New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan. Founded in 1831, NYU is the largest private, nonprofit institution of higher education in the United States. NYU is consistently ranked as a leading academic institution in the world.
NYU is organized into 18 schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, as well as other sites across the globe. NYU operates study abroad facilities in London, Paris, Florence, Prague, Madrid, Berlin, Accra, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv in addition to the Singapore campus of the Tisch School of the Arts, and will open a comprehensive liberal arts campus in Abu Dhabi in 2010 and a site in Washington, D.C. in 2012.
With 12,500 residents, NYU has the seventh-largest university housing system in the U.S. and the largest among private schools. Some of the first fraternities in the country were formed at NYU.
NYU's sports teams are called the Violets, the colors being the trademarked hue "NYU Violet", and white. The school mascot resembles a bobcat. Almost all sports teams at NYU participate in the NCAA's Division III and the University Athletic Association. While NYU has had All-American football players, it has not had a varsity football team since the 1960s.
NYU counts 33 Nobel Prize winners, 3 Abel Prize winners, 16 Pulitzer Prize winners, 19 Academy Award winners, and Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winners. NYU also has MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as National Academy of Sciences members among its past and present graduates and faculty.
History
A group of prominent New York City residents – the city's landed class of merchants, bankers, and traders – established NYU on April 18, 1831. These New Yorkers believed the city needed a university designed for young men who would be admitted based on merit, not birthright, status, or social class. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury under Thomas Jefferson, is cited as the founder. NYU was created non-denominational, unlike many American colonial colleges at the time.[20]
The University Heights campus, now home to the Bronx Community College.
On April 21, 1831, the new institution received its charter and was incorporated as the University of the City of New York by the New York State Legislature; older documents often refer to it by that name. The university has been popularly known as New York University since its beginning and was officially renamed New York University in 1896. In 1832, NYU held its first classes in rented rooms of four-story Clinton Hall, situated near City Hall.[20] In 1835, the School of Law, NYU's first professional school, was established.
Whereas NYU had its Washington Square campus since its founding, the university purchased a campus at University Heights in the Bronx because of overcrowding on the old campus. NYU also had a desire to follow New York City's development further uptown. NYU's move to the Bronx occurred in 1894, spearheaded by the efforts of Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken.[20] The University Heights campus was far more spacious than its predecessor was. As a result, most of the university's operations along with the undergraduate College of Arts and Science and School of Engineering were housed there. With most of NYU's operations transferred to the new campus, the Washington Square campus declined; only the law school remained there until the establishment of Washington Square College in 1914. This college would become the downtown arts and sciences division of NYU. In 1935, NYU opened the "Nassau College-Hofstra Memorial of New York University at Hempstead, Long Island". This extension would later become a fully independent Hofstra University.[21]
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, financial crisis gripped the New York City government and the troubles spread to the city's institutions, including NYU.[22] Feeling the pressures of imminent bankruptcy, NYU President James McNaughton Hester negotiated the sale of the University Heights campus to the City University of New York, which occurred in 1973. After the sale of the Bronx campus, University College merged with Washington Square College. In the 1980s, under the leadership of President John Brademas, NYU launched a billion-dollar campaign that was spent almost entirely on updating facilities. The campaign was set to complete in 15 years, but ended up being completed in 10. In 2003 current President John Sexton launched a 2.5-billion dollar campaign for funds to be spent especially on faculty and financial aid resources.
Washington Square and Greenwich Village have been hubs of cultural life in New York City since the early nineteenth century. Much of this culture has intersected with NYU at various points in its history. Artists of the Hudson River School, the United States’ first prominent school of painters, settled around Washington Square. Samuel F.B. Morse, the first chair of Painting and Sculpture at NYU, and Daniel Huntington were early tenants of the Old University Building in the mid-nineteenth century. (The University rented out studio space and residential apartments within the "academic" building.) Artists and intellectuals such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman contributed to the artistic scene near NYU. As a result, they had notable interaction with the cultural and academic life of the University.
In the 1870s, sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French lived and worked near the Square. By the 1920s, Washington Square Park area was nationally recognized as a focal point for artistic and moral rebellion. As such, the Washington Square campus became more diverse and bustled with urban energy, leading to academic change at NYU. Famed residents of this time include Eugene O'Neill, John Sloan, and Maurice Prendergast. In the 1930s, the abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and the realists Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton had studios around Washington Square. In the 1960s the area became one of the centers of the beat and folk generation, when Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan settled there. This led to tension with the University, which at the time was in the midst of an aggressive facilities expansion phase.
Campus
Most of NYU's buildings are located across a roughly 229 acre area bounded by Houston Street to the south, Broadway to the east, 14th Street to the north, and Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas) to the west. The core of NYU's buildings surround Washington Square Park.
Washington Square campus
Since the late 1970s, the central part of NYU has been its Washington Square campus in the heart of Greenwich Village. Despite being public property the Washington Square Arch is the unofficial symbol of NYU. Until 2007, NYU had held its commencement ceremonies in Washington Square Park, but moved the ceremonies to Yankee Stadium in 2008 because of renovations to Washington Square.
