King's College and Columbia University

King’s College is a royal foundation of 1754 in the City of New York, and Columbia University is the research university that federated around it in the 1880s. They are one institution with two names and two meanings: the college is the undergraduate liberal-arts body at its centre, about three thousand strong, and the university is everything else, about twenty-seven thousand more across law, medicine, engineering, journalism, teaching and the rest. In ordinary speech the answer to which name applies depends entirely on which part is meant, and King’s is used colloquially for both.

The college kept its name because nothing ever required it to be changed. An institution carrying a royal name through a war of separation would have been renamed to scrub an association that had become intolerable. In a Realm that kept the King there was no association to scrub, no independence to mark and no offence to remove. The retention is a standing joke in the Realm about how little the name meant, and the joke is exact rather than cruel: the Crown’s connection to the place consists of a charter and nothing else. There is no Visitor, no royal appointment, no royal money and no royal say. The King’s College has a King in its title and a monarch who, until 2006, had not visited it in decades.

The university’s name arose from an argument rather than a principle. When the modern research institution assembled itself in the 1880s out of the college and a growing collection of professional schools, nobody could agree that the whole thing should be called King’s, and Columbia was the compromise that let the federation proceed. The two names have meant two different things ever since, and the institution has never seen a reason to resolve it.

It is among the first rank of American universities, in a Realm whose higher education is large, expensive, decentralised and internationally dominant, and it charges its students nothing. That is not a right and not a public settlement. The Rights Act’s schooling guarantee reaches compulsory education and has never been read to reach a degree. The chartered foundations charge no tuition because their endowments allow it, while the land-grant universities and nearly all of the vast polity systems, of which California’s is the largest in the world, charge heavily and send their students into debt. The exceptions are a few polities that waive tuition for their own residents, of which the March of Arizona’s is the best known, and none of them covers the cost of living. The inversion, in which the richest institutions are free and nearly all the ordinary ones are not, is the central fact of the Realm’s argument about higher education and the reason this institution’s endowment is politically exposed.

Its strengths are law and medicine, and both grew from the Realm rather than from anywhere else. Its law school and its clinics have shaped the litigation of the American Rights Act for a century, and its teaching hospitals sit inside the National Health Service of America. It has produced three Prime Ministers, two of whom left its law school without degrees. It resisted the loyalty purges of the cold war better than most institutions in the Realm, and its clinics have acted since 2006 for people wrongly placed on watch lists, having first learned what the lists were by watching them fall on its own foreign students.

On 1 May 2006 a device was left in one of its lecture halls in the middle of a working morning. A student saw it, understood it and reported it, and it was the only one of the five that morning that did not go off. The university lost students and staff anyway, at Grand Central, on their way in.

Name and constitution

The charter

The college was chartered in 1754 and the charter is displayed in King’s Hall. It is the oldest royal charter in continuous force in the Realm, which is a distinction the institution mentions rarely and the Realm’s constitutional writers mention often.

What the charter confers is corporate existence, the power to hold property, the power to govern itself and the power to grant degrees. What it does not confer is any continuing role for the Crown. There is no Visitor, the office by which a founder or their successor retains a residual jurisdiction over an English foundation, and the absence appears to have been an oversight in 1754 rather than a design. Successive governing bodies have declined to correct it.

The consequence is that the institution carrying the King’s name is more completely independent of the Crown than almost any other chartered body in the Realm. The American Broadcasting Corporation holds a Crown charter and a founding endowment; this holds a Crown charter and nothing.

The Crown’s absence

The point has been tested. During the crisis of 1968 there were suggestions in the press, and one from a member of the Commons, that the Governor-General might intervene at a royal foundation whose governance had visibly failed. The suggestion went nowhere and the reasoning was published at the time: the Crown had granted a charter two centuries earlier and had reserved itself no power under it, and a Governor-General who acted at King’s College would have been inventing an authority rather than exercising one.

The episode is now cited in constitutional teaching as a minor but clean illustration of a larger rule, that the Crown’s powers are those it actually holds and not those its name implies. That the illustration comes from a university named for the King is the sort of coincidence the Realm enjoys.

The joke

The Realm’s standing joke about the name is not that the name is embarrassing. It is that the name is empty. A radical student periodically discovers the royal title and proposes to be rid of it, and the proposal has never survived contact with the observation that removing a meaningless word would grant it a significance it has never had. The campaigns are remembered fondly and none has come close.

