List of City College of New York people

The following is a list of notable alumni and faculty of the City College of New York.

Nobel laureates

• Kenneth Arrow 1940 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 1972
• Robert J. Aumann 1950 – Nobel laureate in Economics, 2005
• Julius Axelrod 1933 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1970
• Herbert Hauptman 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
• Robert Hofstadter 1935 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1961
• Jerome Karle 1937 – Nobel laureate in Chemistry, 1985
• Henry Kissinger 1923 (did not graduate) – winner of Nobel Peace Prize, 1973
• Arthur Kornberg 1937 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 1959
• Leon M. Lederman 1943 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1988
• John O'Keefe 1963 – Nobel laureate in Medicine, 2014
• Arno Penzias 1954 – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1978
• Julian Schwinger (transferred to Columbia University) – Nobel laureate in Physics, 1965

Graduates of Business School (which became Baruch College in 1968)

• William F. Aldinger III 1969 – chairman and CEO, HSBC North America Holdings
• Abraham Beame 1928 – mayor of New York City
• Akis Cleanthous – former Minister of Education and Culture, Cyprus
• Monte Conner 1986 – senior vice president of Roadrunner Records, A&R Department
• Michael Grimm – member of United States House of Representatives for New York's 13th congressional district
• Sidney Harman 1939 – founder and executive chairman of Harman Kardon; owner of Newsweek
• Ralph Lauren (dropped out) – fashion designer, Polo
• Carlos D. Ramirez – publisher of El Diario La Prensa
• Carl Spielvogel BBA 1957 – former U.S. ambassador to Slovakia
• Craig A. Stanley – member of New Jersey General Assembly, 1996–2008
• George Weissman BBA 1939 – former CEO, Philip Morris International
• Larry Zicklin 1957 – former chairman, Neuberger Berman

