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The youngest member of the Ivy League, Cornell was founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White as a coeducational, non-sectarian institution where admission was offered irrespective of religion or race. Inaugurated shortly after the American Civil War, its founders intended that the new university would teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge — from the classics to the sciences and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's motto, an 1865 Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."[1] The university is organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions, each defining its own academic programs in near autonomy. Since the mid-20th century, the university has been expanding both its campus resources and influence worldwide. From a new residential college housing system to its 2001 founding of a medical college in Qatar, Cornell claims "to serve society by educating the leaders of tomorrow and extending the frontiers of knowledge."[5] Cornell counts more than 240,000 living alumni, 28 Rhodes Scholars and 40 Nobel laureates affiliated with the university as faculty or students.[3][6][7] Research is a central element of the university's mission; Cornell spent $605 million on research and development in a diverse group of fields during the July 2005 to June 2006 fiscal year.[8]
HistoryImage:Cornell Arts Quad 1919.jpg The Arts Quad, around which the College of Arts and Sciences centers
The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.[10] Two years later, Cornell admitted its first women students, making it the first coeducational school among what came to be known as the Ivy League. Scientists Louis Agassiz and James Crafts were among the faculty members.[9] Image:Skorton Speech.jpg In September 2006, David Skorton formally became Cornell's 12th and current president Cornell expanded significantly in the 20th century, with its student population growing to its current count of about 20,000 students. The faculty expanded as well; by the century's end, the university had more than 3,400 faculty members. Along with its population growth, Cornell increased its breadth of course offerings. Today, the university has wide-ranging programs and offers more than 4,000 courses. In the 2000s, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2001, the university founded the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, the first American medical school outside of the United States.[11] It continues to forge partnerships with major institutions in India, Singapore, and the People's Republic of China.[12][13][14] The university has gone as far as to claim to be "the first transnational university".[5] OrganizationImage:Andrew Dickson White statue and Goldwin Smith Hall.jpg Goldwin Smith Hall and the A.D. White statue Cornell is a private institution, receiving most of its funding through tuition, research grants, and alumni contributions. Three of its undergraduate schools/colleges and the graduate-level College of Veterinary Medicine are called contract colleges. These contract colleges receive significant partial, ongoing funding from the state of New York to support their teaching, research, and service missions. Residents of New York enrolled in the contract colleges pay reduced tuition. Furthermore, the New York State Governor, the Speaker of the New York State Assembly, and the President Pro Tem of the New York State Senate all serve as ex-officio members of Cornell's Board of Trustees. Despite some similarities, Cornell's contract colleges are not public or state schools — they are private institutions that Cornell operates by contract with the state government. Cornell is decentralized, with its colleges and schools exercising wide autonomy. Each defines its own academic programs, operates its own admissions and advising programs, and confers its own degrees. The only university-wide requirements for a baccalaureate degree are to pass a swimming test, take two physical education courses, and satisfy a writing requirement. Although students are affiliated with their individual college or school, they may take courses in any of the colleges, provided they have fulfilled the course prerequisites. A handful of inter-school academic departments offer courses in more than one college. Seven schools provide undergraduate programs and an additional seven provide graduate and professional programs. Students pursuing graduate degrees in departments of these schools are enrolled in the Graduate School. The School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions offers programs for college and high school students, professionals, and other adults.[15]
CampusesMain campusImage:CentralAvenueCornell2.jpg McGraw Hall and the clock tower Cornell's main campus is on East Hill in Ithaca, New York, overlooking the town and Cayuga Lake. When the university was founded in 1865, the campus consisted of 209.5 acres (0.85 km²) of Ezra Cornell's roughly 300-acre (1.2 km²) farm. Since then, it has swelled to about 745 acres (3.0 km²), encompassing both the hill and much of the surrounding areas.[16] Some 260 university buildings are divided primarily between Central and North Campuses on the plateau of the Hill, West Campus on its slope, and Collegetown immediately south of Central Campus.[16] Central Campus has laboratories, administrative buildings, and almost all of the university's academic buildings, athletic facilities, auditoriums, and museums. The only residential facility on Central Campus is the Law School's residential college, Hughes Hall. North Campus contains freshman and graduate student housing, themed program houses, and 29 fraternity and sorority houses. West Campus has upperclass residential colleges and an additional 25 fraternity and sorority houses.