Ernest V came to the campus in the days after the May Day Bombings. It was the first visit by a monarch in decades. That a Crown which had given the place nothing but a name arrived the one time the place was nearly destroyed is the answer the Realm generally gives when the joke is made.

Structure and governance

The two bodies

The Chancellor heads the university and the Provost of King’s College heads the college. The arrangement is modern; through most of the institution’s history a single President headed the whole of it, which is the office Dwight D. Eisenhower held from 1948 to 1951 and the reason his title is recorded in the compound form. The restyling came with the governance reforms that followed 1968.

The division between college and university is administrative rather than felt. There is no resentment of the kind that runs through federated universities elsewhere, no argument about which half is the real institution, and nobody inside it treats the two names as rival loyalties. Students at King’s College and graduate students across the university describe themselves as being at the same place, and the paperwork is the only thing that distinguishes them.

The Chancellor is Dr Corinne Vasquez, a constitutional lawyer who directed the rights clinics for eleven years before her election. Her appointment was read at the time as the governing body making a statement about what the university thought it was for, and she has not discouraged the reading.

Governing body

The governing body includes elected student members, who sit with vote rather than by courtesy. That was won in 1968 and is the most durable thing the revolt produced.

The academic staff are strongly unionised, which in a Realm with a labour movement of this weight is unremarkable, and the unions bargain across the whole federation rather than school by school. The university fought recognition for a period in the mid-twentieth century and lost, and the relationship since has been businesslike and occasionally cold.

What the university contains

Beyond King’s College the federation comprises the schools of law, medicine, engineering, journalism, business and the arts, a graduate faculty of arts and sciences, Teachers College, and the women’s college that federated in the nineteenth century and retains its separate foundation. Teachers College is where Shirley Chisholm took her master’s in early-childhood education, and it remains the largest institution of its kind in the Realm.

The federated bodies retain their own charters, endowments and governing arrangements, and the university’s authority over them is real but negotiated. It is a confederation rather than a unitary state, a structure the Realm’s writers have never been able to resist comparing to the Realm.

History

The royal foundation, 1754 to 1775

The college was founded in 1754 by royal charter, opening with eight students in a schoolhouse beside Trinity Church under Samuel Johnson, its first president. It was Anglican in foundation, and the founding was contested along exactly that line: New York’s Presbyterians and Dutch Reformed opposed a colonial college tied to the established church, and the argument over whether it should be Anglican at all lasted longer than the negotiation over its endowment.

It remains formally Anglican, and the connection is not vestigial. The chapel is in use, the academic calendar is built on the Church’s, and the chaplaincy is a real establishment within the Church of America. The institution’s Anglicanism is now a matter of form and custom rather than of doctrine or admission, and it has not been a test for students or fellows for the better part of two centuries.

Part of the founding endowment came from slavery. The university has documented this in an official history and has apologised for it formally, and the article’s treatment of that history is described below.

The war, 1775 to 1779

The Four-Year War reached New York early and the college did not close. It kept teaching, barely, through four years in which the city changed hands and its buildings were repeatedly requisitioned, and the continuity is a matter of institutional pride out of all proportion to the number of students involved, which at points fell into single figures.

Its allegiance was divided along an unusually clean line: patriot in its students and loyalist in its governors. The undergraduates were substantially for the American cause and several left to fight for it; the board and the senior fellowship were substantially for the Crown. Both were proved partly right by a settlement that gave the colonies self-government under a monarchy neither faction had quite been arguing for, and the college has since found the division comfortable rather than awkward.

Its founding alumni are the men the period produced. Alexander Hamilton studied there and left to serve. John Jay, who became the second Governor-General of the United Kingdom of America in 1797, was a King’s man, and the institution mentions it whenever it decently can.

The small college, 1783 to the 1870s

The Charter of Union of the American Colonies settled the Realm in 1783 and produced no consequence whatever for the college’s name. There was no independence to commemorate, no monarchy to repudiate and no reason to print new stationery. The absence of a renaming is the whole of the institution’s constitutional history for the following century.