Politics, history, government, sociology, philosophy, and religion

• Herman Badillo 1951 – congressman and chairman of CUNY's board of trustees
• Bernard M. Baruch 1889 – Wall Street financier and adviser to American presidents; author of the Baruch Plan
• Abraham D. Beame 1928 – mayor of New York City, 1974–1977
• Max Beauvoir 1958 – Haitian Vodou priest and supreme chief
• Daniel Bell 1939 – sociologist, professor at Harvard University
• Stephen Bronner – political theorist, Marxist, professor at Rutgers University
• Roswell B. Burchard 1880 – lieutenant governor of Rhode Island 1913–1915
• Jacob A. Cantor 1875 – congressman, state senator, Manhattan borough president
• Frank Caplan – educator, founder of children's educational toy company Creative Playthings
• Upendra J. Chivukula – first Asian-American elected to the New Jersey General Assembly
• Henry Cohen 1943 – director, Föhrenwald DP Camp; founding dean of the Milano School for Management and Urban Policy at The New School
• Morris Raphael Cohen – graduate of CCNY and professor at CCNY; philosopher, lawyer, and legal scholar; namesake of the Cohen Library at CCNY
• Marty Dolin – former Manitoba NDP MLA for Kildonan
• Philip Elman – Justice Department attorney and Federal Trade Commission member, wrote government's brief in Brown v. Board of Education
• Benjamin B. Ferencz – international jurist and criminal justice pioneer; co-winner of the 2009 Erasmus Prize
• Louis Finkelstein – Conservative Jewish theologian
• Abraham Foxman – national director of the Anti-Defamation League
• Felix Frankfurter 1902 – justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
• George Friedman – founder of Stratfor, author, professor of political science, security and defense analyst
• Nathan Glazer – sociologist, professor at Harvard University; author of Beyond the Melting Pot with Daniel Patrick Moynihan
• Steven Goldberg – president of the sociology department of CCNY
• Paul Goodman – writer, social critic, public intellectual; author of The Empire City, Growing Up Absurd, and Communitas
• Edmund Gordon – founding director of the Institute for Research on African Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean (IRADAC) at CCNY
• Stanley Graze – economist and former lecturer at CCNY; worked in the United Nations, State Department, US Army and the Brookings Institution; MA from Columbia University
• Anthony J. Griffin – congressman and state senator
• Leon Harrison – rabbi
• Carl G. Hempel – philosopher of science and professor of philosophy at CCNY
• Sidney Hook 1923 – writer and philosopher
• Benjamin Kaplan 1929 – helped write the indictments of Nazi war criminals who were tried at Nuremberg; served as Nuremberg prosecutor; distinguished Harvard law professor
• Charles E. H. Kauvar 1900 – rabbi in Denver, Colorado
• Henry Kissinger – secretary of state under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford
• Israel Knox – philosophy professor
• Ed Koch 1945 – mayor of New York City, 1978–1989
• Irving Kristol 1940 – neoconservative intellectual, professor at New York University
• Diana Lachatanere 1969 – archivist
• David Landes 1942 – historian, professor at Harvard University
• Melvin J. Lasky 1938 – anti-communist, editor of Encounter 1958–1991
• Milton Leitenberg – arms control expert
• Felix A. Levy 1904 – rabbi
• Albert L. Lewis – conservative rabbi, president of international Rabbinical Assembly
• Samuel A. Lewis – politician and philanthropist in the late 19th century; a trustee of the college
• Guillermo Linares 1975 – first Dominican American New York City Council member
• Seymour Martin Lipset – political sociology, trade unions
• Deborah Lipstadt 1969 – historian; combatted Holocaust denial
• Rachel Lloyd – applied urban anthropology graduate; founder of Girls Educational and Mentoring Services in New York
• Joseph Lookstein – rabbi and president of Bar-Ilan University
• Jay Lovestone 1918 – radical political leader and trade union functionary
• Richard Lowitt (B.A.) – historian, Guggenheim Fellow
• Sister Jean M. Marshall (M.A.) – received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award from President Bill Clinton in 1999
• Sidney Morgenbesser – philosopher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, known to have witheringly applied Jewish humor to issues in metaphysics and epistemology
• Henry Morgenthau, Sr. – financier and diplomat; as ambassador to Ottoman Empire attempted to warn the world about the Armenian genocide
• Daniel Patrick Moynihan – spent a year at CCNY before he was drafted; author of Beyond the Melting Pot with Nathan Glazer; ambassador to the U.N.; senator representing New York
• Massimo Pigliucci – scientist and philosopher
• William Popper – Orientalist and professor
• Colin L. Powell 1961 – U.S. secretary of state, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. Army general, national security advisor
• Jacob S. Raisin – rabbi
• Simon H. Rifkind 1922 – judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York
• Donald A. Ritchie 1967 – historian, currently historian of the United States Senate
• Alexander Rosenberg – Lakatos Award-winning philosopher at Duke University
• Julius Rosenberg – executed for espionage during the Cold War
• Bertrand Russell – invited by the philosophy department in 1940 to become a professor but his appointment was blocked by a suit and timidity on the part of the Board of Higher Education; see the Bertrand Russell Case
• Bayard Rustin (did not graduate) – African-American leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights (an (adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. and main organizer of the March on Washington in 1963)
• Bernice Sandler (M.A. 1950) – the "godmother of Title IX"
• Oscar Schachter 1936 – law professor and United Nations aide
• Herbert Schiller 1940 – media critic and communications theorist
• George D. Schwab 1954 – political scientist, editor and academic, president of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy
• Henry Schwarzschild – founder of NCADP, LCDC, and head of ACLU's Capital Punishment project in America
• Allen G. Schwartz – U.S. federal judge
• Morrie Schwartz – sociologist, author, and subject of Tuesdays with Morrie
• Philip Selznick 1938 – sociologist, organizational theorist
• Assata Shakur – civil rights activist; involved in May 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in which a state trooper was killed
• Moses J. Stroock 1886 – lawyer
• Myron Sulzberger – lawyer, politician, and judge
• Stanley S. Surrey 1929 – tax law scholar, assistant secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy 1961–1969
• Samuel Turk – rabbi, religious leader, columnist
• Friedrich Ulfers 1959 – deconstructionist writer, dean of Media and Communications at European Graduate School, and NYU professor
• Robert F. Wagner, Sr. – U.S. senator from New York, 1927–1949; introduced the National Labor Relations Act
• Michele Wallace 1975 – major figure in African-American studies, feminist studies and cultural studies
• General Alexander S. Webb – second president of the college; winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism at the Battle of Gettysburg
• Melvyn Weiss (1935–2018, class of 1956) – attorney who co-founded the plaintiff class action law firm Milberg Weiss
• Stephen Samuel Wise 1891 – Reform rabbi, early Zionist and social justice activist
• Bertram D. Wolfe 1916 – political activist and historian