In the 1990s, NYU became a "two square" university by building a second community around Union Square, about a 10-minute walk from Washington Square. NYU's Union Square community primarily consists of the sophomore priority residence halls of Carlyle Court, Palladium Residence Hall, Alumni Hall, Coral Tower, Thirteenth Street Hall,University Hall, and freshmen residence hall Third North Residence Hall.
NYU operates theaters and performance facilities that are often used by the University's music conservatory and Tisch School of the Arts. External productions are also occasionally held in NYU's facilities. The largest performance accommodations at NYU are the Skirball Center for Performing Arts (850 seats) at 566 LaGuardia Place, just south of Washington Square South; and the Eisner-Lubin Auditorium (560 seats) in the Kimmel Center. Recently, the Skirball Center hosted important speeches on foreign policy by John Kerry and Al Gore as well as the recording of the third season finale of The Apprentice. The Skirball Center is the largest performing arts facility south of 42nd Street.
Bobst Library
The Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, built between 1967 and 1972, is the largest library at NYU and one of the largest academic libraries in the United States. Designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster, the 12-story, 425,000-square-foot (39,000 m²) structure sits on the southern edge of Washington Square Park (at 70 Washington Square South) and is the flagship of an eight-library, 4.5 million-volume system. Bobst Library offers three specialized reference centers, 28 miles of open-stacks shelving, and approximately 2,000 seats for student study. The library is visited by more than 6,800 users each day, and circulates more than one million books annually.
Bobst’s Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media is one of the world’s largest academic media centers, where students and researchers use more than 95,000 audio and video recordings per year. The Digital Studio offers a constantly evolving, leading-edge resource for faculty and student projects and promotes and supports access to digital resources for teaching, learning, research and arts events.
Bobst Library is also home to significant special collections. The Fales Collection houses one of the finest collections of English and American fiction in the United States, the unique Downtown Collection, documenting the New York literary avante-garde arts scene from the 1970s to the present, and the Food and Cookery Collection, which documents American food history with a focus on New York City. Bobst Library also houses the Tamiment Library, one of the finest collections in the world for scholarly research in labor history, socialism, anarchism, communism, and American radicalism. Tamiment includes the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, the Archives of Irish America, the Center for the Cold War and the U.S., and the Frederic Ewen Academic Freedom Center.
Bobst is also infamous for the several suicides that occurred inside the building, in which students jumped from the corridors of the higher floors down to the lobby below. In response, NYU created plexiglass barriers around these corridors to prevent students from jumping, and expanded an initiative to reach out to students regarding mental health.
New facilities
Since the early 2000s NYU has developed new facilities on and around its Washington Square Campus. The Kimmel Center for University Life was built in 2003 to serve as the primary location for the university's student services offices. The center also houses the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, the Rosenthal Pavilion, the Eisner & Lubin Auditorium, and the Loeb Student Center. The School of Law built Furman Hall in 2004, incorporating elements of two historic buildings into the new facade, one of which was occupied by poet Edgar Allan Poe.
In 2005, NYU announced the development of a new life science facility on Waverly Place. The facility is the first NYU science building developed since the opening of Meyer Hall in 1971. In November 2005, NYU announced plans to build a 26-floor, 190,000-square-foot (18,000 m2) residence hall on 12th Street. The residence hall, named "Founders Hall", accommodates about 700 undergraduates and contains a host of other student facilities. It is the tallest building in the East Village. The plans have caused anger among East Village and other New York City residents, as the new building would be built over the old St. Ann's Church.
Brooklyn Campus
The Polytechnic Institute of New York University (aka NYU-Poly) is located in Downtown Brooklyn. It is centrally located in the MetroTech Center and is close to transportation routes and easily accessible from all parts of New York City and Long Island. The university has state-of-the-art facilitates including a brand new library and new faculties for its electrical engineering, computer science and computer engineering programs. The Brooklyn campus offers programs primarily for undergraduates students but also offers opportunities for graduate students, including those executive programs for students with related experience.
Polytechnic Institute played a leadership role in bringing about MetroTech Center, one of the largest urban university-corporate parks in the world and the largest in the United States. Today, the 16-acre (65,000 m²), $1 billion complex is home to the institute and several technology-dependent companies, including Securities Industry Automation Corporation (SIAC), New York City Police Department's 911 Center, New York City Fire Department Headquarters and the U.S. technology and operations functions of JPMorgan Chase. In 1998, a Marriott Hotel was built adjacent to MetroTech. MetroTech has proven to be a case study in effective university, corporate, government and private-developer cooperation. It has resulted in renewing an area that once was characterized more by urban decay.
Wunsch Building houses the school's student union and is used to host many social, cultural, and academic events for the school and community. The building dates back to 1847 and was the first independent black church in Brooklyn. It was also a stop on the Underground Railroad and has been designated a historic landmark since November 24, 1981.
The Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology, opened in 1990 in a new building, is Polytechnic's information hub, accessible online from anywhere, on or off campus, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In addition, wireless networks allow users with notebook computers to access the library's electronic services from anywhere on campus.