What followed was ninety years of being small. The college taught a classical curriculum to a few hundred young men of the city, trained a certain number of them for the church and the bar, and was in no sense a national institution. It was outpaced through this period by Harvard, which was older and never let anyone forget it, and the rivalry between them dates from a period when it was not much of a rivalry at all.

It admitted its first Black students before the American Rights Act of 1866, in very small numbers, which was creditable by the standards of the day and is not claimed as more than that. Formal admission and effective access were different things, and remained so for a century.

Through the sectional crisis and the rebellion of 1861 to 1863 the college kept its head down. It made no institutional statement, sent no distinctive contingent and produced no figure of national consequence. New York was Union and the college was in New York, and that is the extent of what can be said for it.

The federation, 1880s to 1914

The modern institution was made in the research-university wave of the late nineteenth century, when American higher education reorganised itself around graduate study, laboratories and professional faculties. The college acquired schools around it, the schools acquired their own endowments and charters, and by the 1880s the resulting body needed a name that the college’s own would not stretch to cover.

Nobody could agree to call the new university King’s. The college’s fellowship regarded the name as theirs, the new faculties regarded a royal college title as a poor description of a research institution, and Columbia was adopted as the settlement between them. It has done the job ever since.

The move to Morningside Heights followed. The old hall of 1754 was taken down and re-erected stone by stone on the new campus, an act of nineteenth-century piety that produced the odd result that the building the college calls the oldest in the Realm is not standing where it was built. Harvard disputes the title on an older hall of its own, which has been reconstructed more than once, and the argument is conducted on definitions neither institution accepts from the other. King’s Hall now holds the charter, the Provost’s rooms and the college’s smallest and most sought-after teaching space.

Women were admitted early, through the separate women’s college, and the timing owes something to the vice-regency of Frances Willard from 1889, whose eight years made women’s authority ordinary in institutions that had previously found reasons to postpone it. The university’s own account is careful not to claim that it acted from conviction, and records that it acted when the cost of not acting had risen.

The quota years

From the 1920s the college operated a quota limiting the admission of Jewish students. It did so through the machinery that such quotas always use, which is to say through character assessment, geographical distribution, interviews and a preference for the sons of alumni, none of which named the group being excluded and all of which were designed to exclude it.

The Register states this plainly because the institution now does. The quota was maintained for decades, it was defended at the time in language about balance and fit, and it worked. Its abolition was slow and was not accompanied by any reckoning until much later.

The quota is also the reason the modern institution has no legacy preference. When the argument over inherited advantage in admissions reached the university in the present century, the decisive objection was historical: preference for the children of alumni had been one of the instruments of the quota, and the university had documented it as such in its own official history. Legacy preference was abolished recently and bitterly, and the bitterness came from alumni who had not read that history.

The wars and the atomic years

Both Great Wars emptied the classes and filled the laboratories. In the second the enemy was fascist France and the Empire of Japan, and the university’s contribution was research, officer training and medicine on the ordinary scale of a major institution in a total war.

It was centrally involved in atomic research, and it is uncomfortable about it. The work began in its laboratories before moving elsewhere, the university has never disowned the scientists who did it, and it has also never found a way of describing the episode that satisfies anyone. Its official history devotes fewer pages to the atomic years than to the quota, which has itself been the subject of complaint.

One thing that did not happen is worth stating, because its absence shaped everything after. The university was not remade in the 1930s by refugee scholars fleeing fascism in central Europe, because no such migration occurred. Fascism was French, the German Empire remained an ally and a scholarly partner, and the intellectual traffic across the Atlantic continued to run in both directions rather than emptying in one. The university’s rise to the first rank therefore has to be explained by something else, and the something else was domestic.

The rise: law and medicine

Two American institutions made this university what it is, and neither is a university.

The first is the American Rights Act. A statutory bill of rights that is litigated case by case under a standard of reasonable progressive fulfilment, and that is never settled, generates a permanent national demand for constitutional lawyers, and the law school placed itself at the centre of supplying them. Its scholarship shaped how the Act was read; its graduates argued the cases; and it has sent judges to the Royal American Supreme Court in numbers that provoke periodic complaint about a bench drawn too narrowly from one faculty.

