When Columbia selected its theme, the scheme met with considerable skepticism on the part of many students and faculty members. Some still feel that the University has attempted too much, and others that it is spending too much.
But the campaign has wrought conversion at Morning side as it has brought forth a far greater response than any but the most optimistic had expected. Columbia administrators now intimated that the Bicentennial will pay for itself and perhaps draw an unsolicited profit. If private reaction has approached the enthusiasm of other universities, they may be right. Over 300 different places outside the United States are participating actively in the celebration. In the U.S., more than 700 institutions have dedicated programs to the theme. Lone response to invitations sent to Russia and the satellites came three years later from the head of the Soviet Academy of Science. He admitted Columbia's appeal was "timely," but concluded her concern with the problem only showed there was no freedom of thought or action in American universities.
Last of Five Conferences
Typical of the reception the entire celebration has received has been that 13 half-hour Sunday radio broadcasts on "Tradition and Change." The University advertised at the beginning of each lecturer a collection of the complete series in book form for one dollar. But when it tried to have the collection printed, no major publisher was willing to assume the risk of the book selling. Finally, the University reluctantly guaranteed a small printer it would cover all costs if 2500 copies were not sold. The books, containing the talks by Arnold Toynbee Joseph Wood Crutch, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnam, and others, were thus finally printed and now have sold 25,000 copies. The Voice of America liked these same talks so much that it adopted them to be beamed behind the Iron Curtain.
The final phase of the Bicentennial at the end of this month will be much like the earlier ones in January and June. Five different conferences attended by international scholars (as well as the Charter Day Dinner and final Convocation) will take place during the week leading up to October 31. Climaxing the series of high-level academic discussions held throughout 1954 on aspects of "The Unity of Knowledge" will be a gathering of 75 scholars at Arden House in Harriman, New York. After three days of closed discussions they will return to New York for one public meeting on the 30th to summarize their thoughts publicly. The following day many of them will undoubtedly receive honorary degrees as President Pusey did last June at the second Convocation.
it has been a busy year on Morning side Heights, one crowded with visiting celebrities and crowded conferences, one unlike any other in the University's history. The institution somehow never got around to celebrating its first hundred years, and seems almost to be trying to make up for the loss now. But, although administrators have been somewhat harder pressed this year than in the past, the passing of the 200th anniversary has not rearranged basic facts about Columbia; its distinguishing characteristics and its 200-year-old problems remain.
A City Needs A University
Located in New York between 114th and 124th Streets off Broadway, the University bears a peculiar relationship to that city. As the founders insisted 200 years ago, a city needs a university. Columbia was built up with responsibility to New York in mind and has become an indispensable asset to the metropolis. It has succeeded in meeting the higher educational needs of New York, especially at the graduate school level, while maintaining its position among the leading scholarly institutions in the country.
And yet New York, which Columbia is so proud to serve, has restricted it in its efforts to expand and better serve. It was on August 23, 1756 that the college made its first transition to King's farm and settled itself for its lifelong struggle with the dollar and the acre.
In 1814, the state legislature handed the trustees 20 acres of botanical garden land three miles north of the city instead of $80,000 in lottery money they really wanted. The college fortunately was unable to move at the time, and when it finally had to, through desperate need of space, the trustees found it less expensive to take over the old Deaf and Dumb Asylum between 40th and 50th Streets, right next to the half-covered coffins in Potter's Field, than to build on the botanical land. That land remained in Columbia's possession, however, gradually increasing in value until it became the site for Reockefeller Center. It now pays the University a yearly rent of three and a half million dollars. By the time this rent was coming in the University had had to move again to the uptown bluffs now known as Morningside Heights.
Gehrig's Park Gone
There on the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, Low Memorial Library was built looking out over a muddy 116th Street to the farm land beyond. Today Low Library still sands, but faces onto those buildings that have come to typify Columbia University to the outside world. John Jay Hall, Hamilton Hall, the new Bradley Library, and others rise straight up like huge apartment houses, finding space in the air that Columbia does not have on the ground. The farm land on which Lou Gehrig once awaited home runs now supports a small area of grass, the only campus the University can provide. It is about half the size of the Yard and is the most convenient method of distinguishing the University amid the Broadway traffic and tall buildings of that part of New York. The Bicentennial has been the cause for resodding the "campus" and including 116 Street in the job, for New York City sold the block of the noisy crowded street in front of Low Library to the University for the nominal sum of $1,000 in June. Many undergraduates undoubtedly consider that sum the best spent of the entire Bicentennial.
Within earshot of the honking Broadway traffic amid skyscraper like dormitories, the Columbia student has listened to respected lecturers and continued to pursue his academic life while the Bicentennial office in Low Memorial Library planned ways to unite the world in a reaffirmation of the ideal of freedom of knowledge. The academic activity of the University for 1954 have been curiously distant from each other. Students, aside from two student government, staged conferences last Spring, have only really met the Bicentennial through reports of conferences last Spring, have only really met the Bicentennial through reports of conferences in the Spectator. Perhaps as anything has come to making this year stand out over any other has been the sodding of 116th Street with the grass from a New Jersey polo field.
The Bicentennial celebration has been nonetheless significant. It has been directed not inwardly but outwardly, and it must be commended for its efforts--and success--in that direction.
Impact Important
That outward purpose was hopefully summed up by President Kirk when he spoke at the American Ambassador's home in London in December of 1952.
"If in 1954, as we all at Columbia do all we can to lay emphasis upon the importance of 'Man's Right to Knowledge and the Free Use Thereof', other institutions in the free world take the opportunity to join in proclaiming their belief in its fundamental importance to human freedom and progress, and if these actions are reported, the aggregate impact would become genuinely important in a political sense and be heard around the world as a reaffirmation of our faith."