What’s Cooking at Columbia: A Recipe Book

In 1942, the Columbia University Committee for War Relief published a recipe book containing the favorite dishes of Columbia’s faculty, entitled What’s Cooking at Columbia. The book sold for one dollar at the campus bookstore and according to the student newspaper, The Daily Spectator, all proceeds from the book went “to help cook Hitler’s goose.” […]

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Engineering Women: “Firsts”

Columbia College did not admit women students until 1983 for its first coeducational class, the Class of 1987. But that did not mean that there were no women undergraduate students at Columbia. Both the School of Engineering and General Studies were already co-ed. And in the 1970s, three women engineering students were claiming firsts and […]

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Columbia’s “Fair Doctors”

In April 1887 Columbia celebrated the Centennial of the 1787 Charter, the charter that is in effect to this day. At the grand Convocation, there were speeches, a special poem for the day, and the conferring of 60 honorary degrees. The newspapers the next day focused on Columbia’s “fair doctors” because Columbia was one of […]

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John Jay: #DormLife in 1764

John Jay would probably be amused if he knew that many, many years in the future, his old Alma Mater—then King’s College, now Columbia—would honor his legacy by naming a dormitory after him. It was a dorm room incident in the original College Hall in 1764 that earned him a suspension from the College and […]

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