The second is the National Health Service of America, founded under Truman after the November 1945 election. A service that guarantees necessary care as an enforceable right, delivered through a mixed network in which public, municipal, church, cooperative and independent providers operate under common duties, requires an enormous and continuous supply of trained physicians and a body of clinical research to sit behind its standards. The medical school and its teaching hospitals entered that settlement early and have been inside it ever since.

Law came first and medicine followed. The pairing is what makes the institution distinctive: it is not a place that rose on physics, and its two great faculties are both concerned with what the Realm owes its people and how that obligation is administered.

Eisenhower, 1948 to 1951

Dwight D. Eisenhower left the office of General-in-Chief in February 1948 and became President of King’s College and Columbia University. He was not good at it, and the faculty said so at the time.

He had no scholarly background, little interest in the internal life of a university and a conception of the office as a public platform rather than an academic one. He was absent often and on business that was not the university’s. The appointment is generally understood as a waiting room between the command he had left and the command he would take up in 1951, when he returned to uniform to build the Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first integrated command, and from there to the premiership in 1952.

The university’s own account is polite and unenthusiastic. It notes that he raised money, that he defended the institution in public at a moment when universities were about to need defending, and that he left.

The loyalty years

The cold war against the Russian Republic reached American campuses as it reached every institution, in the form of loyalty tests, political vetting and pressure to dismiss.

This university resisted better than most, and it regards the episode as its proudest hour. It declined to dismiss staff for their politics, declined to supply lists, and defended people whose opinions its own governors found repellent. The resistance was neither total nor costless, and the official history is careful to record the individuals who were quietly not renewed rather than formally dismissed. But the institution held a line that many comparable institutions did not, and the memory of having done so has shaped what it believed itself obliged to do sixty years later.

Its position was made marginally easier by a fact peculiar to the Realm. Earl Browder, a communist, had served eight years as Governor-General from 1929, on Labour’s advice, and had embodied the Crown through the worst of the Depression without incident. It is difficult for a Realm that placed an avowed communist in the Crown’s resident office to insist that a lecturer’s politics disqualify him from teaching, and the university’s defenders said so at the time, repeatedly and with evident enjoyment.

1968

The defining event of the university’s modern memory took place in 1968, and it was about a building.

The university put up a building on land its neighbours used. The land was theirs in every sense except the legal one, the consultation had been nominal, and the plan proceeded on the assumption that a great institution’s need outweighed a neighbourhood’s habit. Students occupied the site and then the university’s own buildings, in numbers and for a duration that made the ordinary machinery of college discipline irrelevant.

What made it unresolvable quickly was that the building was not the only grievance. The occupation gathered the university’s defence research during the Indochina conflict into the same protest, and the two causes had different constituencies, different demands and no common settlement available. A university that could have conceded the building could not concede the research, and one that conceded neither faced both.

It ended in a negotiated settlement after a long and damaging occupation, and it cost the President his office. The building was abandoned. The neighbourhood relationship was repaired at very great expense over the following two decades and remains watchful rather than warm.

The permanent consequences were three. Students obtained voting places on the governing body, which they retain. The presidency was divided into the modern Chancellorship and Provostship. And the Province of New York legislated on institutional landholding, constraining what universities and other large chartered bodies may acquire and requiring a public process before they build on land in established use. The university is still a major New York landlord, and it operates under a statute its own conduct produced.

King’s College and the Core

King’s College is the undergraduate liberal-arts body at the centre of the university, about three thousand students against the federation’s thirty thousand, and its defining feature is the Core.

Every undergraduate takes it, in small classes, over two years, and it is the same for all of them. It is taught by senior faculty rather than delegated downward, which is expensive and is the point. The Core is the reason the college’s teaching rooms in King’s Hall are the most sought-after space on the campus and the reason a body of three thousand students commands the attention of a university ten times its size.

Its content is fought over continuously and has been since it was established. The settled core of the Core is the western literary and philosophical inheritance, taught in the ordinary way. What has been added, subtracted and re-added is everything else: the Charter of Union of the American Colonies and the American Rights Act are taught as texts rather than as history; the treaty nations appear, though the university’s own critics say they appear thinly and late; and a comparative element on the other Crown realms has come and gone twice.

The recurring objection from the college’s own faculty is that a curriculum designed to give a common inheritance to a common body of students becomes something else when the body of students is drawn from a Realm this various. The recurring answer is that a shared text is the only thing that makes an argument between different people possible at all. Neither side has won and the syllabus is revised roughly every decade.

