The board of trustees was originally composed ofex officio members including officials from theNew York colonial government, crown officials, and various Protestant ministers from the city. Following the college's resuscitation following theAmerican Revolutionary War, it was placed under the control of theBoard of Regents of the University of the State of New York, and the university would finally come under the control of a private board of trustees in 1787. The board is notable for having administered thePulitzer Prize from the prize's establishment until 1975.
As of May 2025, the trustees consists of 21 members and is co-chaired by David Greenwald andJeh Johnson.[2]
The board is governed by a maximum of 24 trustees, including thepresident of the university, who servesex officio. Six of the 24 candidates are nominated from a pool of candidates selected by the Columbia Alumni Association. Another six are nominated by the board in consultation with the University Senate. The remaining 12 are nominated by the trustees through an internal process.[3] The board elects its own chair; the first woman to serve as chair, and the first to chair the governing board of any Ivy League university, wasGertrude Michelson, elected in 1989.[4] The term of office for the trustees is six years and trustees serve for no more than two consecutive terms.[3]
The trustees have met in a dedicated room inLow Memorial Library since 1897.[5] They select the President, oversee all faculty and senior administrative appointments, monitor the budget, supervise the endowment, and protect university property.[6] The board of trustees holds the exclusive power to grant degrees, including, by memoranda of understanding, to the affiliated institutions ofBarnard College andTeachers College. As with most governing boards of private universities, the deliberations of the trustees are confidential. The trustees also oversaw thePulitzer Prizes until 1975, when authority over the prizes was devolved to a separate board.[7]
The board of trustees was originally established in 1754 as the board of governors ofKing's College with 41 members, replacing the ten-member Lottery Commission appointed by theNew York Assembly to oversee lottery funds allocated to the establishment of the college.[8] The board of governors originally included severalex officio members, including, crown officials, members of the colonial government, and ministers of various Protestant denominations:[9]
College Hall was the first building at Columbia until its demolition in 1857. Its cornerstone is installed in the Trustees' Room.
A further twenty-four individuals were named in the charter, serving without terms with their successors to be selected by subsequent governors. College faculty were not provided seatsex officio on the board of governors, at variance with contemporary practice at the Universities ofOxford andCambridge, where the faculty was engaged in the governance of their colleges, but was very much in line with practice of other colonial colleges governed by external boards.[10]
More than half of the fifty-nine New Yorkers who served as governor made their livings as merchants. The next most common occupation among the governors was law (20 percent), followed by ministers (16 percent), and there was only one doctor.[11] The governors met 102 times in 22 years and most meetings were attended by around fifteen governors. A quarter of the governors attended fewer than ten meetings, and another half were absent, leaving a core of sixteen governors. Academic matters such as faculty appointments, the curriculum, and admissions requirements were overseen by degree-bearing ministers, while governors drawing from the city's mercantile and legal ranks oversaw financial matters such as construction of collegiate buildings or the salary of the college steward. This informal division of duties survived the reorganization of theKing's College intoColumbia College and persisted into the 1960s.[12]
In terms of politics, the ratio of Loyalists to Patriots during theAmerican Revolution among the governors was more than eight to one.[13] The college was severely affected by the revolutionary war, which forced the college to shut down for eight years and a number of governors fled to Canada and the West Indies.
In 1784, it became the Board of Regents of Columbia College after the former King's College was reinstated. The 1784 charter also stipulated that eight of the seats on the board should be held by ranking state officials ex officio, with the remaining 24 regents to be appointed, two each, from the state's 12 counties, with only three places reserved for New York City residents. The number of regents was subsequently expanded to 33 by theNew York State Legislature, with 20 of them residents of New York City, including a mix of prominent politicians and clergymen such asJohn Jay,Samuel Provoost,Leonard Lispenard,Gershom Mendes Seixas, andJohn Daniel Gros.[8]
It was renamed in a new 1787 charter as the Trustees of Columbia College in the City of New York, and the college was relieved of its duties as a state institution, returning to earlier status as a privately governed college serving the city. None of the college's trustees were to be state officials, and all replacements were to be elected by incumbent board members.[8] Only until 1908 did the board start accepting alumni nominations.
The board arrived at its final name of The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York by an order from the Supreme Court of New York on July 17, 1912, 16 years after Columbia College was renamed as Columbia University.[14]
Although the trustees usually approve faculty recommendations for hiring and dismissal of Columbia faculty, in some cases they have taken a more direct role. Notably, in 1917 they fired psychologistJames McKeen Cattell for his anti-war and anti-conscription views, a case significant in the history ofacademic freedom.[15][16]
The trustees have been blamed for the violent suppression of protestors in theColumbia University protests of 1968, after they instructed the university administration to call in the police against the protestors and later lauded the police for their efforts.[17]
In 2001, the trustees were accused of pressuring the university to water down its sexual misconduct policy, and the director of the Office of Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Education resigned in protest, claiming that the trustees had directed her not to discuss the policy changes.[18]
Internal disagreements do not often spill out into public, although a notable exception to this occurred in 2012, when trusteeJosé A. Cabranes published a dissenting opinion on the status of Columbia College andits core curriculum within the university, in a column in Columbia's student newspaper, theColumbia Daily Spectator.[19]
The trustees ceded direct oversight of thePulitzer Prizes in 1975.[21] Before that period, the trustees occasionally overruled the awarding of prizes. An early example of this occurred in 1921, when the trustees overruled the jury recommendation and awarded the fiction prize toEdith Wharton forThe Age of Innocence instead ofSinclair Lewis forMain Street.[22] A similar controversy ensued in 1962, when the trustees overruled the jury's choice of a biography ofWilliam Randolph Hearst byW. A. Swanberg,Citizen Hearst, instead choosing to give no award in that category.[23][24]
^Gruber, Carol Signer (September 1972). "Academic freedom at Columbia University, 1917-1918: The Case of James McKeen Cattell".AAUP Bulletin.58 (3):297–305.doi:10.2307/40224603.JSTOR40224603.
^Sokal, Michael M. (2009). "James McKeen Cattell, Nicholas Murray Butler, and academic freedom at Columbia University, 1902–1923".History of Psychology.12 (2):87–122.doi:10.1037/a0016143.
^Oehlschlaeger, Fritz H. (November 1979). "Hamlin Garland and the Pulitzer Prize controversy of 1921".American Literature.51 (3):409–414.doi:10.2307/2925396.JSTOR2925396.
^Columbia Business School (2013-08-02)."Jerome A. Chazen '50".The Jerome A. Chazen Institute for Global Business. Archived fromthe original on 2021-05-02. Retrieved2020-11-17.