[17] Collegetown contains the Schwartz Performing Arts Center and two upperclass residence halls, amid a neighborhood of apartments, restaurants, and businesses. The main campus is marked by an irregular layout and eclectic architectural styles, including ornate Gothic, Victorian, Neoclassical buildings, and less decorative international and modernist structures. The more ornate buildings generally predate World War II. Because the student population doubled from 7,000 in 1950 to 15,000 by 1970, grandiosity was neglected in favor of less expensive and more rapidly constructed styles.[18] While some buildings are neatly arranged into quadrangles, others are packed densely and haphazardly. These eccentricities arose from the university's numerous, ever-changing master plans for the campus. For example, in one of the earliest plans, Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, outlined a "grand terrace" overlooking Cayuga Lake.[19] Because the terrace plan was dropped, McGraw Hall appears to face the wrong direction, facing the Slope rather than the Arts Quad. The Ithaca Campus is among the rolling valleys of the Finger Lakes region and, atop the Hill, commands a panoramic view of the surrounding area. Two gorges bound Central Campus, which become popular swimming holes during the warmer months. Adjacent to the main campus, Cornell owns the 2,900-acre (11.7 km²) Cornell Plantations, a botanical garden containing flowers, trees, and ponds along manicured trails.[20] New York City campusImage:Cornell med 02.jpg Weill Medical Center in New York City Weill Medical Center, often called Weill Cornell, is on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. It is home to two Cornell divisions, Weill Medical College and Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences, and has been affiliated with the New York-Presbyterian Hospital since 1927.[21] Although their faculty and academic divisions are separate, the Medical Center shares its administrative functions with the Columbia University Medical Center. Weill Medical College is also affiliated with the neighboring Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, and the Hospital for Special Surgery. Many faculty members have joint appointments at these institutions, and Weill Cornell, Rockefeller, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering offer the Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program to selected entering Cornell medical students. In addition to the medical center, New York City hosts local offices for some of Cornell's service programs. The Cornell Urban Scholars Program encourages students to pursue public service careers with organizations working with New York City's poorest children, families, and communities.[22] The College of Human Ecology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences provide means for students to reach out to local communities by gardening and building with the Cornell Cooperative Extension.[23] Students with the School of Industrial and Labor Relations' Extension & Outreach Program make workplace expertise available to organizations, union members, policy makers, and working adults.[24] The College of Engineering's Operations Research Manhattan, in the city's financial district, brings together business optimization research and decision support services aimed at strengthening industry and public sector collaboration.[25] The College of Architecture, Art, and Planning has a facility on West 17th Street, near Union Square, to provide studio and seminar space for students and faculty.[26] Qatar campusWeill Medical College in Qatar is in Education City, near Doha. Opened in September 2004, it was the first American medical school outside the United States.[11] The college is part of Cornell's program to increase its international influence. The College is a joint initiative with the Qatar government, which seeks to improve the country's academic programs and medical care.[27] Along with its full four-year MD program, which mirrors the curriculum taught at Weill Medical College in New York City, the college offers a two-year undergraduate pre-medical program with a separate admissions process. This undergraduate program opened in September 2002 and was the first coeducational institute of higher education in Qatar.[28] The college is partially funded by the Qatar government through the Qatar Foundation, which contributed US$750 million for its construction.[29] The medical center is housed in a large two-story structure designed by Arata Isozaki.[30] In 2004, the Qatar Foundation announced the construction of a 350–bed Specialty Teaching Hospital near the medical college in Education City. The hospital will be completed in 2009 and is supported by an $8 billion endowment.[11] Other facilitiesCornell University owns and operates many facilities around the world.[31] The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, site of the world's largest single-dish radio telescope, is operated by Cornell under a contract with the National Science Foundation.[32] The Shoals Marine Laboratory, operated in conjunction with the University of New Hampshire,[33] is a seasonal marine field station dedicated to undergraduate education and research on 95-acre (0.4 km²) Appledore Island off the Maine–New Hampshire coast. Many Cornell facilities focus on conservationism and ecology. The New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, operated by the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is in Geneva, New York, 50 miles (80 km) northwest of the main campus. The facility comprises 20 major buildings on 130 acres (0.5 km²) of land, as well as more than 700 acres (2.8 km²) of test plots and other lands devoted to horticultural research.