A Brief History of the
New York Board of Regents
by Robert Stiles
The New York State Board of Regents
came into being on May 1, 1784 as a corporation that served
as the trustees of Columbia College. In 1786, the Regent’s committee broadened the
Board’s responsibilities so that their own board of trustees
would then oversee all colleges and academies. One year later,
a bill was passed which gave the Board the power to ‘visit
and inspect all the colleges, academies, and schools’ in
New York, award higher academic degrees, hold and distribute
funds, and exercise other powers of a corporation. Under this
law, the board consisted of nineteen Regents, elected for lifetime
terms by Legislative joint ballots, in addition to the governor
and lieutenant governor.
Initially, the Regents implemented
their authority of oversight by reviewing and sifting through
statistical information gathered from the state’s academies
and colleges, and any actual visit to an institution by the
Regents was a rare occurrence. In 1801, the Regents began
applying a set of standards for the incorporation of private
academies and in 1811 these standards were applied to colleges
as well. By decree of the Legislature, the Regents then became
trustees of the State Library and the State Museum in 1894
and 1845; and, by 1892, the Regents involvement came to include
the right to incorporate and supervise all libraries, museums,
correspondence schools, and other educational institutions.
Throughout the mid to late 1800’s, as a statewide system
of public schools evolved, the responsibilities of the board
of Regents and those of the newly created Department of Public
Instruction came into conflict because of the two entities’ similar
administrative functions. The Department of Public Instruction,
under the common school law of 1812, oversaw the state’s
public school system by advising local school authorities,
allocating state aid and preparing reports to the Legislature.
One indication of the increasingly blurred lines of authority
between the Department of Public Instruction and the Regents
became apparent when, after 1842, both the Superintendent of
Common Schools and the Superintendent of Public Instruction
were both members of the Board of Regents. What’s more,
the state’s high schools were subject to visitation and
inspection by the Superintendent of Public Instruction, even
as the academic programs of all secondary schools were under
the general supervision of the Regents. Competition between
the Regents and the Department of Public Instruction grew increasingly
acute, and in 1899 Governor Theodore Roosevelt named a special
commission to study the unification of the two educational
organizations. The commission recommended that a new department
of education, with greater oversight, replace the Department
of Public Instruction and that the Governor, with the consent
of the Senate, appoint the Regents for fixed terms. Soon after,
in 1904, a joint committee proposed that a three-member commission,
made up of one Regent and two other members (each selected
by their respective parties), oversee elementary and secondary
education. However, then-governor Benjamin Odell and a Republican
caucus disregarded the committee’s recommendations, and
created their own unification bill, which then became law,
and established an Education Department on April 1, 1904. Under
the new law, the Regents would appoint a Commissioner of Education.
The first Commissioner was Andrew S. Draper. The Legislature
elected the Regents to serve fixed terms and one Regent was
chosen from each Supreme Court judicial district. Currently,
the Board of Regents works through standing committees, as
well as through its administrative, legal, legislative, and
ethical committees, while it oversees educational activity
at all levels, including private and public, non-profit and
for-profit institutions. The Regents meet monthly, excluding
August. The group has become more socially heterogeneous—the
first woman was appointed in 1927, the first Italian-American
in 1948, the first African-American in 1966, and the first
Puerto Rican-American in 1975. #
