University at Albany: The First Public College in New York

The University at Albany has a longer history than almost anyone realizes, and a campus that looks like it was designed for a science-fiction film, because in some sense it was.

The institution began on May seventh, eighteen forty-four, when the state legislature voted to establish the New York State Normal School, the first public institution of higher education in New York. It opened with twenty-nine students and four faculty members in an abandoned railroad depot on State Street. Its mission was direct: train schoolteachers for the expanding Empire State. The Normal School was immediately practical, rooted in the same utilitarian spirit that would define public higher education across the country.

Over the next century it grew and transformed, becoming the New York State Normal College in the eighteen nineties and receiving the power to grant bachelor's degrees in nineteen oh five, the first public institution in New York to do so. It was renamed the State University of New York at Albany after World War Two when Governor Thomas Dewey created the vast SUNY system to democratize higher education across the state.

Then came Nelson Rockefeller. In nineteen sixty-two, the governor who wanted everything bigger and more dramatic broke ground for an entirely new uptown campus on the site of the old Albany Country Club. He hired architect Edward Durell Stone, the designer of the original Museum of Modern Art building, and charged him with creating something worthy of a great public university. Stone delivered a unified vision of plazas, colonnades, fountains, and towers built around a central podium, a campus that reads like a monumental civic gesture rather than an accident of real estate. It opened in nineteen sixty-seven.

Today the University at Albany enrolls about seventeen thousand students and is particularly renowned for its schools of criminal justice and public policy, descendants in spirit of that first Normal School on State Street, still asking what education owes the public.