"Despite having the nation’s third largest population, after Manhattan and Chicago, Brooklyn did not have a public university of its own. By 1917, City College (CCNY) — the well-regarded Manhattan-based public university — began offering an evening program in Brooklyn to serve more of the city’s residents on their home turfs, the first of a number of planned centers throughout the boroughs. While students — nearly a third of whom lived in Brooklyn — welcomed the chance to reduce long commutes, residents and leaders had very little involvement in the project... Brooklyn’s politicians felt this resentment even more than Chamber of Commerce leaders. For them, a mere branch of CCNY, without any oversight by Brooklyn officials or a faculty independent of City College, was not enough…Reflecting outsized political ambitions, and based on hyperbolic estimates of Brooklyn’s current 1925 population, Joseph A. Guider, the Borough President, argued that “what Brooklyn wanted was a university of her own that would take rank with any in the country.” Noting that “many men and women from Brooklyn have attained eminence and distinction in their various professional callings,” Guider believed that Brooklyn’s residents together demonstrated the area’s intellectual prowess and potential."

For more on the establishment of Brooklyn College, check out this article by Rachel A. Burstein in Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.