The City College of The City University of New York (known more commonly as City College of New York or simply City College, CCNY, or colloquially as City) is a senior college of the City University of New York, in New York City. It is also the oldest of City University's twenty institutions of higher learning. City College's thirty-five acre campus along Convent Avenue from 131st Street to 141st Street is on a hill overlooking Harlem; its neo-Gothic campus was mostly designed by George Browne Post, and many of its buildings are landmarks.
A view of the original entrance to Shepard Hall, the main building of City College of New York, in the early 1900's, on its new campus in Hamilton Heights, from St. Nicholas Avenue looking up westward to St. Nicholas Terrace.
City College was originally founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847 by Townsend Harris, a combination prep school and college, to provide children of the poor, and immigrants also, access to free higher education based on academic merit and other significant criteria.
It was subsequently named the College of the City of New York, but that name was later transferred to the complex of the municipally-owned colleges in New York City, which was the predecessor of the modern City University of New York. At that time, CCNY became officially City College of the College of the City of New York, and later adopted its current name when CUNY was formally established as the umbrella institution for New York City's municipal-college system in 1961. The name City College of New York, however, is in general use.
In 1847, New York State Governor John Young had given permission to the Board of Education to found The Free Academy, which was ratified in a statewide referendum. Founder Townsend Harris proclaimed,
"Open the doors to all ... Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect."
Dr. Horace Webster, first president of The Free Academy on the occasion of its formal opening, January 21, 1849, said:
"The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few."
In 1851, a curriculum was adopted which had nine main fields: Math, History, Language, Literature, Drawing, Natural Philosophy, Experimental Philosophy, Law and Political Economy.
The Academy's first graduation took place in 1853 in Niblo's Garden Theatre , a large theater and opera house on Broadway, near Houston Street at the corner of Broadway and Prince Street.
In 1866, the name was changed to The College of the City of New York and lavender was chosen as its color, while in the next year, the academic senate, the first student government in the nation, was formed.
Having struggled over the issue for ten years, in 1895 the New York State legislature voted to let the college build a new campus. A four-square block site was chosen, located in Manhattanville, within the area which is today enclosed by the North Campus Arches.
Education courses were offered in 1897 as a result of a city law which prohibited hiring teachers who lacked proper education. The School of Education was established in 1921.
The College newspaper, The Campus, published its first issue in 1907, and the first degree-granting evening session in the United States was started.
Separate Schools of Business and Civic Administration and of Technology (Engineering) were established in 1919. Students were also required to sign a loyalty oath.
In 1947, the college celebrated its centennial year, awarding honorary degrees to Bernard Baruch (class of 1889) and Robert F. Wagner (class of 1898). A 100 year time capsule was buried in North Campus.
In the years when top-flight private schools were restricted to the children of the Protestant Establishment, thousands of brilliant individuals (especially Jewish students) attended City College because they had no other option. CCNY's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the titles "Harvard of the Proletariat" and the "poor man's Harvard."
Looking from NAC plaza, towards Shepard Hall at the City College of New York .
Even today, after three decades of controversy over its academic standards, no other public college has produced as many Nobel laureates who have studied and graduated with an undergraduate degree from a particular public college . CCNY's official quote on this is "Nine Nobel laureates claim CCNY as their Alma Mater, the most from any public college in the United States". This should not be confused with Nobel laureates that earned the distinction at a public university as UC Berkeley boasts 19.
In its heyday of the 1930s through the 1950s, CCNY became known for its political radicalism. It was said that CCNY was the place for arguments between Trotskyites and Stalinists. Alumni who were at City College in the mid-20th century said that City College in those days made Berkeley in the 1960s look like a school of conformity.
CCNY may be best known as the only team in college basketball history to win both the NIT and the NCAA Tournament in the same year, 1950.
In the 1969, black and Puerto Rican activists and their white allies demanded, among other policy changes, that City College implement an aggressive affirmative action program. It was during this time that campus protesters began referring to CCNY as "Harlem University." The administration of CCNY at first balked at the demands, but instead, came up with an open-admissions or open-access program under which any graduate of a NYC high school might be able to matriculate either at City College or somewhere in the CUNY college system. Beginning in 1970, the program opened doors to college to many who would not otherwise have been able to attend college, but came at the cost of City College's academic standing and New York City's fiscal health.
City College began charging tuition in 1976, and by the 1990s stopped accepting and working with students who didn't meet its formal entrance requirements.
CCNY's new Frederick Douglass Debate Society defeated Harvard and Yale at the "Super Bowl" of the American Parliamentary Debate Association in 1996.
The U.S. Postal Service issued a postcard commemorating CCNY's 150th Anniversary, featuring Shephard Hall, on Charter Day, May 7, 1997.
In October 2005, Dr. Andrew Grove, a 1960 graduate of the Engineering School in Chemical Engineering, and co-founder of Intel Corporation, donated $26,000,000 to the Engineering School. It is the largest donation ever given to the City College of New York.
The Engineering School has been renamed as the Grove School of Engineering.
