Teachers College, Columbia University in the context of "Edward Thorndike"

The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York is the governing board of Columbia University in New York City. Founded in 1754, it is sometimes referred to as the Columbia Corporation. The Trustees of Columbia University is a 501(c)3 and the owner of the property and real assets of the university. Affiliates of the university, which include Barnard College, Jewish Theological Seminary, Teachers College, and Union Theological Seminary, are separate legal entities.

The board of trustees was originally composed of ex officio members including officials from the New York colonial government, crown officials, and various Protestant ministers from the city. Following the college's resuscitation following the American Revolutionary War, it was placed under the control of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, and the university would finally come under the control of a private board of trustees in 1787. The board is notable for having administered the Pulitzer Prize from the prize's establishment until 1975.

Belle da Costa Greene (November 26, 1879 – May 10, 1950) was an American librarian who managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan died in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Despite being born to black parents, Greene spent her professional career passing for white.

Greene worked in the administrative offices at Columbia University's Teachers College in the mid-1890s, where she was introduced to the philanthropist and social welfare advocate Grace Hoadley Dodge. Dodge arranged for Greene to be admitted to the Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies and funded her education there. Greene attended the seminary for three years, likely from 1896 to 1899. In 1900, Greene attended Amherst College's Summer School of Library Economy, a six-week program that offered courses in the nascent library science field, including cataloging, indexing, and handwriting. Following her graduation, she began working at the Princeton University Library. At Princeton, she was trained in cataloging and reference work, and she developed a knowledge of rare books. While working at Princeton, she met Junius Spencer Morgan II, who later introduced her to his financier uncle J. P. Morgan. Greene began working as J. P. Morgan's librarian in 1905.

Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist painter and draftswoman whose career spanned seven decades and whose work remained largely independent of major art movements. Called the "Mother of American modernism", O'Keeffe gained international recognition for her paintings of natural forms, particularly flowers and desert-inspired landscapes, which were often drawn from and related to places and environments in which she lived.

From 1905, when O'Keeffe began her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, until about 1920, she studied art or earned money as a commercial illustrator or a teacher to pay for further education. Influenced by Arthur Wesley Dow, O'Keeffe began to develop her unique style beginning with her watercolors from her studies at the University of Virginia and more dramatically in the charcoal drawings that she produced in 1915 that led to total abstraction. Alfred Stieglitz, an art dealer and photographer, held an exhibit of her works in 1916. Over the next couple of years, she taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University.

Betty A. Reardon (June 12, 1929 – November 3, 2023) was an American teacher and the founder and director of the Peace Education Center and Peace Education Graduate Degree Program at Teachers College, Columbia University. She was a leader in peace education and a scholar in human rights education at the primary and secondary levels. Along with Elise Boulding and Cynthia Enloe, she was also considered part of the "pioneering generation of women in peace studies" because of her efforts to highlight the dominance of "white haired wise men" in the field, and her desire to make women’s ideas and issues a central part of the debate on world peace. Her publications comprise over 300 works in a number of subject areas including: peace studies, peace education, human rights, gender, and ecology.