Columbia: Bicentennial on Broadway

Literally founded on the combined proceeds of public lottery and a gift of the House of God, Columbia University will be officially two hundred years old in two weeks.

In the early years of the eighteenth century, Trinity Church acquired 32 acres of farm land on the outskirts of the town of New York and proposed to donate part of the land for the site of a college campus. For years, leading men of the thriving commercial center had been agitating for a college to compete with those already established in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Virginia.

In December of 1746 the colonial general assembly authorized a standard public lottery, with death penalty for ticket forgers, to raise funds for the founding of a college. When in 1754 3,000 pounds had been raised by this method, newly picked trustees accepted Trinity's offer and established New York's first college. It was called King's College, in honor of Kind George II, who signed the royal charter on October 31, 1754.

Charter Dinner Oversubscribed

Samuel Johnson, a Yale graduate and Connecticut cleric, reluctantly rode down to accept the presidency of the new institution. Nine years later he resigned, bewildered by the complexities of city life, but only after he had seen the nation's fifty oldest college--renamed Columbia after the Revolutionary War--established as New York's challenge to Princeton, New Haven, and Cambridge.

This year, four campuses further uptown, Columbia is celebrating the 200th year since President Johnson first began classes in Trinity Church's vestry room. Two weeks from today on October 31, the day Kind George 11 signed the charter, the last of three great convocations will be held on Morning side Heights. It will climax one of the most extensive--and praiseworthy-- birthday celebrations ever undertaken by an American university.

Queen Mother Elizabeth will be guest of honor at the Convocation, in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. She will be the to represent the royal family as Columbia awards honorary degrees for the third time this year. She will also represent the royal family at the massive Charter Day Dinner planned for the night of October 30th in downtown New York.

Sensing the drawing of British royalty--as well as other celebrities involved--the Bicentennial Planning Committee has not been surprised to find the Charter Day Dinner heavily oversubscribed. What has surprised it, however, has been the subscription of men and universities throughout the free world to the more serious--and significant--side of Columbia' celebration: the joint advocacy of freedom of knowledge.

A group of faculty members, alumni, trustees, and student shad agreed as early as 1946 that modern world conditions demanded the University undertake a program more positive than the traditional birthday party-fund raising celebration. Discussion brought forth the idea of attempting to center the world's attention on the free and just use of knowledge. It was a noble idea and a difficult task. Ironically, the Committee was afraid its scheme would no longer prove apt by 1954. Nevertheless, it adopted the ponderous phrase, "man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof" and began planning to unite the world behind this slogan.

In December of 1952, the plan further consolidated when Grayson L. Kirk, then vice president and provost of the University, undertook an extensive tour of European capitals discussing cooperative efforts with educational leaders.

The thousands of dollars poured into propagation of this theme can perhaps be considered pump priming for the University' parched treasury. More than one Columbia professor has pointed out unashamedly that the financial advantages of a two hundredth anniversary are too much to be entirely ignored or forgotten. Moreover, they say, Harvard legitimized anniversary appeals for funds by its own campaign during its Tercentenary in 1936. But there would seem to be little evidence to back the view that Columbia is only advertising itself. The prime consideration of the administration has not been with money but with spreading its theme. The University has assumed, in fact, a somewhat publicize itself. "The theme was selected," the committee said at the time, "with full realization than the idea was even greater than the institution represented."

Conversion On Morning side

One of the University's main projects for the Bicentennial year has been assembling and distributing a series of panels with text written by Mark Van Doren, illustrating and interpreting "Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof." Typically only once in the 60 panel exhibit does the name Columbia appear, and that is on the title card down in the right hand corner, stating briefly that the collection has been "arranged by Columbia on the occasion of its Bicentennial." Appeal has been made not to potentially susceptible and prosperous businessmen but to other educational institutions, and the appeal has not been wasted. The set of panels has been seen in universities, libraries, and museums all over the free world. It has proven so popular that the State Department has adopted a smaller edition for more extensive showing abroad.

The eleventh panel, for instance, is based on Goethe's belief, "There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action. "As an illustration the panel includes a picture of the Ku Kiux Klan demonstrating against the Atlanta Constitution.

It is Columbia's honesty in including a KKK picture to be seen abroad that has appealed to foreigners.

When Columbia selected its theme, the scheme met with considerable skepticism on the part of many students and faculty members. Some still feel that the University has attempted too much, and others that it is spending too much.

But the campaign has wrought conversion at Morning side as it has brought forth a far greater response than any but the most optimistic had expected. Columbia administrators now intimated that the Bicentennial will pay for itself and perhaps draw an unsolicited profit. If private reaction has approached the enthusiasm of other universities, they may be right. Over 300 different places outside the United States are participating actively in the celebration. In the U.S., more than 700 institutions have dedicated programs to the theme. Lone response to invitations sent to Russia and the satellites came three years later from the head of the Soviet Academy of Science. He admitted Columbia's appeal was "timely," but concluded her concern with the problem only showed there was no freedom of thought or action in American universities.

