New York University (NYU) is a private, nonsectarian American research university based in New York City. Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the largest private non-profit institutions of American higher education. NYU's main campus is located at Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan with institutes and centers on the Upper East Side, academic buildings and dorms down on Wall Street, and the Brooklyn campus located at MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn.The University also established NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai and maintains 11 other Global Academic Centers in Accra, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Florence, London, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Sydney, Tel Aviv and Washington, D.C.
NYU was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1950. NYU counts thirty-six Nobel Prize winners, four Abel Prize winners, three Turing Award winners, over thirty National Medals for Science, Technology and Innovation, Arts and Humanities recipients, over thirty Pulitzer Prize winners, over thirty Academy Award winners, as well as several Russ Prize, Gordon Prize, Draper Prize and Fields Medal winners, and dozens of Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. NYU also has many MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as hundreds of National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and American Academy of Arts and Sciences members, and a plethora of members of the United States Congress and heads of state of countries all over the world, among its past and present graduates and faculty. NYU has the most Oscar winners of any university.The alumni of NYU are amongst the wealthiest in the world, and include seventeen living billionaires.
Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, declared his intention to establish "in this immense and fast-growing city ... a system of rational and practical education fitting for all and graciously opened to all". 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. These New Yorkers believed the city needed a university designed for young men who would be admitted based upon merit rather than birthright, status, or social class. On April 18, 1831, an institution was established, with the support of a group of prominent New York City residents from the city's landed class of merchants, bankers, and traders. Albert Gallatin was elected as the institution's first president. On April 21, 1831, the new institution received its charter and was incorporated as the University of the City of New York by the New York State Legislature; older documents often refer to it by that name. The university has been popularly known as New York University since its beginning and was officially renamed New York University in 1896. In 1832, NYU held its first classes in rented rooms of four-story Clinton Hall, situated near City Hall. In 1835, the School of Law, NYU's first professional school, was established. Although the impetus to found a new school was partly a reaction by evangelical Presbyterians to what they perceived as the Episcopalianism of Columbia College, NYU was created non-denominational, unlike many American colleges at the time.
It became one of the nation's largest universities, with an enrollment of 9,300 in 1917. 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.
NYU's sports teams are referred to as the NYU Violets, the colors being the trademarked hue "NYU Violet" and white. Since 1981, the school mascot has been a bobcat, whose origin can be traced back to the abbreviation then being used by the Bobst Library computerized catalog—short: Bobcat.NYU's sports teams include baseball, men's and women's varsity basketball, cross country, fencing, golf, soccer, softball, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and wrestling.All of NYU's sports teams participate in the NCAA's Division III and the University Athletic Association, with the exception of fencing, which participates in Division I. While NYU has had All-American football players, the school has not had a varsity football team since 1952.
NYU students also compete in club and intramural sports, including badminton, baseball, basketball, crew, cycling, equestrianism, ice hockey, lacrosse, rugby football, softball, squash, martial arts, tennis, triathlon, ultimate, and quidditch. The Coles Sports and Recreation Center serves as the home base of several of NYU's intercollegiate athletic teams. Many of NYU's varsity teams play their games at various facilities and fields throughout Manhattan because of the scarcity of space for playing fields near campus. In 2002, NYU opened the Palladium Athletic Facility as the second on-campus recreational facility.
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