Syracuse University (SU) is a private research university located in Syracuse, New York. The city is near the geographic center of New York state, about 250 miles northwest of New York City. The university was founded as a seminary by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1832, as a college in 1850 and as a university in 1870. Since 1920, the university has defined itself as nonsectarian. The campus is mostly residential, featuring an eclectic mix of buildings, ranging from nineteenth-century Romanesque structures to state-of-the-art contemporary buildings.
The university has 897 full-time instructional faculty and 107 part-time faculty, and its libraries have over 3.16 million volumes. In fall 2006, the university had over 12,000 full-time undergraduate students and over 1,000 part-time undergraduate students. As well, the university had almost 4,000 full-time graduate and law students and 2,000 part-time graduate and law students. In 2005/2006, the university granted over 2,600 Bachelors degrees; almost 2,000 Masters degrees; over 300 Juris Doctors degrees; and over 160 Doctoral degrees.
