York University (NYU)

York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian American research university based in New York City. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private non-profit institutions of American higher education. NYU's main campus is located at Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan with institutes and centers on the Upper East Side, academic buildings and dorms down on Wall Street, and the Brooklyn campus located at MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn. The University also established NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai and maintains 11 other Global Academic Centers in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C

NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1950. NYU counts thirty-six Nobel Prize winners, four Abel Prize winners, three Turing Award winners, over thirty National Medals for Science, Technology and Innovation, Arts and Humanities recipients, over thirty Pulitzer Prize winners, over thirty Academy Award winners, as well as several Russ Prize, Gordon Prize, Draper Prize and Fields Medal winners, and dozens of Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. NYU also has many MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as hundreds of National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and American Academy of Arts and Sciences members, and a plethora of members of the United States Congress and heads of state of countries all over the world, among its past and present graduates and faculty. NYU has the most Oscar winners of any university. The alumni of NYU are amongst the wealthiest in the world, and include seventeen living billionaires.

NYU is organized into more than twenty schools, colleges, and institutes, located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. According to the Institute of International Education, NYU sends more students to study abroad than any other US college or university, and the College Board reports more online searches by international students for "NYU" than for any other university.

History:

Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, declared his intention to establish "in this immense and fast-growing city ... a system of rational and practical education fitting for all and graciously opened to all". A three-day long "literary and scientific convention" held in City Hall in 1830 and attended by over 100 delegates debated the terms of a plan for a new university. These New Yonkers believed the city needed a university designed for young men who would be admitted based upon merit rather than birthright, status, or social class. On April 18, 1831, an institution was established, with the support of a group of prominent New York City residents from the city's landed class of merchants, bankers, and traders. Albert Gallatin was elected as the institution's first president. 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. In 1835, the School of Law, NYU's first professional school, was established. Although the impetus to found a new school was partly a reaction by evangelical Presbyterians to what they perceived as the Episcopalianism of Columbia College, NYU was created non-denominational, unlike many American colleges at the time.

The University Heights campus:

It became one of the nation's largest universities, with an enrollment of 9,300 in 1917. 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. 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. NYU's administrative operations were moved to the new campus, but the graduate schools of the university remained at Washington Square. In 1914, Washington Square College was founded as the downtown undergraduate college 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.

In 1950, NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities, a nonprofit organization of leading public and private research universities.

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. 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. In 1973, the New York University School of Engineering and Science merged into Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, which in turn merged into NYU to form the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering in 2014. 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 President John Sexton launched a $2.5 billion campaign for funds to be spent especially on faculty and financial aid resources.

In 2009, the university responded to a series of New York Times interviews that showed a pattern of labor abuses in its fledgling Abu Dhabi location, creating a statement of labor values for Abu Dhabi campus workers. A 2014 follow-up article in The Times found that while some conditions had improved, contractors for the multi billion-endowment university were still frequently subjecting their workers to third-world labor conditions. The article documented that these conditions included confiscation of worker passports, forced overtime, recruitment fees and cockroach-filled dorms where workers had to sleep under beds. According to the article, workers who attempted to protest the NYU contractors' conditions were promptly arrested. The university responded the day of the article with an apology to the workers. Another report was published and it maintains that those who were on strike were arrested by police who then promptly abused them in a police station. Many of those who were not local were then deported to their country.

NYU was the founding member of the League of World Universities, an international organization consisting of rectors and presidents from urban universities across six continents. The league and its 47 representatives gather every two years to discuss global issues in education. L. Jay Oliva formed the organization in 1991 just after he was inaugurated president of New York University.

Academics

Schools and colleges

Flags identify NYU buildings around the city. This flag is for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

New York University comprises the following schools and colleges:

Arts & Science

College of Arts and Science

Graduate School of Arts and Science

Liberal Studies

Center for Urban Science and Progress

College of Dentistry

College of Global Public Health

College of Nursing

Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences

Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Institute of Fine Arts

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

Leonard N. Stern School of Business

NYU Abu Dhabi

NYU Shanghai

Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service

Silver School of Social Work

School of Law

School of Medicine

School of Professional Studies

Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development

Tandon School of Engineering

Tisch School of the Arts

Arts and Science is currently NYU's largest academic division. It has three subdivisions: the College of Arts and Science, the Graduate School of Arts and Science, and the Liberal Studies program.The College of Arts and Science and Liberal Studies program are undergraduate divisions, and the former has existed since the founding of NYU.

Undergraduate divisions are also found in the College of Dentistry, College of Nursing, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai, Tandon School of Engineering, Silver School of Social Work, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Tisch School of the Arts. Postgraduate divisions are found in all of NYU's schools and colleges.

NYU has closed and merged various colleges and schools throughout its history, sometimes after affiliating with other institutions. For example, Polytechnic University affiliated with NYU in 2008 to become the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and in 2014 it merged with NYU to become the Polytechnic School of Engineering.

Admissions

Admission to NYU's undergraduate programs is highly selective, with 18,500 admitted from an applicant pool of 60,322 (31%) for the class of 2019.

Total freshman enrollment is 5,873 for the 2014–2015 academic year, representing 49 states and 90 countries, with 19% as non-US citizens. Most freshmen have a typical unweighted GPA of 3.5/A (90–95%) and are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. 50% of freshmen score between 1900 and 2140 on the SAT and between 28 and 32 on the ACT. The student-to-faculty ratio at the New York campus is 10:1, and less than that at the Abu Dhabi and Shanghai campuses. The average scholarship amount awarded to freshmen is $29,528, and 22% of freshmen received Pell Grants.

In the 2014–2015 academic year, NYU enrolled more international students than any other US academic institution, led by students from China.

Faculty and alumni

Main articles: List of New York University alumni and List of New York University faculty

NYU is home to many prominent alumni. At least thirty-six Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with NYU. NYU has 470,000 living alumni as of 2015. Notable graduating classes include 1941, which graduated three later Nobel Prize laureates (Julius Axelrod, Gertrude B. Elion and Clifford Shull), Olympic Gold Medalist John Woodruff, sportscaster Howard Cosell and sociologist Morris Janowitz; 1951 included professor emeritus at MIT and former DARPA director Jack Ruina and Cathleen Synge Morawetz, first woman recipient of National Medal of Science; 1957 included Pulitzer Prize winning author Frank McCourt and president of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Josef Singer; 1964 included former Chief Engineer of NASA Johnson Space Center, Jay Greene and film director Martin Scorsese; and 1977 included: former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan; IRS Commissioner Mark Everson; INSEAD Dean Gabriel Hawawini; Pulitzer, Oscar and Tony Award winner John Patrick Shanley; NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman; physicist Lewis E. Little; NASDAQ CEO Robert Greifeld; Ma Ying-jeou president of Republic of China (Taiwan); Guillermo Endara president of Republic of Panama, Clive Davis music industry executive, and Cathy Minehan, Federal Reserve Chairman Boston.

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 (39,500 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 one Multidisciplinary Reference Center, a Research Commons, 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.

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 as the primary location for the university's student services offices. It 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 had been occupied by poet Edgar Allan Poe.

In 2005, NYU announced the development of a new life science facility on Waverly Place, the first new NYU science building since the opening of Meyer Hall in 1971.[75] 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 approximately 700 undergraduates and contains a host of other student facilities. It is currently the tallest building in the East Village.

Brooklyn campus

NYU's Brooklyn campus is located at MetroTech Center, an urban academic-industrial research park,and is only a few subway stops from the Washington Square campus. It houses the School of Engineering, the Center for Urban Science and Progress and also several of Tisch School of the Arts and Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development's degree programs. The Brooklyn campus also houses NYU's Game Center Open Library, which is the largest collection of games held by any university in the world. The NYU shuttle bus system connects the Brooklyn campus with the Washington Square campus.

