For this May’s graduates, the 2014-15 school year will linger in memory—through nostalgia for late nights in the library and adventures in the city, appreciation for the books and courses that broadened horizons and shaped careers, and, most important of all, the birth of friendships with classmates and faculty who were there every step of the way.
For the rest of us, too, it’s worth noting that this was a big year for the university at large. We named a 16th president—Andrew Hamilton, a noted chemist and vice chancellor of the University of Oxford. Two of our NYU Abu Dhabi students won Rhodes Scholarships. An international Open Doors study found that NYU leads the world in both hosting international students and sending students to study abroad. And we fielded a varsity baseball team for the first time in 41 years.
Those are just a few highlights from a remarkable year. Here’s more fodder for a 2014-15 page in the ol’ NYU scrapbook:
The NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies got a new name—the NYU School of Professional Studies, underscoring its mission to provide career-minded students with real-world knowledge and experience.
With encouragement and support from the NYU Dream Team, the university announced a pilot program to offer institutional scholarship aid to undocumented students from New York.
The 5,900-square-foot Mark and Debra Leslie Entrepreneurs Lab opened its doors at Washington Place and Greene Street to those who want to connect and collaborate across all of NYU.
To address the nationwide crisis of sexual assault on college campuses, NYU developed a comprehensive new policy on sexual misconduct, relationship violence, and stalking.
The NYU Senate voted in favor of a Student Senators Council resolution urging the Board of Trustees to cease investing in fossil fuels.
Thanks in part to the more than 13,000 students who performed over 1.3 million hours of service in a single year, NYU was awarded the Community Engagement Classification by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in recognition of our strong commitment to civic engagement as central to university life.
Our star faculty and alumni garnered almost too many awards and accolades to count, earning Oscar nominations and Golden Globes, mentions on the New York Times notable books list and coveted spots among Forbes' 30 Under 30 in the fields of science, education, food and drink, and enterprise tech.
Steinhardt's Julia Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize for music for her multimedia oratorio Anthracite Fields. Creative Writing Program alumnus Gregory Pardlo won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
With Princeton's John Nash, Courant mathematician Louis Nirenberg was awarded an Abel Prize, NYU's fourth in 10 years.
History professor Greg Grandin won a Bancroft Prize for his book Empire of Necessity. Six faculty members were awarded Guggenheim fellowships, and NYU's 2014 distinguished teaching awards went to Tisch's Mark Dickerman, Law's Helen Hershkoff, Gallatin's Karen Hornick, Engineering's Vikram Kapila, CAS's John P. Richardson, and Steinhardt's Diana Silver.
TIAA-CREF honored John Sexton with the 2015 Theodore M. Hesburgh Award for Leadership excellence.
Junior Krystal McLeod won a 2015 Truman Scholarship.
The 2014-15 school year brought its share of famous faces to campus, from Calvin Trillin and Rachel Maddow to Chance the Rapper and Diane von Furstenberg. Lang Lang performed at NYU Shanghai. Iran's foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke at the Kimmel Center. Sandra Day O'Connor met with students from NYU Washington D.C. Alumni who went on to become astronauts returned to the School of Engineering to talk about the future of space travel.
It was a good year for rankings. NYU cracked the top 20 in the Times Higher Education World Reputation Ratings, up from no. 34 in 2012. On its World University Rankings, we came in at no. 38, up from no. 40 in 2013-14 and no. 41 in 2012-13. And in an inaugural list of the best global universities, we were ranked at no. 36.
Individual schools got nods, too. Money named Stern 7th in a list of 25 best colleges for earning a degree in business. In the U.S. News & World Report best grad school rankings, the NYU School of Law made no. 6 overall, and no. 1 for both international law and tax law. USA Today named Steinhardt a top-five school for fine and studio arts, and for highest paid education graduates. The Brookings Institution put the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering at #4 for alumni with the most valuable skills. And a LinkedIn study on job placement ranked NYU no. 1 for landing grads careers in media, no. 6 for finance, no. 4 for marketing, and no. 7 for investment banking.
The Wall Street Journal put NYU 14th on a list of colleges that produce the best investors. Nerd Wallet ranked us 13th among colleges with the highest salaries for liberal arts grads. Food and Wine called NYU a great university for food lovers.
And our students bested their Columbia peers in a Refinery 29 fashion showdown. Of course.