University School history

The School of Journalism was established by bequest of Joseph Pulitzer in 1912.

When the Methodist-affiliated university opened in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson gave the dedication.

The first 28 students included five women, a notable figure at a time before women could vote, and an African American student won a fellowship in 1915 to pursue a doctorate.

John Erskine taught the first Great Books Honors Seminar at Columbia College in 1919, making the study of original masterworks the foundation of undergraduate education, and in the same year, a course on war and peace studies originated the College's influential Core Curriculum.

Uni was built in 1924 and occupies a 24-acre site that is designated as a California State Historical Site due to the discovery of the remains of a Native American village and a freshwater spring on the campus that has been used by Native Americans in the area for thousands of years.

Undergraduates were first admitted in 1925, by which time graduate students had shifted to a downtown campus on F Street, near the White House.

In 1928, Columbia–Presbyterian Medical Center, the first such center to combine teaching, research, and patient care, was officially opened as a joint project between the medical school and The Presbyterian Hospital.

Undergraduates were first admitted in 1925, by which time graduate students had shifted to a downtown campus on F Street, near the White House. It was there in the heart of downtown that in 1934, at the start of the New Deal, AU launched a program to help train federal employees in new methods of public administration.

The founding of the School of International Affairs (now the School of International and Public Affairs) in 1946 marked the beginning of intensive growth in international relations as a major scholarly focus of the University.

The Washington Semester Program, founded in 1947, began drawing students from around the nation-and ultimately, the world-to participate in what was then a new concept: semester internships in the nation's capital.

The oral-history movement in the United States was launched at Columbia in 1948.

The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory was established in 1949 in Palisades, New York, and is a leading research institution focusing on global climate change, earthquakes, volcanoes, nonrenewable resources, and environmental hazards.

Columbia celebrated its bicentennial in 1954 during a period of steady expansion.

Paige, Roy C. The United States Story: 75th Anniversary (1965).

Nonresidential, virtual, and open universities, some of which are modeled after Britain’s Open University (1969), may enroll 200,000 or more students, who pursue both degree-credit and noncredit courses of study.

A student-activities center, Alfred Lerner Hall, opened in 1999 and features the Roone Arledge Auditorium and Cinema.

In the years following the signing of the Community Benefits Agreement in May 2009, the new campus in Manhattanville has taken shape.

In 2017, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was most recently the Secretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under former President Barack Obama, was named the 15th President of American University.