from 170 in the 1950s and 1960s to 960 by 1974–75.
1980s
By the early 1980s, under President Kenneth G. Ryder, the one-time night commuter school had grown into one of the largest private universities in the nation at around 55,000 students. In 1990, the first class with more live-on campus rather than commuter students was graduated. After Ryder's retirement in 1989, the university adopted a slow and more thoughtful approach to change. Following an economic downturn, a 1991 trustee committee report described the situation as "life threatening to Northeastern," warning of a $17 million budget gap with no funding mechanisms to cover it. That year President John A. Curry formulated a new strategy of transforming Northeastern into a "smaller, leaner, better place to work and study," describing unacceptable compromises in the quality and reputation of the university that had been made in the quest for more students. Staff were terminated and admissions targets were reduced, with applicant numbers beginning to rise and attrition rates fall by the end of Curry's tenure.1996 - 2000s
When Curry left office in 1996, the university population had been systematically reduced to about 25,000. Incoming President Richard M. Freeland decided to focus on recruiting the type of students who were already graduating as the school's prime demographic. Freeland focused on improving academics and restructuring the administration with a goal of "creating the country's premier program of practice oriented education". In the early 1990s, the university began a $485 million construction program that included residence halls, academic and research facilities, and athletic centers. During the university's transition, Freeland reorganized the cooperative education system, decentralizing it into a department-based system to allow better integration of classroom learning with workplace experience. Full-time degree programs shifted from a four-quarter system to two traditional semesters and two summer "minimesters," allowing students to both delve more deeply into their academic courses and have longer and more substantive co-op placements, forcing departments to redesign aging programs to fit the longer format. Freeland also created a marketing department, uncommon for universities at the time, and expanded the university advancement office, while setting an ambitious $200 million fundraising target with the goal of reducing dependency on tuition.Between 1995 and 2007, average SAT exam scores increased more than 200 points, retention rates rose dramatically, and applications doubled. In 1998, Freeland set an admissions target of 2,800 freshman per year, allowing for adequate tuition income without compromising on education. Throughout the transformation, his oft-repeated goal was to crack the top 100 of the U.S. News & World Report's rankings of America's best universities. With this accomplished by 2005, the transformation goal from commuting school to nationally recognized research university was complete. Freeland stepped down on August 15, 2006, and was followed by President Joseph E. Aoun, a former dean at the University of Southern California.