The university is organized into twenty schools, including Columbia College, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and the School of General Studies. The university also has global research outposts in Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Asunción and Nairobi. It has affiliations with several other institutions nearby, including Teachers College, Barnard College, and Union Theological Seminary, with joint undergraduate programs available through the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Sciences Po Paris, and the Juilliard School.
Columbia annually administers the Pulitzer Prize. Notable alumni and former students (including those from King's College) include five Founding Fathers of the United States; nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court; 20 living billionaires; 29 Academy Award winners;and 29 heads of state, including three United States Presidents. Additionally, to date, some 101 Nobel Prize laureates have been affiliated with Columbia as students, faculty, or staff.
Discussions regarding the founding of a college in the Province of New York began as early as 1704, when Colonel Lewis Morris wrote to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the missionary arm of the Church of England, persuading the society that New York City was an ideal community in which to establish a college;] however, not until the founding of Princeton University across the Hudson River in New Jersey did the City of New York seriously consider founding a college. In 1746 an act was passed by the general assembly of New York to raise funds for the foundation of a new college. In 1751, the assembly appointed a commission of ten New York residents, seven of whom were members of the Church of England, to direct the funds accrued by the state lottery towards the foundation of a college.
Classes were initially held in July 1754 and were presided over by the college's first president, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson was the only instructor of the college's first class, which consisted of a mere eight students. Instruction was held in a new schoolhouse adjoining Trinity Church, located on what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. The college was officially founded on October 31, 1754, as King's College by royal charter of King George II, making it the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States.
In 1763, Dr. Johnson was succeeded in the presidency by Myles Cooper, a graduate of The Queen's College, Oxford, and an ardent Tory. In the charged political climate of the American Revolution, his chief opponent in discussions at the college was an undergraduate of the class of 1777, Alexander Hamilton. The American Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, and was catastrophic for the operation of King's College, which suspended instruction for eight years beginning in 1776 with the arrival of the Continental Army. The suspension continued through the military occupation of New York City by British troops until their departure in 1783. The college's library was looted and its sole building requisitioned for use as a military hospital first by American and then British forces.Loyalists were forced to abandon their King's College in New York, which was seized by the rebels and renamed Columbia College. The Loyalists, led by Bishop Charles Inglis fled to Windsor, Nova Scotia, where they founded what is now the University of King's College.
After the Revolution, the college turned to the State of New York in order to restore its vitality, promising to make whatever changes to the school's charter the state might demand. The Legislature agreed to assist the college, and on May 1, 1784, it passed "an Act for granting certain privileges to the College heretofore called King's College." The Act created a Board of Regents to oversee the resuscitation of King's College, and, in an effort to demonstrate its support for the new Republic, the Legislature stipulated that "the College within the City of New York heretofore called King's College be forever hereafter called and known by the name of Columbia College," a reference to Columbia, an alternative name for America. The Regents finally became aware of the college's defective constitution in February 1787 and appointed a revision committee, which was headed by John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. In April of that same year, a new charter was adopted for the college, still in use today, granting power to a private board of 24 Trustees.
On May 21, 1787, William Samuel Johnson, the son of Dr. Samuel Johnson, was unanimously elected President of Columbia College. Prior to serving at the university, Johnson had participated in the First Continental Congress and been chosen as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. For a period in the 1790s, with New York City as the federal and state capital and the country under successive Federalist governments, a revived Columbia thrived under the auspices of Federalists such as Hamilton and Jay. Both President George Washington and Vice President John Adams attended the college's commencement on May 6, 1789, as a tribute of honor to the many alumni of the school who had been involved in the American Revolution
The college's enrollment, structure, and academics stagnated for the majority of the 19th century, with many of the college presidents doing little to change the way that the college functioned. In 1857, the college moved from Park Place to a primarily Gothic Revival campus on 49th Street and Madison Avenue, where it remained for the next fifty years. During the last half of the 19th century, under the leadership of President F.A.P. Barnard, the institution rapidly assumed the shape of a modern university. By this time, the college's investments in New York real estate became a primary source of steady income for the school, mainly owing to the city's expanding population.
