Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, declared his intention to establish "in this immense and fast-growing city ... a system of rational and practical education fitting for all and graciously opened to all".[1] A three-day long "literary and scientific convention" held in City Hall in 1830 and attended by over 100 delegates debated the terms of a plan for a new university. These New Yorkers believed the city needed a university designed for young men who would be admitted based on merit, not birthright, status or social class. On April 18, 1831, an institution was established, with the support of a group of prominent New York City residents from the city's landed class of merchants, bankers, and traders.[10] Albert Gallatin was elected as the institution's first president.[11] On April 21, 1831, the new institution received its charter and was incorporated as the University of the City of New York by the New York State Legislature; older documents often refer to it by that name. The university has been popularly known as New York University since its beginning and was officially renamed New York University in 1896.[11] In 1832, NYU held its first classes in rented rooms of four-story Clinton Hall, situated near City Hall.[11] In 1835, the School of Law, NYU's first professional school, was established. Although the impetus to found a new school was partly a reaction by evangelical Presbyterians to what they perceived as the Episcopalianism of Columbia College,[12] NYU was created non-denominational, unlike many American colleges at the time.[11]
Whereas NYU had its Washington Square campus since its founding, the university purchased a campus at University Heights in the Bronx because of overcrowding on the old campus. NYU also had a desire to follow New York City's development further uptown. NYU's move to the Bronx occurred in 1894, spearheaded by the efforts of Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken.[11] The University Heights campus was far more spacious than its predecessor was. As a result, most of the university's operations along with the undergraduate College of Arts and Science and School of Engineering were housed there. NYU's administrative operations were moved to the new campus, but the graduate schools of the university remained at Washington Square.[13] In 1914, Washington Square College was founded as the downtown undergraduate college of NYU. In 1935, NYU opened the "Nassau College-Hofstra Memorial of New York University at Hempstead, Long Island". This extension would later become a fully independentHofstra University.[14]
In 1950, NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities, a nonprofit organization of leading public and private research universities.[15][16]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, financial crisis gripped the New York City government and the troubles spread to the city's institutions, including NYU.[17] Feeling the pressures of imminent bankruptcy, NYU President James McNaughton Hester negotiated the sale of the University Heights campus to the City University of New York, which occurred in 1973.[18] After the sale of the Bronx campus, University College merged with Washington Square College. In the 1980s, under the leadership of President John Brademas,[19] NYU launched a billion-dollar campaign that was spent almost entirely on updating facilities.[20] The campaign was set to complete in 15 years, but ended up being completed in 10.[21]In 2003 President John Sexton launched a $2.5 billion campaign for funds to be spent especially on faculty and financial aid resources.[22]
NYU was the founding member of the League of World Universities, an international organization consisting of rectors and presidents from urban universities across six continents. The league and its 47 representatives gather every two years to discuss global issues in education.[23] L. Jay Oliva formed the organization in 1991 just after he was inaugurated president of New York University.[24]
University logo
The university logo, the upheld torch, is derived from the Statue of Liberty, signifying NYU's service to the city of New York. The torch is depicted on both the NYU seal and the more abstract NYU logo, designed in 1965 by renowned graphic designer Tom Geismar of the branding and design firm Chermayeff & Geismar. There are at least two versions of the possible origin of the university color, violet. Some believe that it may have been chosen because violets are said to have grown abundantly in Washington Square and around the buttresses of the Old University Building. Others argue that the color may have been adopted because the violet was the flower associated with Athens, the center of learning inancient Greece.[25]
Cultural setting
Washington Square and Greenwich Village have been hubs of cultural life in New York City since the early 19th century. Much of this culture has intersected with NYU at various points in its history. Artists of the Hudson River School, the United States' first prominent school of painters, settled around Washington Square. Samuel F.B. Morse, the first chair of Painting and Sculpture at NYU, and Daniel Huntington were early tenants of the Old University Building in the mid-19th century. (The University rented out studio space and residential apartments within the "academic" building.) Artists and intellectuals, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, have contributed to the artistic scene encompassing NYU. As a result, they had notable interaction with the cultural and academic life of the university.[17]
In the 1870s, sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French lived and worked near the Square. By the 1920s, Washington Square Park was nationally recognized as a focal point for artistic and moral rebellion. As such, the Washington Square campus became more diverse and bustled with urban energy, contributing to academic change at NYU.[17] Famed residents of this time include Eugene O'Neill, John Sloan, and Maurice Prendergast. In the 1930s, the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and the realists Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton had studios around Washington Square. In the 1960s the area became one of the centers of the beat and folk generation, when Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan settled there. This led to tension with the university, which at the time was in the midst of an aggressive facilities expansion phase.[17] In 1975, the university opened The Grey Art Gallery at 100 Washington Square East, housing the NYU art collection and featuring museum quality exhibitions.[26][27]
