Rutgers University

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Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey was founded in 1766 as Queen's College also by Royal Charter, but by the grandson of King George II, George III (also known as "that dude who believed in taxation of Americans without representation and later made a habit of talking to trees"). It was named after Colonel Henry Rutgers in 1825, a Revolutionary War officer who donated the interest on a $5,000 bond (and a bell) and apparently gave the impression that he would donate much more (he didn't).

Today, Rutgers is the official State University of New Jersey, a designation that encroached upon it with the awarding of a land grant in 1864 of 210,000 acres in, of all places, Utah (amidst feverish competition with Princeton, no less)[1]. By 1945, Rutgers had officially been designated a state university. It also gobbled up the University of Newark (now Rutgers-Newark) in 1946 and the College of South Jersey (now Rutgers-Camden) in 1950. Both schools arguably became worse off after the merger. Presently, Rutgers is thinking about nibbling away at UMDNJ and NJIT.

Rutgers was origianlly found as Queen's college, which appeared to have some relational reference to Columbia, which was known as King's college [2].

Ties between Columbia and Rutgers were, at one point in the past, somewhat strong. An entire class of Columbia juniors in the early 19th century threatened to withdraw and petition for admission as a class to Rutgers when the Trustees were considering expelling a particularly troublesome member. And supposedly, there were once "annual Queen's College-King's College (Columbia) debates"[3], but no one has heard of one in recent memory.

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