Binghamton University and Harpur College

Contents

1. Triple Cities College began as a school for veterans
2. Harpur College joined the State University of New York in 1950
3. The campus moved to Vestal above the Susquehanna River
4. Harpur College remains the largest academic division
5. Binghamton University is now a doctoral research university

Candace Cooley earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1990, at a campus whose founding college still answers to a surname from the Colonial frontier. The word is Harpur. The university’s own history explains that when the young college was taken into the state system it was renamed for Robert Harpur, a Colonial teacher, patriot and pioneer who helped settle the country west of Binghamton.² Harpur College’s account of itself adds the word scholar to that list and treats the name as a statement of purpose: a public college of the liberal arts meant to hold its own beside the private schools of the Northeast.¹ More than seven decades on, the college says, that ambition still steers its mission.¹ The surname also turns up on the grounds, where a footbridge crosses Harpur Pond in the campus nature preserve, a scene caught in a local newspaper gallery of the campus over the decades.⁶ The shorter name most people use today, Binghamton University, is the newest layer of all.

Triple Cities College began as a school for veterans

The institution opened in 1946 under another name entirely. It was Triple Cities College, a branch of Syracuse University, founded to meet the needs of local veterans coming home from service in World War II.² Its first home was in Endicott, about five miles west of the present campus.²

The setting was improvised. Harpur College’s history records that classrooms in Endicott ranged from Colonial Hall to temporary Quonset huts.¹ Nothing in that arrangement of borrowed halls and temporary huts pointed yet toward the research university that would grow from it.

Figure

From Triple Cities College to Binghamton University

1. 01
   1946Triple Cities College opens in Endicott as a branch of Syracuse University.
2. 02
   1950The college enters the State University of New York and is renamed Harpur College.
3. 03
   1961The campus moves across the Susquehanna River to Vestal.
4. 04
   1965The campus is formally designated the State University of New York at Binghamton.
5. 05
   1992The name Binghamton University is adopted.

Harpur College joined the State University of New York in 1950

The decisive change came four years after opening. In 1950 the college became part of the newly formed State University of New York, and the Harpur College account describes it as one of the two earliest liberal arts colleges in that system.¹ That year marks the formal start of Harpur College as a public institution under its new name.¹

The paper trail of that moment survives. Binghamton University Libraries Special Collections holds a folder on the dedication of Harpur College and its acceptance into the state university system, dated 1950.³ It sits within a subject file collection of news clippings, reports, statistical data, press releases, departmental histories, organization charts and pamphlets about the university’s programs, buildings, events and groups, a collection that fills 32.25 linear feet across 33 boxes and three map case drawers.³

The same archive lists the administrative papers of S. Stewart Gordon, described in the special collections catalog as the first Dean of Harpur College.⁴ Gordon held a run of senior posts between 1955 and 1976, among them Dean, Interim President, Vice President of Academic Affairs and Executive Vice President for Planning, and his subject files make up most of the papers.⁴ The catalog also lists a Harpur College History Project and records of student affairs and of the provost’s office.⁴

The campus moved to Vestal above the Susquehanna River

The college did not stay in Endicott for long. Work on a new campus in Vestal, on ground overlooking the Susquehanna River, began in 1954.¹ For several years students shuttled between the old Endicott buildings and the rising Vestal site, and the move was complete in 1961.¹

Figure

Endicott and Vestal

	Endicott	Vestal
Role	Original location from 1946	New campus from 1954
Buildings	Colonial Hall and temporary Quonset huts	A new campus under construction
Setting	The original campus town	Overlooking the Susquehanna River
Transition	Students commuted out for several years	Move completed in 1961

Growth then changed the college’s rank inside the state system. Rising enrollment and a reputation for excellence led to the selection of Harpur College as one of four doctorate granting University Centers in SUNY.² In 1965 the campus was formally designated the State University of New York at Binghamton.² An aerial photograph of the campus from about that year, held by the Broome County Historical Society, opens the newspaper’s photo history, which runs on through a library tower in 1996 and a new arrival at Lehman Hall in 1997 who was planning to major in biology.⁶

Harpur College remains the largest academic division

The renaming did not retire the older college. Harpur stayed the largest academic division of the university center, and the university still frames its identity around the liberal arts and sciences that Harpur teaches.¹ Today it offers nearly 60 undergraduate majors and close to 50 graduate programs across the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences, with interdisciplinary programs alongside.¹ Its faculty, by the college’s own description, include members of the National Academy of Sciences.¹ Its students work in science and computing laboratories and language technology facilities, and they can reach across to the professional schools of nursing, community and public affairs, engineering, management and pharmacy.¹

Those professional schools appear in the photo record too. One frame from 2016 shows more than 120 students from the Decker School of Nursing volunteering at a children’s Halloween party, and another from 2018 shows the first day of classes at the new School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.⁶ The university also points to a new Health Sciences Campus in Johnson City as part of its regional presence.² Student life fills the rest of the gallery: freshmen unpacking cars outside their dormitories in Vestal, a homecoming float called the College In The Woods in 2004, and, in 2016, more than 3,000 new students gathered on the Peace Quad to spell out a giant letter B.⁶

Figure

Harpur College by the numbers

Undergraduate majors offered by Harpur College

Nearly 60

Graduate programs offered by Harpur College

Close to 50

SUNY University Centers, of which the Binghamton campus is one

4

Binghamton University is now a doctoral research university

The present name was adopted in 1992.² The university describes itself as an R1 institution, the very high research category of the national classification of colleges and universities, and counts itself among only 146 such institutions in the country.² Its research reach extends into regional industry; its New Energy New York project was awarded more than $113 million to build an innovation hub in upstate New York.² It reports that it is writing a new strategic plan.²

Outside rankings have followed. In January 2025 the Binghamton Press and Sun Bulletin reported that a national magazine list of 125 colleges for future leaders, built by analyzing the resumes of 4,000 top American leaders, placed Binghamton at number 99, one of seven New York schools on the list.⁵ The same story noted a separate 2025 ranking that named it the best value among public universities in New York.⁵

What a university cannot do is make a physician on its own. A bachelor’s degree in biology is an early step; it grants no clinical skill and no right to treat anyone. The years that turn a graduate into a specialist come later, in medical school and in the supervised training described in the entry on residency and board certification, and the field itself is covered under obstetrics and gynecology as a specialty. Nor can a campus history or a ranking say anything about a particular woman’s health; those questions belong with her own physician.