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by Nathan Brockman

Rector and president, parishioners and students, vestrymen and board members gathered in the pews of Trinity Church November 13 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Columbia University, which was founded in lower Manhattan on land granted by Trinity Church. Trinity was to honor its secular child, reared before the American Revolution, when Columbia was King’s College and the Church of England, through Trinity Church, directed its affairs.

Columbia has grown up to become one of the premiere academic institutions in the world, not to mention one of the largest private employers in New York City. Yet today’s service was as much about American and New York City history as it was about lauding Columbia's longevity.

In one sense, worlds – skeptic and believer, scientist and theologian, uptown and downtown -- collided. In another sense, judging from the remarks of the speakers, the university was welcomed home and happy to be there, marking what had changed, as well as what was held in common.

The Rev. Dr. Daniel Paul Matthews, rector of Trinity Church, greeted the civic congregation to his church, and then a roster of formidable academic personalities created a lecture series in microcosm expounding on the shared ideals of the institutions.

Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson need only have listed the diversity of his credentials to make a point. But the Columbia professor, New-York Historical Society president, and Trinity Church vestryman went further, becoming the speakers’ New York City spokesman.

He established the importance of Columbia University and Trinity Church within the historical sweep of New York City, which he called the “Capital of capitalism, of the 20th century, and the entire world.”

Dr. Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, addressed the institutional commonalities specifically: “There is something about the reconnection [between Trinity and Columbia] that I find elusive and important,” he said. “This university, Columbia, this church, Trinity…began with a sense of a combination of a spiritual life and a search for truth.”

Dr. Bollinger suggested that he was using the anniversary to raise the question at his university, “What really is the relationship between the secular search for truth and a broader sense of the spiritual in life?”

Noted historian Robert J. McCaughey, author of Stand Columbia: The History of Columbia University , quoted at length from his research, telling the story of Columbia and Trinity. The institutions in their infancies were “exclusivist” and “anti-revolutionary,” but had grown to flourish in New York City’s multicultural milieu, “even as they contribute to it.”

Dr. Matthews and Dr. Bollinger presented a plaque to the city to mark the location of the first King’s College building, just south of the present-day Trinity Churchyard.

The plaque was received by Carl Weisbroad, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, an organization that tends to the cultural vitality of lower Manhattan.

The original plaque, installed in the 1950s, had been stolen during Columbia student protest in 1970.

Posted on Trinity News, November 13, 2003