Other campuses and facilities

The New York University School of Medicine is situated near the East River waterfront at 550 First Avenue between East 30th and 34th Streets. The campus hosts the medical school, Tisch Hospital, and the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.[81] Other NYU Centers across the city include NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases and the Bellevue Hospital Center. NYU's Silver School of Social Work (formerly Ehrenkranz School of Social Work) manages branch campus programs in Westchester County at Manhattanville College, in Rockland County at St. Thomas Aquinas College, and on Staten Island at the City University of New York's College of Staten Island.

In Sterling Forest, near Tuxedo, NYU has a research facility that contains institutes, in particular the Nelson Institute of Environmental Medicine. The Midtown Center at 11 West 42nd Street is home to the NYU Schack Institute of Real Estate. The Woolworth Building in the financial district is home to NYU's professional studies and education programs.

NYU has two units located on the Upper East Side. The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a discrete entity within NYU, independent of any other school or department of the university, is located on East 84th Street,[87] while the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, a graduate school of art history and fine arts, is located at the James B. Duke Building at 1 East 78th Street.

The Tandon School of Engineering has locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It is one of the oldest private engineering schools in the United States.

NYU has international houses on its Manhattan campus, including the Deutsches Haus, La Maison Française, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò, the Glucksman Ireland House, the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, the Hagop Kevorkian Center, an Africa House and a China House.

Campuses abroad

Tisch School of the Arts, Asia was NYU's first branch campus abroad. The result of a partnership between Tisch School of the Arts and the Singapore Government, it offered Master of Fine Arts degrees in animation and digital arts, dramatic writing, film and international media producing. The campus opened in fall 2007 with the intention to enroll approximately 250 students. Anticipated enrolment figures were not achieved, financial irregularities were alleged and President Pari Sara Shirazi was dismissed from her post by NYU in November 2011. She subsequently announced her intention to commence legal proceedings against NYU alleging wrongful termination and defamation. In a letter to the Tisch Asia community dated November 8, 2012, Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell announced that the campus would close after 2014 with recruitment and admission of new students suspended with immediate effect.

NYU has a host of foreign facilities used for study abroad programs, referred to as Global Academic Centers. As of 2012, NYU operates 14 academic sites – both degree-granting research university campuses and study abroad sites – in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America, including undergraduate academic-year and summer study abroad programs in New York City, Florence, London, Paris, Prague, Berlin, Accra, Madrid, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, Sydney, and Washington, D.C. One of the most noteworthy is the 57-acre (230,000 m2) campus of NYU Florence Villa LaPietra in Italy, bequeathed by the late Sir Harold Acton to NYU in 1994.

In fall 2010, NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) opened as the university's first overseas "Portal Campus" with an inaugural class of 150 students.[97] Unlike NYU's other study abroad centers, NYUAD functions as a separate liberal arts college within a university, offering complete degree programs to students admitted directly to NYUAD. NYUAD recruits students from all over the world and describes itself as the "World's Honor College". The main campus for NYUAD is under construction on Saadiyat Island and is scheduled to open in 2014. Until then the school operates from a campus located in downtown Abu Dhabi. The campus construction and operational costs are entirely funded by the Abu Dhabi government.

In 2011, NYU announced plans to open another portal campus, New York University Shanghai, for the fall semester of 2013. It was set to have about 3,000 undergraduate students, the majority of whom would be Chinese. It was approved by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China in January 2011. NYU's local partner will be East China Normal University (ECNU). ECNU's president Yu Lizhong will be the chancellor and play a major role in government relations while Jeffrey S. Lehman, former president of Cornell amongst other positions, will serve as vice chancellor and have "free rein in academic affairs".

In spring 2014, NYU opened a new campus in Paris, in the student area of the Quartier Latin, where NYU Law set up an EU Regulatory Policy Clinic taught by Alberto Alemanno and Vincent Chauvet.

