Cornell University

FOUR UNIVERSITIES: Founders' Visions and Today's Reality he mission of this journal has been defined by relatively recent devia- T tions from traditional standards in higher education. But there is in- sight to be gained from broader perspectives, and from our contemporary vantage it is useful at times to remember those who christened our universities and set directions for the American academic enterprise. The editors, thus, have enlisted teachers at four schools, Cornell,Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, to look back and gauge how well those schools have realized the originating concepts of their founders. Cornell University Jeremy Rabkin: Professor, