The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York is the governing board of Columbia University in New York City. Founded in 1754, it is sometimes referred to as the Columbia Corporation. The Trustees of Columbia University is a 501(c)(3) organization and the owner of the property and real assets of the university. Affiliates of the university, which include Barnard College, Jewish Theological Seminary, Teachers College, and Union Theological Seminary, are separate legal entities.
The board of trustees was originally composed of ex officio members including officials from the New York colonial government, crown officials, and various Protestant ministers from the city. Following the college's resuscitation following the American Revolutionary War, it was placed under the control of the Board 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 the Pulitzer Prize from the prize's establishment until 1975.
As of 2026, the board of trustees consists of 21 members and is co-chaired by Abigail Black Elbaum and Jeh Johnson.
Structure and function
The board is governed by a maximum of 24 trustees, including the president of the university, who serves ex 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. 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, was Gertrude Michelson, elected in 1989. The term of office for the trustees is six years and trustees serve for no more than two consecutive terms.
The trustees have met in a dedicated room in Low Memorial Library since 1897. They select the President, oversee all faculty and senior administrative appointments, monitor the budget, supervise the endowment, and protect university property. The board of trustees holds the exclusive power to grant degrees, including, by memoranda of understanding, to the affiliated institutions of Barnard College and Teachers College. As with most governing boards of private universities, the deliberations of the trustees are confidential. The trustees also oversaw the Pulitzer Prizes until 1975, when authority over the prizes was devolved to a separate board.
History
King's College Following a decade of fundraising, primarily through interest-bearing loans made from the proceeds of public lotteries, those who had been legally entrusted with responsibility for this revenue petitioned for a royal charter to establish a new college on "a very valuable parcel of Ground on the west side of the Broadway" in the Province of New York. In 1754, King George II of Great Britain issued a charter establishing King's College as a legal corporation. The founding charter contained provisions for the government of this corporation, which consisted of a board of governors or directors, toward its formal mission: "the Instruction and Education of Youth in the Learned Languages and Liberal Arts and Sciences." According to the charter, this "body Corporate and politick" is granted final authority "to make and set down in writing, such Laws, ordinances, and orders, for the Better Government of the said College, and Students, and Ministers thereof, as they shall think best for the General Good of the same," thereby establishing the board's exclusive right to make and amend the rules governing the college, as long as they do not conflict with local, state, or federal laws.
The charter originally established the board of governors of King's College with 41 members, replacing the ten-member Lottery Commission appointed by the New York Assembly to oversee lottery funds allocated to the establishment of the college. These board members named in the charter would be replaced by successors chosen by the board when positions became vacant. The board of governors originally included several ex officio members, including, crown officials, members of the colonial government, and ministers of various Protestant denominations:
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 seats ex officio on the board of governors, at variance with contemporary practice at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 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.
The charter permitted Protestants to serve as governors but excluded Roman Catholics and Jews. Only three members would be Anglicans: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the rector of Trinity Church, and the President of Columbia University, and they were offset by four ex officio members selected from New York's Dutch Reformed Church, French Protestant church, Lutheran Church, and Presbyterian Church. In practice, the board was dominated by Anglicans, members of the Trinity Church, and the Dutch Reformed Church. Of the fifty-nine men who served as governors, only three ex officio members were not from the Anglican or Dutch Reformed churches.
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. 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 the King's College into Columbia College and persisted into the 1960s.
In terms of politics, the ratio of Loyalists to Patriots during the American Revolution among the governors was more than eight to one. 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.
Columbia College 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 the New York State Legislature, with 20 of them residents of New York City, including a mix of prominent politicians and clergymen such as John Jay, Samuel Provoost, Leonard Lispenard, Gershom Mendes Seixas, and John Daniel Gros.
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. Only until 1908 did the board start accepting alumni nominations.
Columbia University
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. 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 psychologist James McKeen Cattell for his anti-war and anti-conscription views, a case significant in the history of academic freedom.
1968 protests
The trustees have been blamed for the violent suppression of protestors in the Columbia 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. The 1968 Cox Commission Report—which found that the ineffective or lacking channels of communication between the university's administration, faculty, and students created the conditions for the protests—led to the establishment of the Columbia University Senate. On April 8, 1969 students and faculty overwhelmingly supported the creation of the University Senate in a campus-wide referendum. In 1973, the trustees adopted the Rules of University Conduct.
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.
Internal disagreements do not often spill out into public, although a notable exception to this occurred in 2012, when trustee José A. Cabranes published a dissenting opinion on the status of Columbia College and its core curriculum within the university, in a column in Columbia's student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator.
Gaza Solidarity Encampment
During the Gaza Solidarity Encampment (17–April 30, 2024), part of the broader protest movement demanding that Columbia disinvest from Israel during the Gaza genocide, the board of trustees announced that it "strongly" supported then-university-president Minouche Shafik days after the New York Police Department was summoned to arrest approximately 100 student demonstrators and after House Republicans Mike Johnson and Virginia Foxx called for her resignation. After students re-established the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on the opposite lawn, a group of 21 Democrats of the United States House of Representatives suggested that the trustees resign if they were unwilling to call in the NYPD to arrest student protestors again. The Barnard-Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors drafted a "Resolution of Censure of President Shafik, her Administration, and the Co-chairs of the Board of Trustees."
According to Timothy Kaufman-Osborn, "Columbia is legally organized as an autocratic corporation whose foremost imperative is to guarantee the security of the property held in its name" and the administration's decision to issue interim suspensions to student protesters and invite the NYPD onto campus to then arrest them en masse for trespassing was a decision made in order to maintain its "commitment to amass and secure its privatized property."
According to an October 2024 report from the Committee on Education & the Workforce of the U.S. House of Representatives, co-chairs of the board of trustees, David Greenwald and Claire Shipman, as well as chair emeritus Jonathan Lavine, were in discussion over what punishments the university should impose on student protesters. The report revealed that executive vice president for university life Dennis Mitchell "had spoken with Greenwald for 'two and a half hours,' going over the status of 'every single one of our disciplinary cases'." According to the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys, The Legal Aid Society, for which Greenwald also serves as treasurer and board member, shielded Greenwald and issued "an organizational response that downplayed police violence and abandoned its victims."