Columbia University
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50 free Columbia University trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Columbia University has been part of New York City since before the United States existed. It began as a small colonial college, survived a revolution and two moves uptown, and grew into an Ivy League research university whose graduates and professors have shaped politics, science, literature and Wall Street. This quiz covers the whole story: the founding and the early years, the buildings and statues of the main campus, the presidents, justices, writers, scientists and musicians who studied or taught there, and the discoveries made in its laboratories. There is plenty of insider knowledge too, from student traditions and graduation quirks to the sporting highs and lows and the films and shows that used the campus as a backdrop. It is written for students, alumni, applicants and New Yorkers who want to test what they know about Columbia. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few stories worth retelling at the next reunion.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Midtown Manhattan landmark stands on land that Columbia University owned until 1985?
Rockefeller Center
Rockefeller Center rose on land that Columbia leased out in 1928 and that had once held America's first public botanical garden. The university finally sold the site for $400 million.
Q 02Which future US president graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a degree in political science?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama transferred to Columbia as a junior in 1981 after two years at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He lived off campus on West 109th Street.
Q 03Which Hollywood studio's logo did former Columbia student Howard Dietz base on his old university's mascot?
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer inherited its lion from Goldwyn Pictures, where Dietz picked the animal in 1916 as a tribute to Columbia, whose teams are still called the Lions.
Q 04Which 1990s sitcom filmed the outside of Tom's Restaurant, a diner in a Columbia University building?
Seinfeld
Seinfeld used the diner's exterior as Monk's Café, later cropping the neon sign so that only the word Restaurant showed. The diner sits on the ground floor of Columbia's Armstrong Hall.
Q 05Which 1984 comedy filmed scenes at Columbia University on condition that the school was never named on screen?
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters used Columbia's Havemeyer Hall as Weaver Hall, the fictional home of the lab its three scientists are thrown out of.
Q 06Which American honor for journalism and the arts has Columbia University administered since 1917?
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize was set up by the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, whose bequest also paid for Columbia's journalism school. The awards are still handed out each spring.
Q 07Which Founding Father attended Columbia's colonial forerunner and has a campus hall named after him?
Hamilton
Hamilton enrolled in 1773 and, two years later, held off an angry mob long enough for the college's Loyalist president to escape. Hamilton Hall carries his name and his statue.
Q 08Which World War II general served as president of Columbia University from 1948 until 1953?
Dwight Eisenhower
Dwight Eisenhower took up oil painting while running Columbia and spent part of his term on leave as NATO's first supreme commander. Faculty came to see him as an absentee president.
Q 09Which future New York Yankees star studied engineering at Columbia University before signing in 1923?
Lou Gehrig
Lou Gehrig spent two years at Columbia and played fullback for its football team. He was barred from college sports as a freshman after playing minor-league games for Hartford.
Q 10What was Columbia University called when it was founded in 1754?
King's College
King's College reopened after the Revolution in 1784 with the new name Columbia College, chosen by the state legislature to show its support for the new Republic.
Q 11What occupied the site of Columbia University's main campus before the college bought it in 1892?
A mental asylum
A mental asylum, the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum, filled the land with orchards, vegetable gardens and a working farm. One of its buildings still stands on campus as Buell Hall.
Q 12In which New York City neighborhood has Columbia University's main campus stood since the 1890s?
Morningside Heights
Morningside Heights became home when president Seth Low moved the campus up from 49th Street, wanting one site where every discipline could be taught. The main campus covers 32 acres.
Q 13Which women's college was founded in 1889 because Columbia University refused to admit female students?
Barnard
Q 21Which Nobel physicist left Europe for Columbia University and joined America's first fission experiment?
Enrico Fermi
Enrico Fermi chose Columbia from five university job offers and joined the 1939 experiment in the basement of Pupin Hall. His reactor research later moved to Chicago.
Q 22Which billionaire investor enrolled at Columbia Business School in 1950 to study under Benjamin Graham?