Last of Five Conferences

Typical of the reception the entire celebration has received has been that 13 half-hour Sunday radio broadcasts on "Tradition and Change." The University advertised at the beginning of each lecturer a collection of the complete series in book form for one dollar. But when it tried to have the collection printed, no major publisher was willing to assume the risk of the book selling. Finally, the University reluctantly guaranteed a small printer it would cover all costs if 2500 copies were not sold. The books, containing the talks by Arnold Toynbee Joseph Wood Crutch, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnam, and others, were thus finally printed and now have sold 25,000 copies. The Voice of America liked these same talks so much that it adopted them to be beamed behind the Iron Curtain.

The final phase of the Bicentennial at the end of this month will be much like the earlier ones in January and June. Five different conferences attended by international scholars (as well as the Charter Day Dinner and final Convocation) will take place during the week leading up to October 31. Climaxing the series of high-level academic discussions held throughout 1954 on aspects of "The Unity of Knowledge" will be a gathering of 75 scholars at Arden House in Harriman, New York. After three days of closed discussions they will return to New York for one public meeting on the 30th to summarize their thoughts publicly. The following day many of them will undoubtedly receive honorary degrees as President Pusey did last June at the second Convocation.

it has been a busy year on Morning side Heights, one crowded with visiting celebrities and crowded conferences, one unlike any other in the University's history. The institution somehow never got around to celebrating its first hundred years, and seems almost to be trying to make up for the loss now. But, although administrators have been somewhat harder pressed this year than in the past, the passing of the 200th anniversary has not rearranged basic facts about Columbia; its distinguishing characteristics and its 200-year-old problems remain.

A City Needs A University

Located in New York between 114th and 124th Streets off Broadway, the University bears a peculiar relationship to that city. As the founders insisted 200 years ago, a city needs a university. Columbia was built up with responsibility to New York in mind and has become an indispensable asset to the metropolis. It has succeeded in meeting the higher educational needs of New York, especially at the graduate school level, while maintaining its position among the leading scholarly institutions in the country.

And yet New York, which Columbia is so proud to serve, has restricted it in its efforts to expand and better serve. It was on August 23, 1756 that the college made its first transition to King's farm and settled itself for its lifelong struggle with the dollar and the acre.

In 1814, the state legislature handed the trustees 20 acres of botanical garden land three miles north of the city instead of $80,000 in lottery money they really wanted. The college fortunately was unable to move at the time, and when it finally had to, through desperate need of space, the trustees found it less expensive to take over the old Deaf and Dumb Asylum between 40th and 50th Streets, right next to the half-covered coffins in Potter's Field, than to build on the botanical land. That land remained in Columbia's possession, however, gradually increasing in value until it became the site for Reockefeller Center. It now pays the University a yearly rent of three and a half million dollars. By the time this rent was coming in the University had had to move again to the uptown bluffs now known as Morningside Heights.

Gehrig's Park Gone

There on the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, Low Memorial Library was built looking out over a muddy 116th Street to the farm land beyond. Today Low Library still sands, but faces onto those buildings that have come to typify Columbia University to the outside world. John Jay Hall, Hamilton Hall, the new Bradley Library, and others rise straight up like huge apartment houses, finding space in the air that Columbia does not have on the ground. The farm land on which Lou Gehrig once awaited home runs now supports a small area of grass, the only campus the University can provide. It is about half the size of the Yard and is the most convenient method of distinguishing the University amid the Broadway traffic and tall buildings of that part of New York. The Bicentennial has been the cause for resodding the "campus" and including 116 Street in the job, for New York City sold the block of the noisy crowded street in front of Low Library to the University for the nominal sum of $1,000 in June. Many undergraduates undoubtedly consider that sum the best spent of the entire Bicentennial.

Within earshot of the honking Broadway traffic amid skyscraper like dormitories, the Columbia student has listened to respected lecturers and continued to pursue his academic life while the Bicentennial office in Low Memorial Library planned ways to unite the world in a reaffirmation of the ideal of freedom of knowledge. The academic activity of the University for 1954 have been curiously distant from each other. Students, aside from two student government, staged conferences last Spring, have only really met the Bicentennial through reports of conferences last Spring, have only really met the Bicentennial through reports of conferences in the Spectator. Perhaps as anything has come to making this year stand out over any other has been the sodding of 116th Street with the grass from a New Jersey polo field.

The Bicentennial celebration has been nonetheless significant. It has been directed not inwardly but outwardly, and it must be commended for its efforts--and success--in that direction.

Impact Important

That outward purpose was hopefully summed up by President Kirk when he spoke at the American Ambassador's home in London in December of 1952.

"If in 1954, as we all at Columbia do all we can to lay emphasis upon the importance of 'Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof', other institutions in the free world take the opportunity to join in proclaiming their belief in its fundamental importance to human freedom and progress, and if these actions are reported, the aggregate impact would become genuinely important in a political sense and be heard around the world as a reaffirmation of our faith."Before Low Library and the Statue of Alma Mater, President Pusey receives his honorary degree from Columbia's President Kirk at the joint graduation and June Bicentennial exercises on Morningside Heights.