Morningside Rites

Still somewhat fresh to the dignity of old age, Columbia University joins the nation's venerables this year as it celebrates its 200th birthday. With due pride, New Yorkers look back over the transformation of the tiny provincial college of 1754 into the colossal cosmopolitan university of today. For as the city has grown in size and importance, so Columbia has grown with it.

New Yorkers, historians say, had ample precedents in college building in the 1750's. New Englanders had not long before held a centennial celebration of their own in Cambridge. A Dr. Samuel Johnson, late of Yale University, listened favorably to the proposals of the trustees of the planned institution, and finally agreed to be the first president of King's, later Columbia, College.

For the next hundred years or so, the names of various Harvard and Yale alumni appear in the list of the university's presidents. But the bonds between the parent Big Three and Columbia are more than mere blood ties. With the coming of the present century, Columbia joined its elders as a university truly cosmopolitan in composition as well as in outlook.

Although large by Ivy standards, with a student body of over 25,000, Columbia has maintained a level of integrity rarely found in the bigger metropolitan colleges. Columbia's sons have excelled in all fields of learning and public affairs. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay are two of the more illustrious names, and of course Dwight D. Eisenhower, though not himself an alumnus, is another whom Morningside Heights has sent on to greater things.

In celebration of its bicentennial, the City, for a nominal thousand dollars, has presented Columbia with 116th Street, which had long run through the middle of its campus. The University has closed the street to traffic, moved in earth, and planted trees and grass in an effort to close out the dirt and noise of a pressing New York. With these trees, a new quiet, and even higher respectability, a great University begins its third hundred years.