College of the City of New York established

It wasn't really a funeral, although the students billed it as one. It was more like a rebirth the day the Free Academy, founded in 1847, was rechristened in 1866 as the College of the City of New York.

The academy had been founded by Townsend Harris, a wealthy merchant and president of the board of education who recruited Horace Webster, a West Point graduate, to conduct an experiment in higher education. "The experiment is to be tried," Webster said, "whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few." Webster stayed on to become the first president of City College.

It began as an all-male institution but was progressive in other ways, forming an academic senate in 1867 (billed as the first student government in the nation) and abolishing chapel attendance early in the twentieth century to make it more welcoming to non-Christian students. In 1907, after enrollment topped thirty-two thousand, the college moved to what would become a thirty-six-acre verdant neo-Gothic campus designed by George Browne Post. (Satellite campuses would later become Brooklyn and Queens Colleges.) Women were admitted to graduate programs in 1930 and, finally, to the college in 1951.

City became known during the 1920s and '30s as "the poor man's Harvard" because, as the college's official history recalls, "in the years when top-fight private schools were restricted to the children of the Protestant establishment, thousands of brilliant individuals (including Jewish students) attended City College because they had no other option. ... Even today, no other public college has produced as many graduates who went on to win Nobel Prizes; like City students today, they were the children of immigrants and the working class, and often the first of their families to go to college.

In the 1930s the college was a political cauldron dominated by Communists, socialists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, other radicals, and tamer progressives, some of whom would emerge decades later as the lapsed liberals who formed the core of neoconservatism. "The memory of poverty and those tedious subway rides has faded with time, whereas what I now recollect most vividly is the incredible vivacity with which we all confronted the dismal 1930s," wrote one of those old liberals, Irving Kristol, without regrets. "If I left City College with a better education than did many students at other and supposedly better colleges, it was because my involvement in radical politics put me in touch with people and ideas that prompted me to read and think and argue with a furious energy."

The twenty-four institutions of higher learning of the City University of New York constitute the largest public urban university system in the country. City, the founding institution, has been joined by ten senior colleges, seven community colleges, an honors college, and five graduate and professional schools, with a fulltime enrollment of more than 160,000.

TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS - 101 OBJECTS