[34] It also operates three substations, Vineyard Research Laboratory in Fredonia, Hudson Valley Laboratory in Highland and the Long Island Horticultural Research Laboratory in Riverhead. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology in Sapsucker Woods in Ithaca, New York, performs research on biological diversity, primarily in birds. In 2005, the lab announced that it had rediscovered the Ivory-billed woodpecker, long thought to be extinct.[35] The Animal Science Teaching and Research Center in Harford, New York, and the Duck Research Laboratory in Eastport, New York, are resources for information on animal disease control and husbandry.[36][37] The Arnot Teaching and Research Forest, a 4,075-acre (16.5 km²) forest 20 miles (32.2 km) south of the Ithaca campus, is the primary field location for faculty and student training and research related to professional forestry.[38] The mission of the Cornell Biological Field Station in Bridgeport, New York, is "to provide a center for long-term ecological research and support the University's educational programs, with special emphasis on freshwater lacustrine systems."[39] In addition, the university operates biodiversity laboratories in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, and in the Amazon rainforest in Peru.[40][41] The university also maintains offices for study abroad and scholarship programs. Cornell in Washington is a program that allows students to study for a semester in Washington, D.C., in research and internship positions while earning credit toward a degree.[42] Cornell in Rome, operated by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, allows students to use the city as a resource for learning architecture, urban studies, and art.[43] The College of Human Ecology offers the Urban Semester Program, an opportunity to take courses and complete an internship in New York City for a semester. As well, the Capital Semester program allows students to intern in the New York state legislature.[44] AcademicsProfileFor the undergraduate class of 2011, the admission rate was 20.5%, the most selective in the university's history.[45] In 2006, the most selective undergraduate college was the College of Arts and Sciences, which admitted only 14.6% of applicants. For the class of 2009, 33.8% enrolled through early decision.[46] Of enrolling students, 67% scored above 650 on the SAT Verbal exam and 82% scored above 650 on the SAT Math exam. Eighty-two percent of enrolling students were ranked in the top ten percent of their high school classes. Sixty-eight percent of new undergraduate students hailed from public high schools.[46] Cornell enrolls students from all 50 U.S. states and more than 120 countries. The Class of 2010 has representatives from all states except for Arkansas. As of Fall 2005, 28% of undergraduate student identified themselves as members of ethnic minority groups.[3] Ninety-six percent of first-year students return for their second year.[46] Of 13,515 undergraduate students, 4,251 (31.5%) are affiliated with the largest college by enrollment, Arts and Sciences, followed by 3,153 (23.3%) in Agriculture and Life Sciences and 2,680 (19.8%) in Engineering. By student enrollment, the smallest of the seven undergraduate colleges is Architecture, Art, and Planning, with 515 (3.8%) students.[3] In 2005, the Graduate School accepted 21.6% of applicants, the Johnson School of Management accepted 34.4%, the Law School accepted 20.6%, and the Veterinary School accepted 10.9%.[47][48][49][50] The Weill Cornell Medical School accepted 4.3%.[51] Faculty
For the August 2005 to May 2006 academic year, Cornell University had 1,594 full-time and part-time academic faculty members affiliated with its main campus.[3] The New York City medical divisions count 1,005 faculty members and Qatar has 34.[3] In total, 40 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Cornell as faculty or students.[6] Notable former professors include Carl Sagan, Charles Evans Hughes, Norman Malcolm, Vladimir Nabokov, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Archie Randolph Ammons, and Allan Bloom. Cornell's faculty for the 2005-06 academic year included three Nobel laureates, a Crafoord Prize winner, two Turing Award winners, a Fields Medal winner, two Legion of Honor recipients, a World Food Prize winner, an Andrei Sakharov Prize winner, three National Medal of Science winners, two Wolf Prize winners, five MacArthur award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, two Eminent Ecologist Award recipients, a Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion recipient, four Presidential Early Career Award winners, 20 National Science Foundation CAREER grant holders, a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research, a recipient of the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a recipient of the Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, three Packard Foundation grant holders, a Keck Distinguished Young Scholar, two Beckman Foundation Young Investigator grant holders, and two NYSTAR (New York State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research) early career award winners.[3] On June 11, 2005, Jeffrey S. Lehman announced that he would resign from the position of Cornell President effective June 30, 2005, citing "differences with the board regarding the strategy for realizing Cornell's long-term vision."