Budget and fundraising
NYU has successfully completed a seven-year, $2.5 billion campaign, surpassing expectations by raising more than $3 billion over the seven-year period.[28] Started in 2001, this campaign was the university's largest in its history, in which they planned to "raise $1 million per day for scholarships and financial aid, faculty building, new academic initiatives, and enhancing NYU's physical facilities".[29] The campaign included a $50 million gift from the Tisch family (after which one building and the art school are named) and a $60 million gift from six trustees called "The Partners Fund", aimed at hiring new faculty.[29][30] On October 15, 2007 the university announced that the Silver family donated $50 million to theSchool of Social Work, which will be renamed as a result.[31] This is the largest donation ever to a school of social work in the United States.[32]
The 2007–2008 academic year was the most successful fundraising year to date for NYU, with the school raising $698 million in only the first 11 months of the year, representing a 70% increase in donations from the prior year.[33] The University also recently announced plans for NYU's Call to Action, a new initiative to ask alumni and donors to support financial aid for students at NYU.[34]
The university has announced a 25-year strategic development plan, scheduled to coincide with its bicentennial in 2031. Included in the "NYU 200" plans are increasing resident and academic space, hiring additional exemplary faculty, and involving the New York City community in a transparent planning process. Additionally, NYU hopes to make their buildings more environmentally friendly, which will be facilitated by an evaluation of all campus spaces.[35] As a part of this plan, NYU purchased 118 million kilowatt-hours of wind powerduring the 2006–2007 academic year – the largest purchase of wind power by any university in the country and any institution in New York City.[36] For 2007, the university expanded its purchase of wind power to 132 million kilowatt-hours.[37] As a result, the EPA ranked NYU as one of the greenest colleges in the country in its annual College & University Green Power Challenge.[38]
Campus
Main article: Campus of New York University
Most of NYU's buildings are located across a roughly 229-acre (930,000 m2) area bounded by Houston Street to the south, Broadway to the east, 14th Street to the north, andSixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) to the west. The core of NYU consists of buildings that surround Washington Square Park.[39][40][41]
With approximately 11,000 undergraduate and graduate residents,[42] NYU had the seventh-largest university housing system in the U.S. as of 2007, and one of the largest among private schools.[43]
Washington Square campus
Since the late 1970s, the central part of NYU has been its Washington Square campus in the heart of Greenwich Village. The Washington Square Arch is an unofficial symbol of NYU. Until 2007, NYU had held its commencement ceremonies in Washington Square Park, but moved the ceremonies to Yankee Stadium in 2008 because of renovations to Washington Square.[44]
In the 1990s, NYU became a "two square" university by building a second community around Union Square, in close proximity to Washington Square. NYU's Union Square community primarily consists of the priority residence halls of Carlyle Court, PalladiumResidence Hall, Alumni Hall, Coral Tower, Thirteenth Street Hall, University Hall, Third North Residence Hall, and Founders Hall.[39]
NYU operates theaters and performance facilities that are often used by the university's music conservatory and Tisch School of the Arts. External productions are also occasionally held in NYU's facilities. The largest performance accommodations at NYU are the Skirball Center for Performing Arts (850 seats) at 566 LaGuardia Place, just south of Washington Square South, and the Eisner-Lubin Auditorium (560 seats) in the Kimmel Center. Recently, the Skirball Center hosted important speeches on foreign policy by John Kerry[45] and Al Gore.[46] The Skirball Center is the largest performing arts facility south of 42nd Street.[47][48]
Bobst Library
Main article: Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, built between 1967 and 1972, is the largest library at NYU and one of the largest academic libraries in the United States. Designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, the 12-story, 425,000-square-foot (39,500 m2) structure sits on the southern edge of Washington Square Park (at 70 Washington Square South) and is the flagship of an eight-library, 4.5 million-volume system. Bobst Library offers one Multidisciplinary Reference Center, a Research Commons, 28 miles of open-stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study. The library is visited by more than 6,800 users each day, and circulates more than one million books annually.[49]
Bobst's Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world's largest academic media centers, where students and researchers use more than 95,000 audio and video recordings per year.[50] The Digital Studio offers a constantly evolving, leading-edge resource for faculty and student projects and promotes and supports access to digital resources for teaching, learning, research and arts events.[51]
Bobst Library is also home to significant special collections. The Fales Collection houses one of the finest collections of English and American fiction in the United States, the unique Downtown Collection, documenting the New York literary avante-garde arts scene from the 1970s to the present, and the Food and Cookery Collection, which documents American food history with a focus on New York City. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, one of the finest collections in the world for scholarly research in labor history, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. Tamiment includes the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Archives of Irish America, the Center for the Cold War and the U.S., and the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center.[52]
