CORNELL UNIVERSITY, one of the largest of American institutions of
higher education, situated at Ithaca, New York. Its campus is finely
situated on a hill above the main part of the city; it lies between Fall
Creek and Cascadilla Creek (each of which has cut a deep gorge), and
commands a beautiful view of the valley and of Lake Cayuga. The
university is co-educational (since 1872), and comprises the graduate
school, with 306 students in 1909; the college of arts and sciences (902
students); the college of law (225 students), established in 1887; the
medical college (217 students, of whom 29 were taking freshman or
sophomore work in Ithaca, where all women entering the college must
pursue the first two years of work)--this college was established in
1898 by the gift of Oliver Hazard Payne, and has buildings opposite
Bellevue hospital on First Avenue and 28th Street, New York city; the
New York state veterinary college (94 students), established by the
state legislature in 1894; the New York state college of agriculture
(413 students), established as such by the state legislature in
1904,--the teaching of agriculture had from the beginning been an
important part of the university's work,--with an agricultural
experiment station, established in 1887 by the Federal government; the
college of architecture (133 students); the college of civil engineering
(569 students); and the Sibley College of mechanical engineering and
mechanic arts (1163 students), named in honour of Hiram Sibley
(1807-1888), a banker of Rochester, N.Y., who gave $180,000 for its
endowment and equipment and whose son Hiram W. Sibley gave $130,000 to
the college. A state college of forestry was established in connexion
with the university in 1898, but was discontinued after several years.
The total enrolment of regular students in 1909 was 3980; in addition,
841 students were enrolled in the 1908 summer session (which is
especially for teachers) and 364 in the "short winter course in
agriculture" in 1909. Nearly all the states and territories of the
United States and thirty-two foreign countries were represented--e.g.
there were 33 students from China, 12 from the Argentine Republic, 6
from India, 10 from Japan, 10 from Mexico, 5 from Peru, &c.
In the W. central part of the campus is the university library building,
which, with an endowment (1891) of $300,000 for the purchase of books
and periodicals, was the gift of Henry Williams Sage (1814-1897), second
president of the board of trustees; in 1906 it received an additional
endowment fund of about $500,000 by the bequest of Prof. Willard Fiske.
The building, of light grey Ohio sandstone, houses the general library
(300,050 volumes in 1909), the seminary and department libraries (7284
volumes), and the forestry library (1007 volumes). Among the special
collections of the general library are the classical library of Charles
Anthon, the philological library of Franz Bopp, the Goldwin Smith
library (1869), the White architectural and historical libraries, the
Spinoza collection presented by Andrew D. White (1894), the library of
Jared Sparks, the Samuel J. May collection of works on the history of
slavery, the Zarncke library, especially rich in Germanic philology and
literature, the Eugene Schuyler collection of Slavic folk-lore,
literature and history, the Willard Fiske Rhaeto-Romanic, Icelandic,
Dante and Petrarch collections, and the Herbert H. Smith collection of
works on Latin America (in addition there are college and department
libraries--that of the college of law numbers 38,735 volumes--bringing
the total to 353,638 bound volumes in 1909). Among the other buildings
are: Morse Hall, Franklin Hall, Sibley College, Lincoln Hall (housing
the college of civil engineering), Goldwin Smith Hall (for language and
history), Stimson Hall (given by Dean Sage to the medical college),
Boardman Hall (housing the college of law), Morrill Hall (containing the
psychological laboratory), McGraw Hall and White Hall--these, with the
library, forming the quadrangle; S. of the quadrangle, Sage chapel (with
beautiful interior decorations), Barnes Hall (the home of the Cornell
University Christian Association), Sage College (a dormitory for women),
and the armoury and gymnasium; E. of the quadrangle, the Rockefeller
Hall of Physics (1906) and the New York State College of Agriculture
(completed in 1907); and S.E. of the quadrangle the New York State
Veterinary College and the Fuertes Observatory. The university is
well-equipped with laboratories, the psychological laboratory, the
laboratories of Sibley college and the hydraulic laboratory of the
college of civil engineering being especially noteworthy; the last is on
Fall Creek, where a curved concrete masonry dam has been built, forming
Beebe Lake. East of the campus is the university playground and athletic
field (55 acres), built with funds raised from the alumni. Cayuga Lake
furnishes opportunity for rowing, and the Cornell crews are famous.
During their first two years all undergraduates, unless properly
excused, must take a prescribed amount of physical exercise. Normally
the first year's exercise for male students is military drill under the
direction of a U.S. army officer detailed as commandant.
The reputation of the university is particularly high in mechanical
engineering; Sibley college was built up primarily under Prof. Robert
Henry Thurston (1839-1903), a well-known engineer, its director in
1885-1903. The college includes the following departments: machine
design and construction, experimental engineering, power engineering,
and electrical engineering. The "Susan Linn Sage School of Philosophy,"
so called since the gift (1891) of $200,000 from Henry W. Sage in memory
of his wife, issues _The Philosophical Review_ and _Cornell Studies in
Philosophy_, and is well known for the psychological laboratory
investigations under Prof. E. B. Titchener (b. 1867). Equally well known
are the college of agriculture under Prof. Liberty Hyde Bailey (b.
1858); the "Cornell School" of Latin grammarians, led first by Prof. W.
