University at Albany: New York's First Public College, Born in a Railroad Depot
Near Albany, New York
The oldest campus in the State University of New York system did not begin in a grand building. It began on May seventh, eighteen forty-four, in an abandoned railroad depot on State Street in downtown Albany, with twenty-nine students, four faculty members, and a mission to train teachers for the rapidly expanding public schools of New York State.
The institution was called the New York State Normal School, and its founding made it the first New York State-chartered public institution of higher education. Normal school was the term of the era for teacher-training colleges, derived from the French idea of establishing educational norms and standards. New York in the eighteen forties was growing fast, with immigration swelling cities and new townships spreading across the western counties. Trained teachers were desperately needed, and the state had no public institution to produce them.
The school moved several times in its early decades before finding more permanent quarters, and its curriculum evolved alongside the demands of the profession it served. By the early eighteen nineties it had become the New York State Normal College at Albany, and in nineteen oh five it became the first public institution of higher education in New York State granted the power to confer the bachelor's degree. That was a significant milestone: public colleges conferring four-year degrees was still unusual, and New York's was among the first.
When New York formally organized the State University of New York system in nineteen forty-eight, Albany's institution was absorbed into the new network as its oldest member. Over the following decades it grew into a comprehensive research university, moving to a new campus designed by architect Edward Durell Stone in the nineteen sixties.
Today the University at Albany enrolls over seventeen thousand students and operates one of the leading atmospheric sciences programs in the country, a long journey from that railroad depot and four professors in eighteen forty-four.
