List of City College of New York alumni

Notable alumni

Nobel laureates

• Julius Axelrod 1933 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1970
• Kenneth Arrow 1940 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 1972
• Herbert Hauptman 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
• Robert Hofstadter 1935 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1961
• Jerome Karle 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
• Arthur Kornberg 1937 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1959
• Leon M. Lederman 1943 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1988
• Arno Penzias 1954 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1978
• Robert J. Aumann 1950 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 2005
• John O'Keefe, 1963 – Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 2014

Rhodes Scholars

• James T. Molloy 1939

Chancellors

• Matthew Goldstein – former chancellor of the City University of New York (1999-2013).

Politics, government and sociology

• Herman Badillo 1951 – former Congressman and Chairman of CUNY's Board of Trustees, an architect of the University's academic rebirth
• Bernard M. Baruch 1889 – Wall Street financier; adviser to American Presidents for 40 years, from Woodrow Wilson to John F. Kennedy
• Abraham D. Beame 1928 – mayor of New York City, 1974 to 1977
• Daniel Bell – sociologist, professor at Harvard University
• Stephen Bronner – political theorist, Marxist, professor at Rutgers University
• Upendra J. Chivukula – first Asian American elected to the New Jersey General Assembly
• Henry Cohen 1943 – Director of Föhrenwald DP Camp; founding dean of the Milano School for Management and Urban Policy at The New School
• Suzanne DiMaggio - long-time analyst of U.S. Foreign Policy in Asia and the Middle East
• Benjamin B. Ferencz 1920 – international jurist
• Abraham Foxman – National Director of the Anti-Defamation League
• Felix Frankfurter 1902 – justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1939-1962
• George Friedman – founder of Stratfor, author, professor of political science, security and defense analyst
• Nathan Glazer – sociologist and professor at Harvard University
• Irving Howe – coined the phrase "New York Jewish Intellectual"
• Robert T. Johnson 1972 – Bronx District Attorney
• Henry Kissinger – Nobel Peace Prize and Secretary of State, National Security Advisor (did not graduate)
• Ed Koch 1945 – mayor of New York City, 1978-1989
• Irving Kristol 1940 – neoconservative pundit
• Melvin J. Lasky 1938 – anti-communist; editor of Encounter 1958-1991
• Milton Leitenberg 1955 - American arms control expert
• Guillermo Linares 1975 – first Dominican-American New York City Council member
• Colin Powell – United States Secretary of State (2001–2005); Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993) and U.S. Army General; National Security Advisor (1987–1989)
• Sal Restivo 1965 – pioneer ethnographer of science; one of the founders of the sociology of mathematics; founding member and former president of the Society for Social Studies of Science
• Julius Rosenberg – infamous convicted spy during the Cold War
• Robert F. Wagner Sr. – United States Senator from New York, 1927-1949
• Michele Wallace 1975 – major figure in African-American studies, feminist studies and cultural studies
• Stephen Samuel Wise 1891 – Reform rabbi, early Zionist and social justice activist
• Marilyn Zayas 1965 - Judge, Ohio's First District Court of Appeals ^[1]

The arts

• Maurice Ashley 1993 – first African-American International Chess Grandmaster
• Paddy Chayefsky – playwright and screenwriter; wrote Marty , Hospital and Altered States
• Carl Dreher 1917 – sound engineer, nominated for Sound Recording Academy Awards for the films The Gay Divorcee and I Dream Too Much
• Ira Gershwin 1918 – lyricist, collaborator with, and brother of George Gershwin
• Marv Goldberg 1964 – music historian in the field of rhythm & blues
• Hazelle Goodman 1986 – stage, screen and TV actress; first African-American to hold a leading role in a Woody Allen film, Deconstructing Harry
• Arthur Guiterman – humorous poet
• Luis Guzmán – actor
• E.Y. "Yip" Harburg 1918 – lyricist ( The Wizard of Oz , Finian's Rainbow )
• Judd Hirsch 1960 – actor
• Alvin Hollingsworth - painter, co-organizer of African American artist contributors to 1963 March on Washington, and early comic book artist
• Ernest Lehman 1937 (BS) – screenwriter ( North by Northwest , The Sound of Music , Sweet Smell of Success , Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? )
• David Margulies – actor
• Jackie Mason – comedian and actor
• Sterling Morrison 1970 – musician, co-founder of The Velvet Underground
• Zero Mostel 1935 – actor
• Faith Ringgold 1959 – artist and children's book author and illustrator
• Edward G. Robinson 1914 – actor
• Richard Schiff 1983 – Emmy Award-winning actor; star of The West Wing (his character, Toby Ziegler, also attended CCNY)
• Ben Shahn – artist
• Gabourey Sidibe – actress
• Alfred Stieglitz 1884 – photographer
• Eli Wallach 1938 MA – actor