Psychology

• Solomon Asch 1928 – psychologist, known for the Asch conformity experiments
• Morton Bard – psychologist, trailblazer in crisis intervention and author of The Crime Victim's Book
• Isidor Chein 1932 – minority group identification, co-wrote amicus curiae brief in Brown v. Board of Education
• Kenneth Clark – CCNY professor who studied attitudes toward race and testified at Brown v. Board of Education
• Jacob Cohen – psychologist and statistician, developed the coefficient kappa to assess the reliability of ratings of discrete categories of behavior (e.g., diagnoses of mental disorder); expert on factor analysis and regression analysis
• Morton Deutsch – social psychology, conflict resolution
• Milton Diamond 1955 – known for following up the case of David Reimer
• Leonard Eron – expert on the development of aggression
• Leon Festinger 1939 – social psychologist; pioneered experimental social psychology, the theory of cognitive dissonance
• Robert Glaser – educational psychology
• Henry Gleitman – cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics
• Arno Gruen – psychologist and psychoanalyst
• Samuel Guze – psychiatrist; pioneered the emergence of psychiatry's ability to validly diagnose disorders
• Richard Herrnstein – quantitative analysis of behavior; co-author of The Bell Curve; Harvard professor
• Frederick Irving Herzberg – two-factor theory of job satisfaction
• Richard Lazarus – emotion, stress, and coping
• Abraham Maslow – psychologist, known of Maslow's hierarchy of needs
• Barry Mehler – psychologist, MA from CCNY, 1972
• Walter Mischel – social and personality psychology
• Gardner Murphy – professor of psychology at City College
• Charles Nemeroff – chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
• Vera S. Paster – clinical psychologist known for her contributions to ethnic minority issues and mental health
• Irvin Rock 1947; MA 1948 – professor of psychology at Berkeley, leading researcher on perception
• Margaret Rosario – clinical psychologist known for her research on human sexuality
• Irvin S. Schonfeld – psychology faculty member and leading researcher in the field of occupational health psychology
• Hans Strupp (did not graduate) – expert in psychotherapy research