Law, medicine and the clinics

The law school

The law school’s influence on the Realm runs through its clinics as much as its scholarship, and that is what makes it politically contentious.

The clinics bring cases. They do not merely teach students how cases are brought, or file supporting arguments in other people’s litigation; they act for clients, and the clients they choose have made the university a participant in national arguments rather than an observer of them. Successive ministries have found this irritating, and the criticism, which is made openly, is that a federally funded institution litigates against the government that funds it.

The university’s answer is the audit answer: federal research money comes with accounting obligations and no directive power whatever, and a government that wished to buy the university’s silence would have to say so in a statute. No ministry has attempted it.

After May Day

The clinics’ most consequential work has been on the watch lists built after the May Day Bombings of 2006, and the institution’s account of how it came to that work is unflattering and honest.

It learned what the lists were by watching them fall on its own foreign students. Visas that did not renew, admissions that lapsed without explanation, students who left the Realm for a family funeral and could not return, and in no case a stated reason, because the harm the post-May Day settlement produces is invisibility rather than friction. A person wrongly listed is not told, and therefore cannot challenge what has not been disclosed to them.

The clinics began acting for their own students and then for others, and they still do. The work is slow, partial and unfinished. Since Barack Obama’s review a person can in principle discover whether they are listed, and the process remains difficult enough that most of the clinics’ clients arrive having suspected for years without knowing.

The university’s historians, separately, lead the public campaign to open the New York Investigation’s sealed annexes ahead of their scheduled release in 2031. The lawyers are more cautious about it than the historians, for reasons the two faculties argue about in print.

Medicine

The medical school and its teaching hospitals sit inside the National Health Service of America, under the same common duties as every other provider in a mixed system. The relationship is not one of ownership in either direction: the service does not run the university and the university does not run a part of the service. What it supplies is training, clinical research and a share of the evidence base on which the service’s standards are built.

It performed on 1 May 2006 the way the rest of the service performed, which is to say well, and the fact that nobody in the Realm was ruined by being injured that day is a fact its clinicians mention when the endowment argument becomes heated.

Admission, tuition and who gets in

The institution charges no tuition. Neither does any other chartered foundation. Nearly every other kind of university in the Realm charges, most of them heavily. The exceptions are a few polity systems that waive tuition for their own residents, of which the March of Arizona’s is the best known, and none of them covers the cost of living. Tuition, debt and admissions preference are perennial political subjects.

This is the inversion at the centre of the Realm’s argument about higher education: the richest institutions are free and nearly all the ordinary ones are not, because free tuition here is a privilege of endowment rather than a public entitlement. The Rights Act’s schooling guarantee reaches compulsory education and has never been read to reach a degree, and no ministry has attempted to make it. The chartered foundations are consequently the single most powerful argument for extending free tuition to everyone, and they are deployed as that argument by people who resent them.

If a place costs nothing, something else is scarce, and what is scarce here is preparation. Admission is holistic, which is to say it assesses the whole of an applicant, and the whole of an applicant is largely a record of the schooling they received. The free place goes disproportionately to whoever arrived best prepared to compete for it. Abolishing fees did not abolish advantage; it moved the advantage upstream into the school system, where it is harder to see, harder to measure and much harder to legislate against.

The university knows this and says so. Its own admissions research is the most-cited evidence in the Realm’s argument about educational inequality, which is an uncomfortable position for an institution that is also the argument’s principal exhibit.

Legacy preference was abolished recently and bitterly, on the historical ground that preference for alumni children had been an instrument of the Jewish quota.

Students from the treaty nations are admitted under negotiated agreements with nation governments, and the numbers are small and the record is poor. The university states this in its own reporting without much in the way of mitigation. Distance, schooling, cost of living in New York and the ordinary weight of an institution that does not look like home account for most of it, and the agreements have not moved the figures much in thirty years.

The student body is otherwise very international, drawn from across the Crown realms, the European Concert, the Empire of China and the wider world, with an exchange with Oxford of long standing.

The endowment and the property

The endowment is enormous and politically controversial, and the controversy is not about its size or its spending rate. It is about what the endowment is invested in and what the university declines to divest from.

