Syracuse University
Syracuse University is a private research university in Syracuse, New York, United States. It was established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church but has been nonsectarian since 1920. Located in the city's University Hill neighborhood, east and southeast of downtown Syracuse, the large campus features an eclectic mix of architecture, ranging from nineteenth-century Romanesque Revival to contemporary buildings. Syracuse University is organized into 13 schools and colleges and is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity".
Syracuse University athletic teams, the Orange, participate in 20 intercollegiate sports. SU is a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference for all NCAA Division I athletics, except for the men's rowing and women's ice hockey teams. SU is also a member of the Eastern College Athletic Conference. Alumni, faculty, and affiliates include former President Joe Biden, thirty-six Olympic Medalists, Academy Award winners, Emmy Award winners, Grammy Award winners, governors, and members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
History
Founding
The institution's roots can be traced to the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary. The seminary was founded in 1831 by the Genesee annual conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Lima, New York, south of Rochester. In 1850, it was resolved to enlarge the institution from a seminary into a college, or to connect a college with the seminary, becoming Genesee College. However, the location was soon thought by many to be insufficiently central. Its difficulties were compounded by a new railroad that competed with the Erie Canal and reconfigured the region's primary economic conduits to bypass Lima. The trustees of the struggling college decided to seek an alternate locale whose economic and transportation advantages could provide a surer base of support.The college began looking for a new home at the same time that Syracuse, ninety miles to the east, was searching to bring a university to the city after having failed to convince Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to locate Cornell University in Syracuse rather than in Ithaca. Syracuse resident White pressed that the new university should relocate on the hill in Syracuse due to the city's attractive transportation hub, which would ease the recruitment of faculty, students, and other persons of note. However, as a young carpenter working in Syracuse, Cornell had been cheated of his wages by an employer there. Instead, he insisted Cornell University be in Ithaca on his large farm on East Hill, overlooking the town and Cayuga Lake.
Meanwhile, there were several years of dispute between the Methodist ministers, Lima, and contending cities across the state over proposals to move Genesee College to Syracuse. At the time, the ministers wanted a share of the funds from the Morrill Land Grant Act for Genesee College. They agreed to a quid pro quo donation of $25,000 from Senator Cornell in exchange for their support for his bill. Cornell insisted the bargain be written into the bill and Cornell became New York State's Land Grant University in 1865. In 1869, Genesee College obtained New York State approval to move to Syracuse but Lima got a court injunction to block the move, and thus Genesee stayed in Lima until it was dissolved in 1875. By that time, however, the court injunction had been made moot by the founding of a new university on March 24, 1870. On that date the State of New York granted the new Syracuse University its own charter independent of Genesee College. The Methodist church subscribed an endowment of $400,000 and the City of Syracuse offered $100,000 to establish the school. Methodist bishop Jesse T. Peck had donated $25,000 to the proposed school and was elected the first president of the board of trustees.
Daniel Steele, a former Genesee College president, served as the first administrative leader of Syracuse until its Chancellor was appointed. The university opened in September 1871 in rented space downtown. Judge George F. Comstock, a member of the new university's board of trustees, had offered the school of farmland on a hillside to the southeast of the city center. Comstock intended Syracuse University and the hill to develop as an integrated whole; a contemporary account described the latter as "a beautiful town... springing up on the hillside and a community of refined and cultivated membership... established near the spot which will soon be the center of a great and beneficent educational institution."
The university was founded as coeducational and racially integrated: "open to men and women, white and black." President Peck stated at the opening ceremonies, "The conditions of admission shall be equal to all persons... there shall be no invidious discrimination here against woman.... brains and heart shall have a fair chance... " Syracuse implemented this policy with a high proportion of women students for its era. In the College of Liberal Arts, the ratio between male and female students during the 19th century was approximately even. The College of Fine Arts was predominantly female, while lower ratios of women enrolled in the College of Medicine and the College of Law. Men and women were taught together in the same courses, and many extra-curricular activities were coeducational as well. Syracuse also developed "women-only" organizations and clubs.
