Welcome to Manhattan College. As I think you’ll see amply demonstrated on this site, Manhattan is an exciting place to be for students, faculty, and staff alike. We pride ourselves on our 150-year tradition of excellence in education, grounded in a deep sense of community. At Manhattan, students are at the center of our concern, and everything we do is focused on providing the challenge and support that our students need to excel both professionally and personally.
As someone relatively new to Manhattan, I can assure you from firsthand experience that this really is a “caring campus community,” as we say in our mission statement. The school is large enough to be robustly diverse and to support a wide range of academic, extracurricular, and support programs. The five schools that make up the College — arts, business, education, engineering, and science — offer, individually, extraordinarily rich curricula, as well as ample opportunity for students in each school to take advantage of the resources of the others. At the same time, Manhattan College is small enough and compact enough for people to form a genuine sense of shared identity. Our students get to know each other very well; professors know their students by name; the Brothers community welcomes students, faculty, and staff with open arms and generous hospitality; and members of our community form deep relationships that last a lifetime.
This sense of community, combined with our location in New York City, provides our students with a “best of both worlds” experience. Our students have at their doorstep the world’s financial and cultural capital in all its diversity and richness and challenge. At the same time, they also have access to a quiet, contemplative haven in the midst of all that energy and activity. Our campus is our doorway, our staging ground, or our retreat. It allows our students and faculty to be immersed in the city without being overwhelmed by it.
Manhattan is both a great, modern, New York school — a fast-paced place where you’ll be immersed in cutting-edge learning across the disciplines and a school that for more than 150 years has played a vital role in the history of New York and of the country, producing alumni who have been leaders in business, the arts, education, government and politics, law, the church, and (of course) engineering. Manhattan engineers like to say, “New York was built by Manhattan College engineers.” That’s true. And the city has been governed, educated, protected, financed, informed, entertained, and inspired by generations of Manhattan alumni, too. We’re proud to list among our distinguished alumni former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and best-selling author James Patterson.
Beneath its rich New York history lies Manhattan’s connection with scores of institutions around the world that share the legacy of St. John Baptist de La Salle. The Lasallian legacy stands for more than three centuries of excellence in education, emphasizing the dignity of the human person and calling each of us to use his or her unique gifts in the service of our fellow human beings, especially those among us who are most vulnerable. St. John Baptist de La Salle, whom the Catholic Church recognizes as the patron saint of teachers, was someone who could have lived a very comfortable life among the cultivated, clever and rich in his native France. He himself was an exquisitely educated priest on his way to a brilliant career in the church when he was called to pour out his talents and his life living among and establishing schools for people who would today be called “underrepresented groups” — the children of less well-off parents who in that place and time would have otherwise been denied an education.
Among the many outgrowths of the legacy of De La Salle today is its longstanding and firm commitment to combining liberal learning with a very practical sense of things. Manhattan graduates are people who are both broadly well-educated across the range of disciplines and problem solvers, the kind of people who are not content just to know things, but who are always asking how can this knowledge be put to good use? How can things be made better by our knowing this? How can we use our gifts of intelligence and imagination and skill to make the world a better place?
We invite you to learn more about us, through this site or, better, during a campus visit. We’d love to welcome you into our community.