The argument has run in different forms for decades and the present one is conducted by students, by a substantial minority of the faculty and by the unions, against a governing body that has made partial concessions and holds a line on the principle. The university’s position is that an endowment which funds free tuition for thirty thousand people has an obligation to be managed for return; its critics’ position is that this reasoning would justify anything and has.

Its New York property is extensive and constrained. The landholding statute the Province passed after 1968 limits what large chartered bodies may acquire and requires a public process before building on land in established use, and the university operates under it without much complaint, having produced it.

The campus

The campus is in Morningside Heights, on the Beaux-Arts scheme laid out for the move, with the library at the centre and the steps below it. The steps are the image of the institution that everyone in the Realm would recognise, and they are where its students gather, protest, sunbathe and are photographed.

King’s Hall, the re-erected foundation building of 1754, stands to one side of the scheme and does not match it, which the university has declined several opportunities to correct. It holds the charter, the Provost’s rooms and the college’s small teaching spaces.

May Day

On the morning of 1 May 2006 a device was left in a lecture hall on the campus, in the middle of a working morning, in term.

A student saw it, understood what they were looking at and reported it. The campus was evacuated and the device was made safe. It was the fifth of the day and the only one that did not detonate, and the Realm was told about it the same afternoon, at a point when it badly needed to be told that something had gone right.

The student is known to the university and to the Constabulary and has never been publicly identified, at their own wish. The university has honoured them privately and has respected the wish for twenty-two years.

The campus was not the whole of the university’s day. Students and staff were killed at Grand Central, commuting in, and their names are on the May Day Names with everyone else’s, by site and then alphabetically, name and age and nothing further.

The institution is uncomfortable about having been spared and declines to make anything of it. There is no annual observance of its own, no plaque marking the lecture hall and no commemoration of the interception. On 1 May the campus stops at 10:37 with the rest of the Realm, for the people who died at the stations and the pier and the march, and it does not mark the thing that did not happen to it.

Ernest V came to the campus in the days after the attacks, in the course of the visit on which he walked the four sites. It was the first visit by a monarch in decades. He said nothing there either.

Alumni

Three Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom of America studied there, and two of them did not finish.

Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt both entered the law school and both left without degrees, in the ordinary manner of men who discovered that politics was available sooner. Barack Obama took his degree in government in 1983, transferring in and finding the place solitary and disciplined, and is the only one of the three the institution can claim as a graduate.

John Jay, second Governor-General of the Realm, was a King’s man of the founding generation. Shirley Chisholm, twenty-fourth Governor-General, took her master’s in early-childhood education at Teachers College, and the training in developmental theory and programme design shaped a politics that never accepted professional expertise as a substitute for what parents knew.

The institution’s ordinary output is not premiers. It is lawyers, physicians, teachers and journalists, in very large numbers, and its influence on the Realm runs through the professions rather than through high office.

Symbols

The college’s arms retain the crown. A renaming would have stripped the device of its royal elements; nothing was removed, and the arms carry the seated figure, the children, the sunburst and the crown above them as they were granted.

The college’s motto is Deo et Regi, for God and the King. The university’s is In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen, in Thy light shall we see light, taken from the Psalms and adopted at the federation. That the older body’s motto names two authorities with which the institution now has almost no relationship is the joke about the name, restated in Latin, and the college has never shown any inclination to change it.

The colour is blue.

Timeline

Trivia

See also

• The University of the March: the flagship of the March of Arizona, which waives tuition for its own residents
• The United Kingdom of America, whose higher education is large, expensive and decentralised, and whose Rights Act guarantee stops short of a degree
• American Rights Act, litigated case by case, and the making of the law school
• National Health Service of America, inside which the teaching hospitals sit
• The May Day Bombings, whose intercepted fifth device was left in one of its lecture halls
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, President from 1948 to 1951, and not good at it
• John Jay, second Governor-General, of the founding generation of the college
• Shirley Chisholm, twenty-fourth Governor-General, who took her master’s at Teachers College
• Barack Obama, who read government there and took his degree in 1983
• Earl Browder, whose vice-regency made red-hunting awkward to justify
• Frances Willard, in whose vice-regency women were admitted
• Church of America, to which the chapel and chaplaincy belong
• Royal American Supreme Court, to which it has sent judges in complained-of numbers

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