NYU was packed with returning veterans in 1946. With 39,000 students enrolled for the fall semester according to a 1946 Time magazine article, the school had the highest enrollment of any university in the country if part-time students were included (Berkeley ranked first in full time enrollment) with Columbia in second place. CCNY was also in the top five. Student organizations that had gone moribund during the war were back in swing. By 1949 the school had more than 70,000 students.
NYU had more vets in its student body than any other college in the country. According to The New York Times, about one-third of the students enrolled in the first half of 1946 were veterans. After a wartime predominance of women students, the school was once again 2-1 male. About half of the vets, many of whom were still wearing Army jackets and boots because of clothing shortages, were resuming their interrupted NYU studies while the other half were starting school under the GI Bill. The school ran extended sessions that year well into the night. In a New Yorker piece that ran in the March 30, 1992 issue, Cynthia Ozick, a freshman in the spring of 1946, wrote of thronged, unventilated lecture halls that smelled of old shoes, flatulence and boredom. The younger students often sprawled or squatted in the aisles. Some of the married vets were housed in Quonset huts in Brooklyn and Long Island and former barracks in New Jersey. Classes were held in offices after the business day.
Most of the vets were taking courses with a vocational emphasis. To the teenage Ozick, the presence of so many serious, passionless “old men,” who seemed to have little interest in discussing intellectual, cultural or political topics and lacked a sense of awe and wonder, put a damper on her college experience. In retrospect she realizes that they had seen death close up and were looking to restore their lives while she was "recently besotted" with Keats, Shelley and Proust. Some professors and administrators at the time wondered if those pragmatic vets with little interest in the liberal arts might be better served at tech schools rather than crowding into the universities.