This Day in Education History (Lottery Started for Future Columbia University)

January 12, 1747 – As befitting its location amid the financial capital of New York and the media center of the nation, the history of Columbia University began in money and controversy on this date, as the New York Gazette announced a lottery to raise funds to establish a college in the colony. The notice came a month after a New York assembly bill to raise funds by public lottery for the school of higher learning.

It took a couple of more attempts at a lottery, along with controversy on the college’s location and religious affiliation, before the proposal becomes a reality. Proposals were made to locate the college in Newburgh, Rye, and Hempstead before the final selection: a new schoolhouse next to Trinity Church, near what is now lower Broadway in Manhattan. 

The site was not surprising, given that the overwhelming majority of the lottery commission members consisted of Trinity Church and Dutch Reform members.

In 1753, a newspaper war broke out after commission member William Livingston – the only Presbyterian in the group – attacked the proposal as a plot to create an Anglican college with public funds (an impression not discouraged when the lottery commission accepts Trinity’s demand that the new college would be headed by an Anglican and always use Anglican services). 

To alloy concern concerns over this, the college posted a notice in the Gazette stressing that all will be welcome – all Protestants, that is.

With a royal charter in hand, King’s College opened in 1754. During the American Revolution, it will be divided into Tories (school president Myles Cooper) and several prominent patriots (students Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert Livingstone). In 1784, in a gesture to the new spirit of republicanism overtaking the young country, the school reopened as Columbia University.

In the nineteenth century, Columbia moved uptown to 49th Street and Madison Avenue before settling on its present location, in Morningside Heights, at 116th Street and Broadway, in a more spacious campus designed by Charles McKim, in 1897.

More than a century later, Columbia University in the City of New York still argues with the city about location (a proposed expansion into Manhattanville), as well as religion and its presidents (Lee Bollinger’s hosting of a university appearance by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad). 

Despite my republican (small “r”) sympathies and Irish heritage, I continue to wear proudly every day my class ring, which not only signifies my long-ago attendance at the school but, with its crown set amid the blue background, the university’s beginnings as King’s College.