Short answers, pulled from the story.
Columbia University was founded on the 31st of October 1754 as King's College, by royal charter of George II of Great Britain, on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the American Revolution, and became Columbia University in 1896 when the campus moved to Morningside Heights.
Columbia faculty including Enrico Fermi, Isidor Isaac Rabi, John R. Dunning, and Polykarp Kusch were among the key figures in the early phases of the Manhattan Project. Research at Columbia's Pupin Hall produced the first nuclear fission reactor in the Americas and advanced work on gaseous diffusion. The uranium atom was split at Pupin Hall just ten days after the world's first atom-splitting in Copenhagen, Denmark.
In the spring of 1968, hundreds of students occupied buildings across the Columbia campus. The protests forced the resignation of university president Grayson Kirk and led directly to the creation of the University Senate, a governance body including faculty and student representatives.
In February 2022, Columbia mathematics professor Michael Thaddeus published a website arguing that data Columbia submitted to U.S. News and World Report rankings was inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading. U.S. News removed Columbia from its rankings in July 2022. Columbia acknowledged the incorrect data submission in September 2022, and in July 2025 agreed to pay $9 million to settle a class-action student lawsuit over the alleged false data.
Columbia alumni include U.S. presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Barack Obama; Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and J.D. Salinger; FM radio inventor Edwin Armstrong; IBM founder Herman Hollerith; and entertainers including Greta Gerwig and Kate McKinnon.
Columbia University's main campus is in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan, New York City, occupying more than six city blocks, or 32 acres. The campus was designed by architects McKim, Mead and White along Beaux-Arts planning principles, and was moved to its current location in 1896 under president Seth Low.