The arts

• Chantal Akerman – film director who was a visiting professor
• Woody Allen (briefly attended)
• Maurice Ashley 1993 – first African-American International Chess Grandmaster
• Jeff Barry – singer/songwriter; wrote with his wife Ellie Greenwich many hit songs, including "Be My Baby" and "Baby, I Love You"
• Deborah Berke – architect
• Seymour Boardman – New York abstract expressionist
• Chakaia Booker – sculptor
• Joshua Brand – Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer
• Eddie Carmel, born Oded Ha-Carmeili (1936–1972) – Israeli-born entertainer with gigantism and acromegaly, popularly known as "The Jewish Giant"
• Paddy Chayefsky 1943 – playwright and screenwriter; wrote Marty, The Hospital, Network, and Altered States
• Shirley Clarke – independent filmmaker
• Madeleine Cosman – author of medieval cookbook
• Julie Dash – filmmaker best known for Daughters of the Dust
• Edward Eliscu – songwriter; screenwriter; actor; wrote lyrics for "Carioca" (nominated for Best Song Oscar in 1935), inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame
• Victor Ganz – collector of contemporary art in the 20th century
• Davidson Garrett – poet; actor; New York City yellow taxi cab driver; known for his book King Lear of the Taxi: Musings of a New York City Actor/Taxi Driver
• Sergio George 1961 – producer, musician
• Ira Gershwin 1918 – lyricist; collaborator with his brother George Gershwin, and with Jerome Kern, Kurt Weill, and Harold Arlen
• William Gibson 1938 – playwright, The Miracle Worker
• Marv Goldberg 1964 – music historian in the field of rhythm & blues
• Hazelle Goodman 1986 – stage, screen and TV actress
• Eydie Gormé – singer
• Bill Graham – music promoter
• Allen J. Grubman – entertainment lawyer
• Arthur Guiterman – humorous poet
• Luis Guzmán – actor
• E.Y. "Yip" Harburg 1918 – lyricist, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?," The Wizard of Oz, Finian's Rainbow
• Caroline Hirsch – founder of the comedy club Caroline's
• Judd Hirsch 1960 – actor
• Sam Jaffe 1912 – actor, teacher, musician, and engineer
• Sondra James – actress
• Dayal Kaur Khalsa 1963 (as Marcia Schonfeld) – author of children's books
• Arthur Knight 1940 – movie critic, historian, teacher and TV host
• Stanley Kubrick 1946 – film director
• Mordecai Lawner – actor
• Ernest Lehman BS 1937 – screenwriter
• David Maurice Levett – composer and music teacher
• Leonard Liebling 1897 – composer, music critic, and long time editor-in-chief of the Musical Courier
• Hal Linden – actor, musician
• Frank Loesser (did not graduate) – songwriter; Tin Pan Alley, stage and films; wrote music and lyrics of "Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition" and the music of Guys and Dolls
• Darko Lungulov 1996 – film director
• Donald Madden – stage, television, and screen actor
• Roma Maffia – actress
• David Margulies – actor
• Ernest Martin – theatre director and manager
• Jackie Mason – comedian and actor
• Jerry Masucci – founder of Fania Records
• Butterfly McQueen 1975 – actress
• Radley Metzger – filmmaker and film distributor
• Andy Mineo – rapper, singer, producer, director, actor and minister
• Nyala Moon – filmmaker, screenwriter, and actress
• Sterling Morrison 1970 – musician, co-founder of The Velvet Underground
• Zero Mostel 1935 – actor
• Thom Michael Mulligan – actor and film festival director
• Stanley Nelson 1976 – documentary filmmaker
• John Patitucci – jazz bassist, City College
• Brock Peters – actor, known for his role in as Tom Robinson in the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird
• Abraham Polonsky 1932 – screenwriter, director of Force of Evil
• George Ranalli 1946 – architect and dean, Spitzer School of Architecture of The City College of New York
• Adrienne Rich – feminist poet and essayist; taught at CCNY 1968–1979
• Faith Ringgold – artist known for her painted story quilts
• Edward G. Robinson 1914 – actor
• Walter Rosenblum – photographer; documented US forces in Europe during World War II
• Judith Rossner – novelist; author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar and August; attended 1952–1955
• Mickey Rourke – actor; never officially attended, but began auditing Sandra Seacat's acting class in 1975, making what is generally referred to as his stage debut at CCNY in May of that year
• Chris Rush 1968 – stand-up comedian
• Robert Russin – sculptor
• Richard Schiff 1983 – Emmy Award-winning actor; star of The West Wing (played Toby Ziegler; see "Fictional" below)
• Sandra Seacat 1970s – actor, director and acting coach, taught acting at City College
• Ben Shahn – artist
• Dan Shor – actor
• Gabourey Sidibe – actress, majored in psychology
• Russell Simmons (did not graduate) – hip hop mogul
• Hrvoje Slovenc – photographer
• Erik Sommer – contemporary artist
• Alfred Stieglitz 1884 – photographer
• Ed Summerlin – tenor saxophonist, composer and arranger; directed CCNY's jazz program 1971–1989
• Jean Toomer – novelist; associated with the Harlem Renaissance; did not graduate
• Roy Turk – songwriter; member of the Songwriters' Hall of Fame; wrote lyrics of standards including "Mean To Me," "I'll Get By," "Walkin' My Baby Back Home," and others
• Vagabon – multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and producer; graduated from Grove School of Engineering
• J. Buzz Von Ornsteiner – forensic psychologist; television personality
• Eli Wallach MA 1938 – actor
• Dirk Weiler – singer and actor
• Cornel Wilde 1935 – actor

