NYU

To the student from upwardly mobile Jewish families, NYU was a popular alternative to the Ivy League schools, which had de facto quotas on Jewish students. About 40 percent of the NYU student body was Jewish. To many middle class families in the New York City area, it was the default choice, the equivalent of going to the state university, which New York state did not have until 1948. According to writer Cynthia Ozick, who entered the university in January 1946 fresh from high school, her NYU classmates saw students at Columbia University as snobs, while City College was seen as an extension of high school for working class kids who couldn't afford to go to a real college.

Since the turn of the century, NYU's main campus was in University Heights in the Bronx where the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the engineering school were located. It was also the site of the then famous Hall of Fame, a major tourist attraction in 1946 but now long neglected and forgotten, overshadowed by its many imitators. The University Height's campus, which was sold to City University in 1973 and now houses Bronx Community College, had been devoted largely to providing specialized science and engineering courses to military personnel during the war. The uptown campus offered only freshman and sophomore year courses to civilian students who had to transfer to the Washington Square College to complete their education if they hadn't been drafted first.

In the 1940s the Washington Square campus where NYU had started, was home to the business school, the law school and school of education as well as to the Washington Square College, a liberal arts institution that catered largely to commuter and part-time students, The School of General Studies offered popular continuing education courses. The downtown campus lacked much of the social life and campus amenities of the traditional college campus but the intellectual, cultural and political vibrancy of the surrounding Village compensated.

In her detailed, amply illustrated history of Washington Square, It Happened on Washington Square, Emily Kies.Folpe wrote that NYU's downtown liberal arts campus was opened between the wars to educate commuter students from the immigrant population who could not afford to attend the University Heights school. Before then, much of NYU's Washington Square space had been rented out to cultural organizations. She says it was known largely as having a working class student body at that time. Novelist Thomas Wolfe taught downtown for a while and cruelly satirized his students in Of Time and the River in 1935. Perhaps this was true of the School of General Studies but in 1946, based on the accounts by Mimi Sheraton and Cynthia Ozick, both of whom were students then, most of the students at Washington Square College came from the professional and business class and were not the children of immigrants. The downtown campus overshadowed the more conventional University Height campus in the postwar years.