[52] Former Cornell President Hunter R. Rawlings III served as interim president for the 2005-06 academic year. David J. Skorton, former president of the University of Iowa, assumed office on July 8, 2006. International programsCornell offers undergraduate curricula with international focuses, including the Africana Studies, French Studies, German Studies, Jewish Studies, Latino Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Romance Studies, and Russian Literature majors. Cornell was the first university to teach modern Far Eastern languages.[3] In addition to traditional academic programs, Cornell students may study abroad on any of six continents.[53] The Asian Studies major, South Asia Program, Southeast Asia Program, and the newly launched China and Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS) major provide opportunities for students and researchers in Asia. Cornell has an agreement with Peking University allowing students in the CAPS major to spend a semester in Beijing.[54] Similarly, the College of Engineering has an agreement to exchange faculty and graduate students with Tsinghua University in Beijing, and the School of Hotel Administration has a joint master's program with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has signed an agreement with Japan's National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences,[55] as well as the University of the Philippines, Los Baños,[56] to engage in joint research and exchange graduate students and faculty members. It also cooperates in agricultural research with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.[57] In the Middle East, Cornell's efforts focus on biology and medicine. The Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar trains new doctors to improve health services in the region. The university is also developing the Bridging the Rift Center, a "Library of Life" (or database of all living systems) on the border of Israel and Jordan, in collaboration with those two countries and Stanford University.[58] Cornell has partnered with Queen's University in Canada to offer a joint Executive MBA. The only program of its kind in the world, graduates of the program earn both a Cornell MBA and a Queen's MBA.[59] This program is made possible through videoconferencing, and so students in Canada and the United States share an interactive virtual classroom. RankingsImage:PictureofMyronTaylorHall.jpg Cornell Law School in the summer Among business schools in the United States, the Johnson Graduate School of Management was ranked 7th by BusinessWeek in 2004,[65] 9th by Forbes in 2005,[66] 16th by U.S. News in 2007,[67] and 18th by The Wall Street Journal in 2005.[68] Worldwide, the school was ranked 17th by The Economist in 2005 and 36th by the Financial Times in 2006.[69][70] The Undergraduate Business Program at Cornell University ranked #11 Nationally in US News & World Report's Best Undergraduate Business Programs for 2007. U.S. News ranked the Weill Cornell Medical School as the 15th best in the United States in its 2007 edition.[71] The College of Veterinary Medicine was ranked first among national veterinary medicine graduate schools.[72] The Cornell Law School was ranked as the 13th best graduate law program among national universities.[73] In 2005, The National Law Journal reported that Cornell Law had the sixth highest placement rate at the top 50 law firms in the U.S. among law schools with recent graduates.[74] In its 2006 ranking[75] and 2007 ranking[76] of undergraduate engineering programs at universities in the United States, U.S. News placed Cornell first in engineering physics. In 1954, Conrad Hilton called the Cornell School of Hotel Administration "the greatest hotel school in the world."[77] According to the latest ranking of National Research Council in 1995, Cornell ranks sixth nationally in the number of graduate programs in the top ten in their fields.[78] Cornell had 19 ranked in the top 10 in terms of overall academic quality. Also National Research Council ranked the quality of faculties as 5th in Arts and Humanities, 6th in Mathematics and Physical Sciences, and 5th in Engineering. LibraryImage:Biocrawler.Cornell Law School 2.jpg The Cornell Law Library, Myron Taylor Hall The Cornell University Library is the eleventh largest academic library in the United States, ranked by number of volumes held.[79] Organized into twenty divisions, in 2005 it held 7.5 million printed volumes in open stacks, 8.2 million microfilms and microfiches, and a total of 440,000 maps, motion pictures, DVDs, sound recordings, and computer files in its collections, in addition to extensive digital resources and the University Archives.[80] It was the first among all U.S. colleges and universities to allow undergraduates to borrow books from its libraries.[3] In 2006, The Princeton Review ranked it as the 11th best college library.[81] The library plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. arXiv, an e-print archive created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg, is operated and primarily funded by Cornell as part of the library's services. The archive has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the e-print a viable and popular means of announcing new research. PressThe Cornell University Press, established in 1869 but inactive from 1884 to 1930, was the first university publishing enterprise in the United States.