Literature and journalism

• Alan Abelson 1942 – columnist, former editor, Barron's
• Marc D. Angel MA – rabbinic leader, published author
• Maurice Ashley 1988 – chess grandmaster, chess promoter, and author
• Toni Cade Bambara
• Helen Boyd 1995 – writer, speaker, and educator on gender and transgender theory
• Lawrence Bush – author and editor of Jewish Currents
• Barbara Christian
• Dan Daniel 1910 – dean of American sportswriters
• Reuben Fine 1932 – chess grandmaster, psychologist, and author
• Reuben Fink 1910 – Yiddish-language author
• Nat Fleischer 1908 – sports writer, especially boxing; founder of Ring magazine
• Floriana Garo 1987 – Albanian television presenter and model
• Davidson Garrett 1988 – poet
• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – novelist, philosopher, MacArthur Fellow
• Vivian Gornick – writer, memoirist, feminist, professor; author of Fierce Attachments (1987)
• Clyde Haberman 1966 – New York Times reporter and columnist
• Safiya Henderson-Holmes MFA – poet, winner of the 1990 William Carlos Williams Award
• Oscar Hijuelos 1975 – won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
• Hy Hollinger – entertainment trade journalist, reporter and editor for Variety, international editor of The Hollywood Reporter (1992–2008)
• Irving Howe 1940 – author of World of Our Fathers, literary critic, coined the phrase "New York Jewish Intellectual"
• John Johnson BA 1961, MA 1963 – journalist and television news correspondent/anchor
• June Jordan
• Bernard Kalb 1951 – journalist and television news correspondent
• Marvin Kalb 1951 – journalist and television news correspondent
• Kwame Karikari – Ghanaian journalist and academic
• David Karp 1948 – novelist and television writer
• Alfred Kazin – author of A Walker in the City, literary critic
• Dayal Kaur Khalsa (née Marcia Schonfeld) 1963 – author of children's books
• Marvin Kitman 1953 – television critic, humorist, and author
• Jack Kroll 1937 – culture editor, Newsweek
• Joseph P. Lash 1931 – Pulitzer Prize for Biography winner, author of Eleanor and Franklin
• Harvey Leonard (Moskowitz) 1970 – meteorologist, broadcast journalist, and TV personality
• Paul Levinson – author of The Plot to Save Socrates and The Silk Code (winner, Locus Award, 1999)
• Oscar Lewis 1936 – anthropologist, author, and professor
• Douglas Light 2003 – novelist, screenwriter, short story writer (O. Henry Prize winner 2003, Grace Paley Prize 2010)
• Audre Lorde
• Bernard Malamud BA 1936 – author (won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award); author of The Assistant
• Henry Miller – ttended one semester, author of Tropic of Cancer
• Ralph Morse – career photographer for LIFE magazine; youngest war correspondent in World War II; recipient of the 1995 Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award, the highest honor in photojournalism
• Montrose Jonas Moses 1899 – author
• Walter Mosley 1991 (MA) – best-selling author whose novels about private eye Easy Rawlins have received Edgar and Golden Dagger awards
• Larry Neal
• Michael Oreskes 1975 – former senior vice president for news at NPR
• Arthur Pine – author, literary agent
• Mario Puzo – best-selling novelist; screenwriter, The Godfather
• Ernesto Quiñonez BA, MA 1996 – national bestselling author of Bodega Dreams
• Robert Rosen BA 1974, MA 1977 – author of the best-selling biography '
• A.M. Rosenthal 1949 – former executive editor of The New York Times
• Henry Roth 1928 – novelist, author of Call It Sleep
• Miriam Roth – Israeli writer and scholar of children's books; kindergarten teacher; educator
• Robert Scheer – journalist
• Daniel Schorr 1939 – journalist, newscaster, and commentator for CBS, CNN, and NPR
• Stephen Shepard 1961 – editor-in-chief, Business Week
• Anatole Shub – editor and journalist specializing in Eastern European matters
• Upton Sinclair BA 1897 – author of The Jungle
• Robert Sobel BSS 1951, MA 1952 – best-selling author of business histories
• Keith Sweat 1984 – R&B singer, and radio show host personality
• Julius Thompson BA Arts – teacher and novelist (Andy Michael Pilgrim trilogy)
• Earl Ubell 1948 – print, TV and radio journalist specializing in science and health reporting
• Elsie B. Washington – author (using the pseudonym Rosalind Welles) of the 1980 book Entwined Destinies, considered the first romance novel featuring African-American characters written by an African-American author
• Al Wasserman 1941 – documentary film-maker
• Gary Weiss 1975 – investigative journalist, author
• Edward Wellen 1955 – mystery and science fiction writer
• Rajzel Å»ychlińsky – Yiddish-language poet