Syracuse University: The Hill

Driving up the hill southeast of downtown, you reach a ridgeline campus of limestone buildings and Gothic towers that looks, from certain angles, the way universities are supposed to look in movies. Syracuse University was chartered by New York State on March twenty-fourth, eighteen seventy, a date that is also Matilda Joslyn Gage's birthday, which is a coincidence worth noting in a city of layered histories.

The Methodist Episcopal Church subscribed an endowment of four hundred thousand dollars. The city of Syracuse matched with one hundred thousand dollars of its own. Judge George Comstock offered fifty acres of farmland on the hillside. The university opened its doors in eighteen seventy with a founding class that included women alongside men, an unusual choice in eighteen seventy. At the first commencement in eighteen seventy-two, women were among the nineteen graduates. Alpha Phi, a sorority founded by ten of those early women students in eighteen seventy-two, built what is documented as the world's first sorority house on this campus in eighteen eighty-six.

In eighteen seventy-three, the university added one of the first architecture programs in the United States. Crouse College, completed in eighteen eighty-nine in Romanesque Revival style, became one of the university's defining buildings, its towers visible from much of the city. The Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, dedicated by President Herbert Hoover in nineteen thirty-seven, became one of the most respected public policy programs in the country.

The campus today enrolls more than twenty thousand students and sits above the city it transformed. From University Hill you can see Onondaga Lake to the northwest, where the Haudenosaunee held their council fires. In between is a city built on salt, typewriters, air conditioning, and the kind of place where a girl could graduate in eighteen seventy-two and it was considered a radical act.