Warren Buffett
Warren Buffett applied only after Harvard Business School rejected him, then built his approach on Graham's idea of buying undervalued stocks. He left with a master's in economics in 1951.
Q 23Which annual Columbia University student musical, first staged in 1894, once featured songs by Richard Rodgers?
Barnard College was started by student activist Annie Nathan Meyer and named after a Columbia president. Its graduates receive diplomas signed by the presidents of both schools.
Q 14What is the bronze statue of a seated, robed woman on Columbia University's Low Library steps called?
Alma Mater
Alma Mater, Latin for nourishing mother, has sat there since 1903. In May 1970 a bomb was planted on the statue during a wave of student protests.
Q 15Which bird is hidden in the robes of the bronze statue on Columbia University's Low Library steps?
An owl
An owl, an age-old symbol of wisdom, is tucked into the cloak near the figure's left leg. One professor argued it was really a nod to the sculptor's college fraternity.
Q 16Which color did Columbia University take from its oldest student society to pair with white?
Light blue
Light blue came from the rosettes of the Philolexian Society, while white came from its rival, the Peithologian. The shade is now simply called Columbia blue.
Q 17Which traditional symbol of Columbia University tops the scepter held by a famous campus statue?
A crown
A crown stayed Columbia's emblem long after the Revolution ended royal rule, and a student Shakespeare troupe on campus still performs under its name.
Q 18Which sport was Columbia University playing at Baker Field in 1939 in America's first televised sporting event?
Baseball
Baseball made its television debut when NBC broadcast a Columbia home game in May 1939. The first televised football game followed that September, also a college contest.
Q 19Which literary movement took shape when Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg met around Columbia University in 1944?
The Beat Generation
The Beat Generation grew out of friendships made in and around the campus, where Kerouac had arrived on a football scholarship. William Burroughs and Lucien Carr were part of the same circle.
Q 20Which future Supreme Court justice left Harvard for Columbia Law School and graduated joint first in her class?
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Ruth Bader Ginsburg moved when her husband took a job in New York, after Harvard's dean refused to let her finish her degree from afar. She later became Columbia Law's first tenured woman.
The Varsity Show
The Varsity Show began as a fundraiser for Columbia's athletic teams and still satirizes campus life every spring. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the 1920 edition, Fly With Me.
Q 24What does Columbia College call the set of required courses, begun in 1919, that all its students take?
The Core Curriculum
The Core Curriculum began with a peace-issues course after World War I, reworked from a war-issues class the US Army had commissioned from Columbia in 1917.
Q 25Which unusual challenge must Columbia College students pass before receiving their diplomas?
A swimming test
A swimming test stands between every Columbia College student and graduation, though a semester of beginners' swimming lessons can stand in for it.
Q 26Which planned building in a Harlem park helped set off the 1968 student occupation of Columbia University?
A gymnasium
A gymnasium planned for city parkland drew fury because its design gave the Harlem community a separate lower level. The protests got the project scrapped.
Q 27Which broadcasting technology did Columbia University professor Edwin Howard Armstrong invent in the 1930s?
FM radio
FM radio was born in Philosophy Hall, where Armstrong kept a self-financed laboratory and owned his patents outright. He taught at Columbia for the rest of his life.
Q 28Which Ivy League rival did Columbia's football team defeat in 1988 to end a 44-game losing streak?
Princeton
Princeton lost 16–13 after missing a late field goal, ending a run in which Columbia went 47 games without a win. It was the team's first victory in its four-year-old stadium.
Q 29Which West Coast university did Columbia's football team upset 7–0 to win the 1934 Rose Bowl?
Stanford
Stanford fell to a trick play called KF-79, in which the quarterback hid the ball and slipped it to Al Barabas for the game's only score. It ranks among the Rose Bowl's biggest upsets.
Q 30Which US president entered Columbia Law School in 1904 but dropped out after passing the bar exam?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt never finished the degree, and neither did his distant cousin Theodore a generation earlier. Columbia Law gave both presidents honorary law degrees in 2008.