Columbia University

2960 Broadway
Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College by royal charter of King George II of England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States. The Royal Charter formally es... more

Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College by royal charter of King George II of England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States.

The Royal Charter formally establishing King’s College in 1754 defined the institution’s goal as “the Instruction and Education of Youth in the Learned Languages and Liberal Arts and Sciences.” This mandate has not essentially changed, even with the transformation of King’s College into Columbia, one of the world’s foremost research universities.

Columbia’s undergraduate curriculum combines the breadth of learning provided by general education courses with the solid mastery of a discipline achieved through a major. And, because Columbia is a great research university as well as a small liberal arts college, students with the will and ability to pursue their majors to the highest levels of scholarly sophistication are free to do so.


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Morningside Heights Description

Columbia University is located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. New Yorkers have several nicknames for Morningside Heights: the "Academic Acropolis," "Bloomingdale Village," or as the late George Carlin (who grew up here) once cynically put it, "White Harlem." Stretching from West 106th to 125th Streets, Morningside Heights is primarily known as the home of highly revered institutions such as Barnard College, Columbia University, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Manhattan School of Music, St. Luke's Hospital, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and Riverside Church. The term Morningside came from the park on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, which each morning was the first area to be lit up by the sun and thus called Morningside Park by the residents at the time. Riverside Park, an enormous 266-acre waterfront park maintained by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, was created in 1870s. While obviously overshadowed by New York's Central Park, both of these parks are much beloved by New Yorkers and tourists alike—especially those with an affinity for jogging. The neighborhood was the stage the Battle of Harlem Heights, a Revolutionary War skirmish that pitted 2,000 Americans against a British division of 5,000 soldiers. At the end of the nineteenth century construction began on both the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and Columbia University's uptown campus, and the neighborhood, previously farmland, became urbanized over the ensuing decades. Generally an affluent neighborhood, many of the beautiful apartment buildings and row houses in Morningside Heights were amongst the first residences to use elevators and were built for New York's prosperous middle class in the first two decades of the twentieth century. During the middle of the century, however, largely due to the increasing numbers of Single Room Occupancy hotels (SROs), the neighborhood experienced socioeconomic troubles and fell for a time into decline, with some residents opting to move to affluent suburbs surrounding New York City. In the meantime, the neighborhood has rebounded and reestablished its former grandeur with the significant help of major investments and real estate acquisitions by Columbia University to the north of its existing campus. Definitely the most famous restaurant in Morningside Heights is Tom's Restaurant, featured in the song of the same name by Suzanne Vega and perhaps most recognizable as "Monk's Café" in Seinfeld. Havana Central, on Broadway near 114th street, was once a legendary haunt filled with Beat Generation poets and activists, but afteryears of languishing as burger-n-beer joint with jazz, they spicing things up, Cuban-style. Popular college bars in the area are 1020 and the nearby Lion's Head Tavern, where youngsters and oldsters knock back pints and shots and get routinely weirded out by each other's respective ages. There's also the slightly less divey Village Pourhouse and US Civil War history buffs will be interested to know that Grant's Tomb is located in the Morningside Heights neighborhood, situated in a prominent location in Riverside Park with a gorgeous view of the Hudson River. And to answer the famous question, no one is technically "buried" in Grant's Tomb, as that's not how tombs work: both Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia are entombed there. Given the fact that the neighborhood here is primarily residential, the closest accommodations you find in the nearby vicinity would be Morningside Inn on West 107th Street, which is housed in a pre war building with the old world charm of that era. The nearby Marrakech Hotel on the Upper West Side at Broadway and 103rd Street offers enticing Moroccan style accommodations in one of Manhattan's quieter residential neighborhoods.

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2960 Broadway
New York, NY 10025
(212) 854-1754
Website

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  • to 116th St/Columbia Univ -- 0.1

Upcoming Events

The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria

Syrian Kurds and their Arab and Christian allies have embarked on one of the most radical experiments in self-governance of our time. In defiance of the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and regional autocrats, this unlikely coalition created a statelet to govern their semi-autonomous region. In Stat... [ + ]elet of Survivors, Amy Austin Holmes charts the movement from its origins to what it has become today. Drawing from seven years of research trips to northern and eastern Syria, Holmes traces the genealogy of this social experiment to the Republic of Mount Ararat in Turkey, where a self-governing entity was proclaimed in 1927 based on solidarity between Kurds and Armenian genocide survivors. Founded by survivors of modern-day atrocities, the Autonomous Administration does more to empower women and minorities than any other region of Syria. Holmes analyzes its military and police forces, schools, the judicial system, the economic model it has implemented, and strategy of empowering women who were once enslaved by ISIS.Amy Austin Holmes is Research Professor of International Affairs and Acting Director of the Foreign Area Officers Program at George Washington University. Dr. Holmes has published widely on the global American military posture, the NATO alliance, non-state actors, revolutions, and military coups. She has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and previously served as a tenured Associate Professor at the American University in Cairo, and as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. Dr. Holmes is the author of Social Unrest and American Military Bases in Turkey and Germany since 1945 (Cambridge UP) and Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi (Oxford UP). Her third book, Statelet of Survivors: The Making of a Semi-Autonomous Region in Northeast Syria (Oxford UP) is based on a pioneering field survey of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). In addition to her academic career, Dr. Holmes served as an advisor at the U.S. Department of State through a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she also taught as a volunteer lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics.

04/01/2024 06:00 PM
Mon, April 01
6:00PM
$

STATELESS IN POST-WWII BEIRUT

FEATURED SPEAKERTALAR CHAHINIAN, Author and Visiting Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature, UC IrvineStateless focuses on two key moments and places of Western Armenian literary history, post-WWI Paris and post-WW II Beirut, to examine how a stateless language sustained itself in a dia... [ + ]sporic setting. In it, by analyzing the public debates, critical writings, and the creative works of writers gathered around the journal Menk and writers gathered around the Writers’ Association of Syria and Lebanon (WASL), I comparatively interrogate competing models of literary production and their intersection with Western Armenian’s prolonged linguistic vitality.Talar Chahinian holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and lectures in the Program for Armenian Studies at UC Irvine, where she is also Visiting Faculty in the Department of Comparative Literature. She is the author of Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse University Press, 2023) and co-editor, along with Tsolin Nalbantian and Sossie Kasbarian, of The Armenian Diaspora and Stateless Power: Collective Identity in the Transnational 20th Century (Bloomsbury Press, 2023). She co-edits Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies and contributes regularly to the literary magazine Pakin.

04/08/2024 06:00 PM
Mon, April 08
6:00PM
$
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