G. Hale and then by Prof. C. E. Bennett; the department of entomology
under Prof. J. H. Comstock (b. 1849), the department of physics under
Prof. E. L. Nichols (b. 1854), and other departments. The university
publishes _Cornell Studies in Classical Philology_, the _Journal of
Physical Chemistry_, the _Physical Review_, _Publications of Cornell
University Medical College_, various publications of the college of
agriculture, and _Studies in History and Political Science_ (of "The
President White School of History and Political Science"). Among the
student publications are _The Cornell Era_ (1868, weekly), _The Cornell
Daily Sun_ (1880), _The Sibley Journal of Engineering_ (1882), _The
Cornell Magazine_, a literary monthly, and _The Cornell Widow_ (1892), a
comic tri-weekly. The regular annual tuition fee is $100, but in
medicine, in architecture, and in civil and mechanical engineering it is
$150. In the veterinary and agricultural colleges there are no tuition
fees for residents of New York state. There are 150 free-tuition state
scholarships (one for each of the state assembly districts), and, in
addition, there are 36 undergraduate university scholarships (annual
value, $200) tenable for two years, and 23 fellowships and 17 graduate
scholarships (annual value, $300-600 each). In the college of arts and
sciences the elective system, with certain restrictions, obtains.
The university has always been absolutely non-sectarian; its charter
prescribes that "persons of every religious denomination, or of no
religious denomination, shall be equally eligible to all offices and
appointments" and that "at no time shall a majority of the board (of
trustees) be of one religious sect or of no religious sect." There is,
however, an active Christian Association and religious services--provided
for by the Dean Sage Preachership Endowment--are conducted in Sage chapel
by eminent clergymen representing various sects and denominations.
The affairs of Cornell university are under the administration of a
board which must consist of forty trustees, of whom ten are elected by
the alumni. The following are _ex officio_ members of the board: the
president of the university, the librarian of the Cornell Library (in
Ithaca), the governor and the lieutenant-governor of the state, the
speaker of the state assembly, the state commissioners of education and
of agriculture, and the president of the state agricultural society. The
internal government is in the hands of the university faculty (which
consists of the president, the professors and the assistant professors,
and has jurisdiction over matters concerning the university as a whole),
and of the special faculties, which consist of the president, the
professors, the assistant professors, and the instructors of the
several colleges, and which have jurisdiction over distinctively
collegiate matters.
In 1909 the invested funds of the university amounted to about
$8,594,300, yielding an annual income of about $428,800; the income from
state and nation was about $232,050, and from tuition fees about
$336,100; the campus and buildings were valued at about $4,263,400, and
the Library, collections, apparatus, &c. at about $1,826,100.
The university was incorporated by the legislature of New York state on
the 27th of April 1865, and was named in honour of Ezra Cornell,[1] its
principal benefactor. In 1864 Cornell, at the suggestion of Andrew D.
White, his fellow member of the state senate, decided to found a
university of a new type--which should be broad and liberal in its
scope, should be absolutely non-sectarian, and which should recognize
and meet the growing need for practical training and adequate
instruction in the sciences as well as in the humanities. He offered to
the state as an endowment $500,000 (with 200 acres of land) on condition
that the state add to this fund the proceeds of the sales of public
lands granted to it by the Morrill Act of 1862 for "the endowment,
support and maintenance of at least one college, where the leading
object shall be ... to teach such branches of learning as are related to
agriculture and the mechanic arts.... "[2] The charter provided that
"such other branches of science and knowledge may be embraced in the
plan of instruction and investigation pertaining to the university as
the trustees may deem useful and proper," and Ezra Cornell expressed his
own ideal in the oft-quoted words: "I would found an institution where
any person can find instruction in any study." The opposition to
Cornell's plan was bitter, especially on the part of denominational
schools and press, but incorporation was secured, and the trustees first
met on the 5th of September 1865. Andrew D. White was elected president
and the entire educational scheme was left to him. Dr White's ideals in
part were: a closer union between the advanced and the general
educational system of the state; liberal instruction of the industrial
classes; increased stress on technical instruction; unsectarian control;
"a course in history and political and social science adapted to the
practical needs of men worthily ambitious in public affairs"; a more
thorough study of modern languages and literatures, especially English;
the "steady effort to abolish monastic government and pedantic
instruction"; the elective system of studies; and the stimulus of
non-resident lecturers. On the 7th of October 1868 the Cornell
University opened with some confusion due to the condition of the
campus, and to the presence of 412 would-be pupils, many of whom
expected to "work their way through." The brilliance of the faculty and
especially of its non-resident members (including J. R. Lowell, Louis
Agassiz, G. W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Theodore D. Dwight, and Goldwin
Smith, who was a resident professor in 1866-1869), was to a degree
over-shadowed during the fifteen years 1868-1882 by financial
difficulties. But Ezra Cornell himself paid many salaries during early
years, and provided much valuable equipment solely at his own expense;
and because the state's land scrip was selling too low to secure an
adequate endowment for the University, in 1866 he bought the land scrip
yet unsold (819,920 acres)[3] by the state at the rate of sixty cents
an acre on the understanding that all profits, in excess of the purchase
money, should constitute a separate endowment fund to which the
restrictions in the Morrill Act should not apply; and in 1866-1867 he
"located" 512,000 acres in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Kansas. In November
1874 he transferred these lands, which had cost him $576,953 more than
he had received from them, to the university. This actual deficit on the
lands owned by the university steadily increased up to 1881, when, after
the trustees had refused (in 1880) an offer of $1,250,000 for 275,000
acres of pine lands, they sold about 140,600 acres for $2,319,296;
ultimately 401,296 acres of the land turned over to the university by
Cornell were sold, bringing a net return of about $4,800,000. The
university was put on a sound financial footing; the number of students,
less in 1881-1882 than in 1868 at the opening of the university, again
increased, so that it was 585 in 1884-1885, and 2120 in 1897-1898. The
presidents of the university have been: Andrew Dickson White, 1865-1885;
Charles Kendall Adams, 1885-1892; and Jacob Gould Schurman.