New York University

New York University

If Columbia, the stodgier cousin uptown, offers an academic respite from the manic street life of New York, then NYU embodies that exuberant bedlam, a campus spread piecemeal across much of the liveliest parts of lower Manhattan. Since the nineteenth century, as Washington Square Park has become a central breeding ground for social and political activity, NYU has been and central player in the cultural history of the city. Founded in 1831 by a group of well-to-do New York businessmen, hoping to build in their city a university and research institution worthy of it, NYU is now the largest private university in America, instructing nearly forty thousand students each academic year. Though not considered one of the premier educational institutions in the country, NYU can hold its own in many departments, and particularly at the graduate level, but its major accomplishment might just be helping to ensure that the neighborhoods in which the school resides never quite settle into a gentrified urban idyll; the school provides enough political, artistic, and social turbulence to capsize most cities.