New York University

NYU is organized into 18 schools, colleges, and institutes,[3] located in six centers throughout Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, as well as other sites across the globe. NYU operates study abroad facilities in London, Paris, Florence, Prague, Madrid, Berlin, Accra, Shanghai, Buenos Aires and Tel Aviv in addition to the Singapore campus of the Tisch School of the Arts and a comprehensive liberal-arts campus in Abu Dhabi that opened in Sept. 2010.NYU plans to open a site in Washington, D.C. in 2012.

With approximately 12,500 residents, NYU has the seventh-largest university housing system in the U.S. and the largest among private schools. Some of the first fraternities in the country were formed at NYU.

NYU's sports teams are called the Violets, the colors being the trademarked hue "NYU Violet", and white. The school mascot is modeled after a bobcat. Almost all sports teams at NYU participate in the NCAA's Division III and the University Athletic Association. While NYU has had All-American football players, it has not had a varsity football team since the 1960s.

History

A three-day long "literary and scientific convention" held in City Hall in 1830 and attended by over 100 delegates debated the terms of a plan for a new university modeled on the University of London (1826) which would be designed for young men admitted based on merit, not birthright, status, or social class. The trustees of the new institution sought funding from the city and state, but were turned down, and instead raised $100,000 privately to start up the college. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury under Thomas Jefferson, was selected as the school's first president, although he served less than a year before resigning over disagreements about the curriculum. Although the impetus to found a new school was in large part a reaction by evangelical Presbyterians to what they perceived as the Episcopalianism of Columbia College, NYU was created non-denominational, unlike many American colonial colleges at the time.

Whereas NYU had its Washington Square campus since its founding, the university purchased a campus at University Heights in the Bronx because of overcrowding on the old campus. NYU also had a desire to follow New York City's development further uptown. NYU's move to the Bronx occurred in 1894, spearheaded by the efforts of Chancellor Henry Mitchell MacCracken. The University Heights campus was far more spacious than its predecessor was. As a result, most of the university's operations along with the undergraduate College of Arts and Science and School of Engineering were housed there. NYU's administrative operations were moved to the new campus, but the graduate schools of the university remained at Washington Square. In 1914, Washington Square College was founded as the downtown undergraduate college of NYU. In 1935, NYU opened the "Nassau College-Hofstra Memorial of New York University at Hempstead, Long Island". This extension would later become a fully independent Hofstra University.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, financial crisis gripped the New York City government and the troubles spread to the city's institutions, including NYU. Feeling the pressures of imminent bankruptcy, NYU President James McNaughton Hester negotiated the sale of the University Heights campus to the City University of New York, which occurred in 1973. After the sale of the Bronx campus, University College merged with Washington Square College. In the 1980s, under the leadership of President John Brademas, NYU launched a billion-dollar campaign that was spent almost entirely on updating facilities. The campaign was set to complete in 15 years, but ended up being completed in 10. In 2003 President John Sexton launched a 2.5-billion dollar campaign for funds to be spent especially on faculty and financial aid resources.