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If the university has to a large extent assumed the character of the city, the process has also worked in reverse. Among its alumni are 3,000 New York City lawyers, 1,500 physicians, and 1,000 of the city's dentists. Its college and graduate schools have turned out ten New York governors (among them: Thomas E. Dewey, LL.B. '25), and 14 New York City mayors. Simon and Shuster, Harcourt and Brace, and Alfred Knopf all went there; so did Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein II. In the newspaper field, Columbia boasts a variety of opinion-makers, from the Times's Arthur Hays Sulzberger to the New York Post's Editor James Wechsler to Hearst Columnist George Sokolsky.
The present faculty, much more than a distinguished cluster of scholars, includes two Nobel Prizewinners (Physicists I. I. Rabi and Hideki Yukawa) and three winners of Pulitzer Prizes (Composer Douglas Moore, Historian Allan Nevins, Poet Mark Van Doren). It is also a reservoir of talent that serves the whole metropolis. Such men as Philosopher Irwin Edman, Critic Lionel Trilling and Classicist Gilbert Highet are full-fledged city celebrities. Economist Carl Shoup wrestles with city finances; Historian Harry Carman serves on the Board of Higher Education, and a slew of geologists and planners struggle with the city's water and traffic.
But of all Columbia's contributions to its home town, none is more impressive than the School of General Studies, where anyone from taxi driver to tycoon can get a complete liberal-arts education pretty much on his own schedule. Since 1947 some 1,500 students have won their B.A.s there, and of these, 68% have gone on to graduate work. With that school, 200-year-old Columbia has rounded out the promise that President Barnard made nearly a century ago—that "no seeker after knowledge shall fail to find here what he requires, and . . . that no sincere and earnest seeker after knowledge, of whatever age, sex, race or previous condition, shall be denied the privilege of coming here."