Columbia University
- Columbia’s mascot is the Lion
- Acceptance rate is 6.9% and 27, 942 students
- It was established in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain and is the oldest institution of higher learning in New York State as well as one of the country's nine colonial colleges. 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.
- Their motto is In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen or “In Thy light shall we see light”
- The first class of graduates from Columbia was made up of only five students.
- The State of New York gave Columbia the 14-acre land that became Rockefeller Center in 1929. In 1985 Columbia sold the land to the Rockefeller family for $400 Million, which doubled the University’s endowment.
- Columbia’s medical college was the second medical school ever established in the colonies. In 1770 it became the first to award the M.D.
- During the British occupation of New York City in 1776, Columbia was used as a British military hospital.
- The first intercollegiate sporting event Columbia played was a baseball game against NYU in 1860.
- Between 1905 and 1916, Columbia abolished its intercollegiate football program in protest of the game’s violence.
- The Student Homophile League, the country’s oldest student-run gay rights group, was founded at Columbia in 1966.
- During the American Revolution, the Battle of Harlem Heights was fought on September 16, 1776 on the land where Columbia University sits today.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower was Columbia’s 13th president but resigned in 1953 when he was elected president of the United States
- The Columbia University Marching Band has a habit of busting into the Butler Library reading room before the big Organic Chemistry exam to play as loudly as they can, which studying students may or may not enjoy...
- Columbia University houses the most filmed lecture hall in America:
Havemeyer 309 is featured in movies like Spiderman, Kinsey, Ghostbusters,
and Mona Lisa Smile.
- The modern concept of trivia was created in the 1960s
by 2 Columbia University students, who hosted the first intercollegiate quiz
bowls, which they called "trivia contests."
- Columbia University's Baker Field was the site of the nation's first
televised sports event, a baseball game between Columbia and Princeton
universities, broadcast by NBC in 1939, and is also Manhattan's only
football stadium.
- The iconic lion logo for Goldwyn Pictures, which later
became MGM Studios, was inspired by Columbia University's Lion mascot.
- South Field, a grassy area in the heart of Columbia University's Morningside Heights campus, was once an athletic
field where Lou Gehrig played baseball for Columbia.
- Columbia University alumni founded several major publishing houses,
including Harcourt Brace, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, and Simon &
Schuster.
- Actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Matthew Fox attended Columbia University, but neither studied theater. Gyllenhaal majored in
Eastern religion and philosophy and Fox majored in economics.
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| Nighttime view of the city surrounding Columbia |
By: Rayonna Jernigan
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