New facilities
Since the early 2000s, NYU has developed new facilities on and around its Washington Square Campus. The Kimmel Center for University Life was built in 2003 as the primary location for the university's student services offices. It also houses the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the Rosenthal Pavilion, the Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, and the Loeb Student Center. The School of Law built Furman Hall in 2004, incorporating elements of two historic buildings into the new facade, one of which had been occupied by poet Edgar Allan Poe.[53]
In 2005, NYU announced the development of a new life science facility on Waverly Place, the first new NYU science building since the opening of Meyer Hall in 1971.[54] In November 2005, NYU announced plans to build a 26-floor, 190,000-square-foot (18,000 m2) residence hall on 12th Street. The residence hall, named "Founders Hall", accommodates approximately 700 undergraduates and contains a host of other student facilities. It is currently the tallest building in the East Village.[55]
Other campuses and facilities
The New York University School of Medicine is situated near the East River waterfront at 550 First Avenue between East 30th and East 34thStreets. The campus hosts the medical school, Tisch Hospital, and the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.[56] Other NYU Centers across the city include NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases and the Bellevue Hospital Center.[57][58] NYU's Silver School of Social Work (formerly Ehrenkranz School of Social Work) manages branch campus programs in Westchester County at Manhattanville College, in Rockland County atSt. Thomas Aquinas College, and on Staten Island at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.[59]
In Sterling Forest, near Tuxedo, New York, NYU has a research facility that contains institutes, in particular the Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine.[60] The Midtown Center at 11 West 42nd Street and the Woolworth Building in the financial district are home to NYU's continuing education programs.[61]
NYU has two units located on the Upper East Side. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a discrete entity within NYU, independent of any other school or department of the university, is located on East 84th St,[62] while the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, a graduate school of art history and fine arts, is located at the James B. Duke Building at 1 East 78th St.[63]
Tisch School of the Arts, Asia was NYU's first branch campus abroad. The result of a partnership between Tisch School of the Arts and the Singapore Government, it offered Master of Fine Arts degrees in animation and digital arts, dramatic writing, film and international media producing. The campus opened in fall 2007 with the intention to enroll approximately 250 students.[64] Anticipated enrolment figures were not achieved, financial irregularities were alleged and President Pari Sara Shirazi was dismissed from her post by NYU in November 2011.[65] She subsequently announced her intention to commence legal proceedings against NYU alleging wrongful termination and defamation.[66] In a letter to the Tisch Asia community dated 8 November 2012, Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell announced that the campus would close after 2014 with recruitment and admission of new students suspended with immediate effect.[67]
On July 1, 2008, the New York Board of Regents approved the affiliation of New York University and Polytechnic University, one of the oldest private technology institutes in the United States,[68] to form the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, often referred to as NYU-Poly.[69][70] NYU-Poly has locations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Long Island.[71][72]
In the fall of 2010, NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) opened as the University's first overseas "Portal Campus" with an inaugural class of 150 students.[73] Unlike the University's other study abroad centers, NYUAD functions as a separate liberal arts college within a University, offering complete degree programs to students admitted directly to NYUAD. NYUAD recruits students from all over the world and describes itself as the "World's Honor College". The main campus for NYUAD is under construction on Saadiyat Island and is scheduled to open in 2014. Until then the school operates from a campus located in downtown Abu Dhabi.[74] The campus construction and operational costs are entirely funded by the Abu Dhabi government.[75]
It was announced in 2011 that NYU planned to open another portal campus, New York University Shanghai, for the fall semester of 2013. It was set to have about 3,000 undergraduate students, the majority of whom would be Chinese. It was approved by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China in January 2011.[76] NYU's local partner will be East China Normal University (ECNU). ECNU's president Yu Lizhong will be the chancellor and play a major role in government relations while Jeffrey S. Lehman, former president of Cornell amongst other positions, will serve as vice chancellor and have "free rein in academic affairs".[77]
NYU has a host of foreign facilities used for study abroad programs, referred to as Global Academic Centers. As of 2012, NYU operates 14 academic sites – both degree-granting research university campuses and study abroad sites – in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America, including undergraduate academic-year and summer study abroad programs in New York, Florence, London, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Accra, Madrid, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, Sydney and Washington DC.[78][79] One of the most noteworthy is the 57-acre (230,000 m2) campus of NYU Florence Villa LaPietra in Italy, bequeathed by the late Sir Harold Acton to NYU in 1994.[80]
NYU also has international houses on campus, including the Deutsches Haus, La Maison Française, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Glucksman Ireland House, the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, the Hagop Kevorkian Center, an Africa House and a China House.[81]
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