The City College of The City University of New York (known more commonly as the City College of New York or simply City College) is a senior college of the City University of New York, in New York City. It is also the oldest of City University's twenty institutions of higher learning. City College's campus is on a hill overlooking Harlem; its impressive neo-gothic campus was mostly designed by George B. Post.

CCNY is widely considered to be the flagship municipal college of New York City.

History

City College was originally founded as the Free Academy of the City of New York in 1847 by Townsend Harris to provide children of the poor and immigrants access to higher education. It was subsequently named the College of the City of New York, but that name was later transferred to the complex of the municipally-owned colleges in New York City, which was the predecessor of the modern City University of New York. At that time, CCNY became officially City College of the College of the City of New York, and later adopted its current name when CUNY was formally established as the umbrella institution for New York City's municipal-college system in 1961. The name City College of New York, however, is in general use.

In the years when top-flight private schools were restricted to the children of the Protestant Establishment, thousands of brilliant individuals attended City College because they had no other option. CCNY's academic excellence and status as a working-class school earned it the title "Harvard of the Proletariat." Even today, after three decades of relative mediocrity, no other public college has produced as many Nobel laureates.

In its heyday through the 1930s and 1950s, CCNY became known for its political radicalism. It was said that CCNY was the place for arguments between Trotskyites and Stalinists. Alumni who were at City College in the mid-twentieth century said that City College in those days made Berkeley in the 1960s look like a school of conformity.

In the late 1960s, black and Puerto Rican activists and white allies demanded that City College implement an aggressive affirmative action program. The administration of CCNY balked at the idea, but instead came up with an open-admissions program under which any graduate of a NYC high school could matriculate. The program opened doors to college to many who would not otherwise have been able to attend college, but came at the cost of City College's academic standing and NYC's fiscal health.

City College began charging admissions in the 1970s and abandoned open admissions in the 1990s.

Notable alumni

Nobel Laureates

• Julius Axelrod - 1970 Nobel laureate in Medicine
• Kenneth Arrow - 1972 Nobel laureate in Economics
• Herbert Hauptman - 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry
• Robert Hofstadter - 1961 Nobel laureate in Economics
• Jerome Karle - 1985 Nobel laureate in Chemistry
• Arthur Kornberg - 1959 Nobel laureate in Medicine
• Leon M. Lederman - 1988 Nobel laureate in Physics
• Arno Penzias - 1978 Nobel laureate in Physics

Politics, Government, and Sociology

• Daniel Bell - sociologist, professor at Harvard University
• Bernard M. Baruch - Wall Street financier and adviser to American Presidents for 40 years, from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy.
• Abraham D. Beame - mayor of New York City, 1974 to 1977
• Stephen Bronner - political theorist, professor at Rutgers University
• Nathan Glazer - neoconservative political pundit
• Irving Howe - coined the phrase "New York Jewish Intellectual"
• Ed Koch - mayor of New York City, 1978 to 1989
• Irving Kristol - neoconservative pundit
• Colin L. Powell - United States Secretary of State
• Julius Rosenberg - infamous convicted spy during the Cold War

The Arts

• Paddy Chayevsky - famed playwright for the stage and screen, wrote Marty and Altered States
• Ira Gershwin - American lyricist, collaborator with, and brother of George Gershwin
• Arthur Guiterman, humorous poet
• E.Y. "Yip" Harburg - American lyricist (The Wizard of Oz, Finian's Rainbow, others)
• Oscar Hijuelos - Pulitzer Prize winning writer
• Judd Hirsch - American actor

Science and Technology

• Julius Blank - engineer, member of the Traitorous Eight that founded Silicon Valley
• George Washington Goethals - civil engineer, best known for his supervision of construction and the opening of the Panama Canal
• Dan Goldin - served as the 9th and longest-tenured Administrator of NASA.
• Andy Grove - 4th employee of Intel, and eventually its president, CEO, and chairman, and TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1997
• Robert E. Kahn - Internet pioneer, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, co-recipient of the Turing Award in 2004.
• Lewis Mumford - historian of technology
• Charles Lane Poor - noted astronomer
• Jonas Salk - inventor of the Salk vaccine (see polio vaccine)

External links

• Official website
• Arguing the World - PBS documentary about the "New York Intellectuals," who came of age at City College