Expansion
Coeducation at Syracuse traced its roots to the early days of Genesee College where educators and students like Frances Willard and Belva Lockwood were heavily influenced by the Women's movement in nearby Seneca Falls, New York. However, the progressive "co-ed" policies practiced at Genesee would soon find controversy at the new university in Syracuse. Colleges and universities admitted few women students in the 1870s. Administrators and faculty argued women had inferior minds and could not master mathematics and the classics. Erastus Otis Haven, Syracuse University chancellor and former president of the University of Michigan and Northwestern University, maintained that women should receive the advantages of higher education. He enrolled his daughter Frances at Syracuse, where she joined the other newly admitted female students in founding the Gamma Phi Beta sorority. The inclusion of women in the early days of the university led to the proliferation of various women's clubs and societies. Frank Smalley, a Syracuse professor coined the term "sorority" specifically for Gamma Phi Beta.File:Crousecollegesu.jpg|thumb|Crouse College, a Romanesque building completed in 1889, housed the first College of Fine Arts in the U.S. It is now the home of the Setnor School of Music.
In the late 1880s, the university engaged in a rapid building spree. Holden Observatory was followed by two Romanesque Revival buildings – Von Ranke Library, now Tolley Humanities Building, and Crouse College. Together with the Hall of Languages, these first buildings formed the basis for the "Old Row," a grouping which, along with its companion Lawn, established one of Syracuse's most enduring images. The emphatically linear organization of these buildings along the brow of the hill follows a tradition of American campus planning which dates to the construction of the "Yale Row" in the 1790s. At Syracuse, "The Old Row" continued to provide the framework for growth well into the twentieth century.
File:Syracuse-university 1908 winter.jpg|thumb|Left to right: Hall of Languages and
Von Ranke Library
From its founding until the early 1920s, the university grew rapidly. It offered programs in the physical sciences and modern languages and, in 1873, added one of the first architecture programs in the U.S. It was also the first institution to grant a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in the United States. In 1874, Syracuse created the nation's first bachelor of fine arts degree. In 1876, the school offered its first post-graduate courses in the College of Arts and Sciences. SU created its first doctoral program in 1911. In 1919, Syracuse added its business school which contains multiple MBA programs. SU's school of journalism, now the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, was established at Syracuse in 1934.
The growth of Syracuse University from a small liberal arts college into a major comprehensive university was due to the efforts of two men, chancellor James Roscoe Day and John Dustin Archbold. James Roscoe Day was serving the Calvary Church in New York City, where he befriended Archbold. Together, the two dynamic figures would oversee the first of two great periods of campus renewal in Syracuse's history.
John Dustin Archbold was a capitalist, philanthropist, and President of the Board of Trustees at Syracuse University. He was known as John D. Rockefeller's right-hand man and successor at the Standard Oil Company. He was a close friend of Syracuse University Chancellor James R. Day and gave almost $6 million to the university over his lifetime. Said a journalist in 1917:
Mr. Archbold's... is the president of the board of trustees of Syracuse University, an institution which has prospered so remarkably since his connection with it that its student roll has increased from hundreds to over 4,000, including 1,500 young women, placing it in the ranks of the foremost institutions of learning in the United States.
In 1905, James D. Phelps secured a donation of $150,000 from Andrew Carnegie for a new university library provided the university raised an equal sum as an endowment for the library. The university raised the required endowment in a little over a month, with the largest share being contributed by Archbold. On September 11, 1907, the transfer of the Von Ranke collection from the old library building marking the opening of the new Carnegie library with a collection of over 71,000 volumes.
In addition to keeping the university financially solvent during its early years, Archbold also contributed funds for eight buildings, including the full cost of Archbold Stadium, Sims Hall, the Archbold Gymnasium, and the oval athletic field.