NEW YORK -- Columbia College, the nation's oldest state-chartered college, celebrated its bicentennial with a birthday party featuring stars of stage, opera, ballet, and popular music at the Metropolitan Opera House.
'We want to remember tonight that Columbia College is known as the college on Broadway,' said Walter Cronkite, who hosted the Sunday night gala.
The bicentennial was to be celebrated on campus Monday -- April 13, l787 was the actual date of the Coolumbia charter signing -- with a convocation at St. Paul's Chapel.
Cronkite introduced the entertainers at the celebration at the Met, including Broadway composer-lyricist team John Kander and Fred Ebb, musical comedy stars Karen Akers and Ben Vereen, Met singers Roberta Peters and Robert Merrill, pop singer Tony Bennett, the Dance Theater of Harlem, and pianist Emanuel Ax, class of '70.
Composer Marvin Hamlisch played 'Happy Birthday' on the piano as it might have been composed by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. The Oratorio Society of New York sang the Bruce Pohamac's specially composed 'Columbia Bicentennial Overture' accompanied by the Columbia Uniersity Orchestra, and actor George Segal, class of '55, sang 'Yes, Sir, That's My Baby,' accompanying himself on the banjo.
Among the 3,800 people in the audience were most of the class of 1987, the college's first coeducational graduating class. Their years on campus were recalled by film clips of seven recent Hollywood movies with scenes made at Columbia, including 'Hannah and Her Sisters.'
Columbia College was founded in 1754 as King's College and was first governed by George III, then by New York state, with clerics as presidents. The 1787 charter made it an independent college, free of both church and state. The college is now the undergraduate school of Columbia University.