Sustainability

NYU has made the greening of its campus a large priority. For example, NYU has been the largest university purchaser of wind energy in the U.S. since 2009. With this switch to renewable power, NYU is achieving benefits equivalent to removing 12,000 cars from the road or planting 72,000 trees. In May 2008, the NYU Sustainability Task Force awarded $150,000 in grants to 23 projects that would focus research and efforts toward energy, food, landscape, outreach, procurement, transportation and waste. These projects include a student-led bike-sharing program modeled after Paris' Velib program with 30 bikes free to students, staff, and faculty. NYU received a grade of "B" on the College Sustainability Report Card 2010 from the Sustainable Endowments Institute.

NYU purchased 118 million kilowatt-hours of wind power during the 2006–2007 academic year – the largest purchase of wind power by any university in the country and any institution in New York City. For 2007, the university expanded its purchase of wind power to 132 million kilowatt-hours.

The EPA ranked NYU as one of the greenest colleges in the country in its annual College & University Green Power Challenge.

Research:

NYU manages one of the largest annual collegiate research budgets of any university in the United States. In 2014, NYU received $524 million in research grants from the National Science Foundation alone.

Admissions

Admission to NYU's undergraduate programs is highly selective, with 18,500 admitted from an applicant pool of 60,322 (31%) for the class of 2019.

Total freshman enrollment is 5,873 for the 2014–2015 academic year, representing 49 states and 90 countries, with 19% as non-US citizens. Most freshmen have a typical unweighted GPA of 3.5/A (90–95%) and are in the top 10% of their high school graduating class. 50% of freshmen score between 1900 and 2140 on the SAT and between 28 and 32 on the ACT. The student-to-faculty ratio at the New York campus is 10:1, and less than that at the Abu Dhabi and Shanghai campuses. The average scholarship amount awarded to freshmen is $29,528, and 22% of freshmen received Pell Grants.

In the 2014–2015 academic year, NYU enrolled more international students than any other US academic institution, led by students from China.

Rankings

University rankings

National

ARWU 19 

U.S. News & World Report 32 

Global

ARWU 27

QS  53 

Times 30 

School Rankings

Ranking #

US News & World Report (Medicine) 14

US News & World Report (Law) 6

US News & World Report (MBA) 11

US News & World Report (Nursing) 6

US News & World Report (Public Affairs) 6

Nationally, NYU is ranked #14 in the Center For World University Rankings,#15 by Global Language Monitor, #17 by QS World University Rankings, #19 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, #24 by Business Insider, and #32 by U.S. News & World Report.

Globally, NYU is ranked #18 in the Center for World University Rankings,#19 in International Colleges and Universities,#27 in the Academic Ranking of World Universities, #30 in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, and #53 in the QS World University Rankings.Additionally, NYU is ranked 20th in the THE World Reputation Rankings.

U.S. News & World Report ranks NYU's graduate schools #6 for law, #6 for public policy, #9 for math (#1 for applied math ), #10 for occupational therapy, #10 for business, #11 for economics, #15 for political science, #19 for medical school research, #20 for education, #21 for nursing, #27 for physical therapy, #29 for computer science, #30 for psychology, and #46 for engineering. In 2010, The Foreign Policy Association ranks the Center for Global Affairs (CGA) in the NYU School of Professional Studies one of the top 10 international relations and public policy graduate programs in the United States. NYU is consistently ranked by The Foreign Policy Association as one of the Top 25 schools in the world to earn a master's degree in International Relations.

Globally, NYU's social sciences are ranked #8 by the Academic Ranking of World Universities, #15 by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings,[142] and #16 by the QS World University Rankings. NYU is globally ranked #11 for psychology by The QS World University Ranking. The Social Psychology Network ranks NYU #5 for industrial/organizational psychology, #14 for clinical psychology, and the U.S. News & World Report ranks NYU #9 for social psychology and #9 for behavioral neuroscience.

