A National Historic Landmark

Have you ever gotten so bored that you just read Columbia University’s Wikipedia page in its entirety? No? Well, here are some of the funnest fun facts about Columbia from Wikipedia. (Disclaimer: everything in this article comes straight from Wikipedia, and we don’t guarantee that everything is entirely accurate. This is Wikipedia’s words, not ours!)

  • Columbia was the first school in the US to grant the M.D. degree.
  • The Pulitzer Prize is administered annually by Columbia.
  • Columbia has the second most Nobel Prize-winning affiliates in the country (the first being Harvard).
  • Columbia College didn’t admit women until 1983.
  • Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church.
  • As of 2012, Columbia’s library system was the 8th largest library system and the 5th largest collegiate library system in the US by the number of volumes possessed.
  • Low is a National Historic Landmark because of its architectural significance.
  • Pupin is also a National Historic Landmark because the first experiments on the fission of uranium were conducted there. (Never mind that random sulfuric smells waft into my CC class in Pupin 425 once in a while.)
  • The FM radio was invented in Philosophy Hall by Edwin Armstrong, class of 1913.
  • Columbia has a campus in Palisades, NY (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory) and one in Irvington, NY (Nevis Laboratories).
  • CC and SEAS didn’t accept the Common Application until 2010, making Columbia the last Ivy to switch to the Common App.
  • Columbia was the first North American site where the uranium atom was split.
  • The laser was invented at Columbia. (Its invention is widely but not universally attributed to Gordon Gould, who was then a graduate student at Columbia.)
  • Many other inventions were and are being born at Columbia, and the university made $230 million from patent-related deals in the 2006 fiscal year: more than any other university in the world.
  • ADP, which was established at Columbia in 1836, was the first Greek life organization on campus.
  • The Columbia Review is the nation’s oldest college literary magazine.
  • In 1870, Columbia’s football team played the second football game ever in the history of football against Rutgers.
  • They (the football team) also hold the record for the longest losing streak for the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision: 44 losses in a row between 1983 and 1988.
  • Apparently, our archrival is Princeton.
  • The Columbia University Orchestra, founded in 1896, is the oldest continually operating university orchestra in the US.
  • The Columbia Queer Alliance, founded in 1967, is the oldest gay student organization in the world.

Low via Bwog Archives