Columbia University is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City. The university is now legally known as Columbia University in the City of New York. The institution was established as King's College by the Church of England, receiving a Royal Charter in 1754 from George II of Great Britain. One of only two universities in the United States to have been founded by royal charter, it was the first college established in the Province of New York, and the fifth college established in the Thirteen Colonies. After the American Revolution it was briefly chartered as a New York State entity from 1784-1787, however the university now operates under a 1787 charter that places the institution under a private board of trustees.

Columbia University is home to the Pulitzer Prize, which has rewarded outstanding achievement in journalism, literature and music for over a century. Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism was founded by Joseph Pulitzer.

Seventy-seven Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with Columbia.

Columbia was the birthplace of FM radio, the first American university to offer historic preservation, anthropology and political science as academic disciplines, the first American school to grant the M.D. degree, and the birthplace of modern genetics. An early research center for Manhattan Project development of the atomic bomb, its Morningside Heights campus was the first North American site where the uranium atom was split. Literary and artistic movements as varied as the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat movement and postcolonialism all took shape at Columbia in the 20th century.

Columbia has had a long association with American political leaders. Among the earliest students and trustees of King's College were four "founding fathers" of the United States. U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt both studied law at Columbia, and Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the University before making his White House bid. The 2008 Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama received his undergraduate degree at Columbia, as did current U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the current Governor of New York State David Paterson, and a number of current U.S. Senators and Representatives to Congress.

Morningside Heights

Most of Columbia's graduate and undergraduate studies are conducted in Morningside Heights at Seth Low's late-19th century vision of a university campus where all disciplines could be taught in one location. The campus was designed along Beaux-Arts principles by acclaimed architects McKim, Mead, and White and is considered one of their best works.