[82] It was established in the College of the Mechanic Arts (as mechanical engineering was called in the 19th century) because engineers knew more than literature professors did about running steam-powered printing presses. From its inception, the press has offered work-study financial aid: students with previous training in the printing trades were paid for typesetting and running the presses that printed textbooks, pamphlets, a weekly student journal, and official university publications. Today, the press is one of the country's largest university presses.[3] It produces approximately 150 nonfiction titles each year in various disciplines including anthropology, Asian studies, biological sciences, classics, history, industrial relations, literary criticism and theory, natural history, philosophy, politics and international relations, veterinary science, and women's studies.[82][83] The press's acquisitions, editorial, production, and marketing departments have been located in Sage House since 1993, and the financial department is on Cascadilla Street in downtown Ithaca.[82] Student lifeActivitiesImage:BaileyHall.jpg Bailey Hall, Cornell's main auditorium For the 2005-06 academic year, Cornell had 886 registered student organizations. These clubs and organizations run the gamut from kayaking to full-armor jousting, from varsity and club sports and a cappella groups to improvisational theatre, from political clubs and publications to chess and video game clubs.[84] They are subsidized financially by academic departments and/or the Student Assembly and the Graduate & Professional Student Assembly, two student-run organizations with a collective budget of $3.0 million per year.[85][86] The assemblies also finance other student life programs including a concert commission and an on-campus movie theater. Student organizations also include a myriad of musical groups that play everything from classical, jazz, to ethnic styles in addition to the Big Red Marching Band, which performs regularly at football games and other campus events.[87] Organized in 1868, the oldest student organization is the Cornell University Glee Club. Cornell hosts the second largest fraternity and sorority system in North America, with 66 chapters involving 28% of male and 22% of female undergraduates.[88][89] During the 2004-05 academic year, the Greek system committed 21,668 community service and advocacy hours and raised $176,547 in philanthropic efforts.[89] However, the administration has expressed concerns over student misconduct in the system. In 2004-05, of 251 social events registered with the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, 37 (15%) resulted in a complaint. In that same year, there were five reported instances of property destruction, five reports of bias, three hazing incidents, and various other allegations.[89] Student misconduct is reviewed by the Judicial Administrator, Cornell's justice system. Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans, was founded at Cornell in 1906. Alpha Phi Alpha's charter was revoked in 1996 due to a hazing incident involving Cornell student Sylvester Lloyd due to allegations of intense physical beatings.[90][verification needed] Press and Radio
Housing
University housing is broadly divided into three sections: North Campus, West Campus, and Collegetown. Since a 1997 residential initiative, West Campus houses transfer and returning students, whereas North Campus is almost entirely populated by freshmen.[93] The only options for living on North Campus for upperclassmen are the program houses: Risley Residential College, Just About Music, the Ecology House, Holland International Living Center, the Multicultural Living Learning Unit, the Latino Living Center, Akwe:kon, and Ujamaa. Image:Risley hall, backyard.gif Risley has served as the basis for the new residential colleges In an attempt to create a sense of community and an atmosphere of education outside the classroom and continue Andrew Dickson White's vision, the university has undertaken the $250 million residential college project on West Campus.[94] The Class Halls will be demolished and rebuilt as five residential colleges named after notable deceased Cornell professors. The first, Alice Cook House, was opened to students in 2004, followed by Carl Becker House in 2005. The third house, Hans Bethe House, opened in January 2007. The idea of building a house system can be attributed in part to the success of Risley Residential College, the oldest continually operating residential college at Cornell. Like Risley, the new houses will have their own dining halls, student governments, in-house lectures, house trips, and crests. The completion of the five-house residential college campus will occur in August 2009.[94] Image:Balch Halls Exterior.jpg Balch Hall is a women-only residence hall on North Campus Off campus, many homes in the East Hill neighborhoods adjacent to the university have been converted to apartments. Several high-rise apartment complexes have been constructed in the Collegetown neighborhood. Nine percent of undergraduate students reside in fraternity and sorority houses, although freshmen are not permitted to live in them.[89] Housing cooperatives or other independent living units exist, including Watermargin, Telluride House, the Center for Jewish Living, and the Wait Cooperative. In its 2006 rankings of college campus food, The Princeton Review ranked Cornell's dining services fourth overall.[81] The university has 31 on-campus dining locations, and a program called the Cross Country Gourmet Guest Restaurant Series periodically brings chefs, menus, and atmosphere from restaurants to Cornell's eight all-you-care-to-eat dining halls.[95] Athletics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