Literature and journalism

• Alan Abelson 1942 – columnist, former editor, Barron's
• Morris Raphael Cohen – philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar
• Dan Daniel 1910 – Dean of American Sportswriters
• Davidson Garrett 1988- American poet
• Gary Gruber 1962 – best selling author, educator, physicist
• Oscar Hijuelos 1975 – won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
• Jack Kroll 1937 – culture editor, Newsweek
• Paul Levinson – author of The Plot to Save Socrates and The Silk Code ; winner of Locus Award, 1999
• Bernard Malamud 1936 (BA) – author; won 1967 Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his novel The Fixer , National Book Award for The Magic Barrel ; also wrote The Natural (1952)
• Montrose Jonas Moses – author
• Walter Mosley 1991 MA – best-selling author whose novels about private eye Easy Rawlins have received Edgar and Golden Dagger Awards
• Michael Oreskes 1975 – Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune
• Mario Puzo – bestselling novelist, screenwriter, The Godfather
• Selwyn Raab – investigative journalist for The New York Times ^[2]
• Alexander Rosenberg 1967 – novelist and philosopher
• A.M. Rosenthal 1949 – won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. Was Executive Editor of The New York Times
• Henry Roth – novelist and author of Call It Sleep , a novel on the Jewish immigrant experience
• Robert Scheer – journalist and radio host
• Stephen Shepard 1961 – editor in chief, Business Week
• Anatole Shub – editor and journalist specializing in Eastern European matters
• Upton Sinclair 1897 BA – author of The Jungle (1906)
• Robert Sobel 1951 BSS, 1952 MA – best-selling author of business histories
• Gary Weiss 1975 – investigative journalist; author of Born to Steal (2003) and Wall Street Versus America (2006)

Science and technology

• Solomon Asch – psychologist, known for the Asch conformity experiments
• Julius Blank – engineer, member of the "traitorous eight" who founded Silicon Valley
• Marvin Chester 1952 – physicist, quantum physics emeritus professor at UCLA
• Adin Falkoff – engineer, computer scientist, co-inventor of the APL language interactive system
• Richard D. Gitlin 1964 – engineer, co-invention of DSL Bell Labs
• George Washington Goethals 1887 – civil engineer, best known for his supervision of construction and the opening of the Panama Canal
• Dan Goldin 1962 – 9th and longest-tenured administrator of NASA
• Walter S. Graf – cardiologist, pioneer in creation of emergency paramedic care system
• Robert E. Kahn 1960 – Internet pioneer, co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocol, co-recipient of the Turing Award in 2004
• Allen Kent – pioneer of information science, especially mechanized information retrieval
• Gary A. Klein 1964 – research psychologist, known for pioneering the field of naturalistic decision making
• Leonard Kleinrock 1957 – Internet pioneer
• Solomon Kullback – mathematician; NSA cryptology pioneer
• Lewis Mumford – historian of technology
• Charles Lane Poor – noted astronomer
• Mario Runco, Jr. 1974 – astronaut
• Jonas Salk 1934 – inventor of the Salk polio vaccine
• Philip H. Sechzer 1934 – anesthesiologist, pioneer in pain management; inventor of patient-controlled analgesia
• Abraham Sinkov – mathematician; NSA (National Security Agency) cryptology pioneer
• David B. Steinman 1906 – engineer; bridge designer
• Leonard Susskind 1962 – physicist, string theory
• Victor Twersky 1943 – physicist, scattering theory ^{[3] [4]} – physicist and IEEE Fellow renowned for his contributions to the multiple scattering theory; professor of applied mathematics in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science at University of Illinois at Chicago (1966-1990)

Business

• Andrew Grove 1960 – 4th employee of Intel, and eventually its president, CEO, and chairman; TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1997; donated $26,000,000 to CCNY's Grove School of Engineering in 2006
• Melvin Simon 1949 – real estate developer, co-founder of Simon Property Group

Sports

• Red Holzman 1942 – basketball coach for the New York Knicks
• Holcombe Rucker 1962 – organizer and namesake of the Rucker Tournament

Fictional alumni

• Lennie Briscoe – character from the TV show Law & Order
• Don Draper – character on the TV show Mad Men
• Brian Flanagan – character from the 1988 film Cocktail
• Gordon Gekko – character from the 1987 film Wall Street
• Nancy – character from the 1971 film Bananas
• Toby Ziegler – character from the TV show The West Wing

See also

• Category:City College of New York alumni
• List of City College of New York people

Footnotes

1. "Marilyn Zayas". Ballotpedia. Retrieved November 22, 2020.
2. Raab, Selwyn (November 6, 2009). "McCarthyism and Student Journalism at City College". The New York Times. Retrieved September 2, 2012.
3. Victor Twersky; Fellow: Awarded 1972: Field of Study: Applied Mathematics
4. Victor Twersky Archived July 15, 2007, at the Wayback Machine by Joseph B. Keller.

References and further reading

• S. Willis Rudy, College of the City of New York 1847–1947, 1949.
• James Traub, City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College, 1994.
• Paul David Pearson, The City College of New York: 150 years of academic architecture, 1997.
• Sandra S. Roff, et al., From the Free Academy to Cuny: Illustrating Public Higher Education in New York City, 1847–1997 , 2000.