(2 of 3)
Princes & Pontiffs. The Butler reign (1902-45) lasted for more than 40 years, and for Columbia it was an age of vast expansion. "It is literally true," Butler once wrote, "that beginning with Gladstone, Prince Bismarck, Cardinal Newman and Pope Leo XIII, it has been my happy fortune to meet, to talk with, and often to know in warm friendship almost every man of light and learning during the past half-century." Along with premiers, princes and pontiffs, Butler also went in for bankers. He had such a way with men of means, in fact, that Muckraker Upton Sinclair finally dubbed Columbia "the University of the House of Morgan."
Today, under able President Grayson Kirk (who succeeded President Eisenhower), Columbia carries on the pursuit of learning on a campus that resembles an oasis in a traffic jam. But it is part of the university's nature that it regards the screeching city not as a distraction but as a stimulus. Students are inclined to treat the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a sort of Columbia annex. There are exchange arrangements with both Union and Jewish Theological Seminaries. Broadway actors, corporation lawyers, Manhattan litteratéurs have all given courses, and Columbia professors themselves are as much a part of town as gown.
Books & Presidents. At the heart of Columbia is Columbia College—one of the smallest (2,255 students) but still one of the most influential in the Ivy League. It was Columbia that first revolutionized its freshman and sophomore years by introducing what has subsequently become known as General Education, and out of the late John Erskine's famed humanities course came the inspiration for the entire Great Books movement.
Meanwhile, the university's professional schools and affiliated institutions (including the great $50 million Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center) have exercised an influence of their own. Columbia started the first U.S. School of Mines (1864), awarded the first M.D. in the North American colonies (1770), established the first school of library training, the first professorship of agriculture, the first graduate school of social work. It has turned out three Chief Justices of the U.S. (John Jay, Charles Evans Hughes, Harlan F. Stone), enrolled in its law school the two Presidents Roosevelt ("You will never be able to call yourself an intellectual," huffed Butler after F.D.R. quit school for politics, "until you come back to Columbia and pass your law exams"). For better or worse, Columbia can also claim to have started the most powerful U.S. teachers' college—just across 120th Street, which TC's liberal-arts critics call "the widest street in the world."
Turbans & Slacks. Like New York City, Columbia is a melting pot. It is a land of the turban, the fez and the beret, as well as a casual assortment of G.I. shirts, flannel slacks and pin stripes. It bristles with institutes and centers for Russian, Middle East and East Asian studies, has a Maison Française, a Casa Italiana, a Deutsches Haus and a Casa Hispánica. Through the portals of Columbia, as through the Port of New York, passes the largest foreign enrollment in the U.S.