The U.S. News & World Report ranks the New York University School of Law #1 for tax law and #1 for international law. The publication also ranks The Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service #6 in public policy. The NYU Department of Philosophy is globally ranked #1 by the The Philosophical Gourmet Report and the QS World University Rankings. In The Los Angeles Times, NYU Tisch School of Arts is ranked #1 for film by Ranker. NYU is ranked #1 for New Ivies by college resource guide Unigo. The Princeton Review ranked NYU in student college admission choices as #1 in 2006, #1 in 2007, and #4 in 2013.The annual Global Employability Survey in The New York Times ranks NYU #11 nationally and #29 globally for employability.

Student organizations

A bus system transports students to and from the far ends of campus.

NYU has over 450 student clubs and organizations on campus.In addition to the sports teams, fraternities, sororities, and study clubs, there are many organizations on campus that focus on entertainment, arts, and culture. These organizations include various student media clubs: for instance, the daily student newspaper the Washington Square News, the NYU Local daily blog, The Plague comedy magazine, "Washington Square Local web-based satire news source, and the literary journals Washington Square Review and The Minetta Review, as well as student-run event producers such as the NYU Program Board and the Inter-Residence Hall Council. It also operates radio station WNYU-FM 89.1 with a diverse college radio format, transmitting to the entire New York metropolitan area from the original campus, and via booster station WNYU-FM1 which fills in the signal in lower Manhattan from atop one of the Silver Towers, next to the football field at the Washington Square campus.

The New York University Mock Trial team is consistently ranked as one of the best collegiate mock trial teams in the country. NYU has qualified for the National Championship Tournament for ten consecutive seasons and placed in the top ten during each of those years. In the 2009-2010 season, NYU won the 26th National Championship Tournament in Memphis over rival Harvard. The following season, they qualified for the final round once more only to be the runner-ups to UCLA. In the American Mock Trial Association's 2015-2016 power rankings, NYU ranks third, behind Harvard and Yale.

During the University Heights era, an apparent rift evolved with some organizations distancing themselves from students from the downtown schools. The exclusive Philomathean Society operated from 1832 to 1888 (formally giving way in 1907 and reconstituted into the Andiron Club). Included among the Andiron's regulations was "Rule No.11: Have no relations save the most casual and informal kind with the downtown schools". The Eucleian Society, rival to the Philomathean Society, was founded in 1832. The Knights of the Lamp was a social organization founded in 1914 at the School of Commerce. This organization met every full moon and had a glowworm as its mascot. The Red Dragon Society, founded in 1898, is thought to be the most selective society at NYU. In addition, NYU's first yearbook was formed by fraternities and "secret societies" at the university.

NYU has traditions which have persisted across campuses. Since the beginning of the 20th century initiation ceremonies have welcomed incoming NYU freshmen. At the Bronx University Heights Campus, seniors used to grab unsuspecting freshmen, take them to a horse-watering trough, and then dunk them head-first into what was known colloquially as "the Fountain of Knowledge". This underground initiation took place until the 1970s. Today freshmen take part in university-sponsored activities during what is called "Welcome Week". In addition, throughout the year the university traditionally holds Apple Fest (an apple-themed country fest that began at the University Heights campus), the Violet Ball (a dance in the atrium of Bobst Library), Strawberry Fest (featuring New York City's longest Strawberry Shortcake), and the semi-annual midnight breakfast where Student Affairs administrators serve free breakfast to students before finals.

Students publish a campus comedy magazine, The Plague. Like many college humor magazines, this often pokes fun at popular culture as well as campus life and the idiosyncrasies of New York University.The Plague was founded in 1978 by Howard Ostrowsky along with Amy Burns, John Rawlins, Joe Pinto and Dan Fiorella, and is currently published once per semester. It is not NYU's first humor magazine, as The Medley was a humor magazine published by the Eucleian Society from 1913 to 1950.