City College of New York

The City College of New York, known as City College or CCNY, is a public research university and the flagship of the City University of New York system, with its main campus in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. Townsend Harris, a businessman and president of the Board of Education, founded it in 1847 as the Free Academy of the City of New York to give the children of immigrants and the poor free higher education on academic merit alone, which made it the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. Horace Webster was its first president and the first graduation took place in 1853. Today it has four schools plus Macaulay Honors College, including the Grove School of Engineering, and it hosts a research center focusing on nanotechnology, structural biology, photonics, neuroscience and environmental sciences. Three alumni became Nobel laureates in physics: Robert Hofstadter, Arno Penzias and Leon Lederman.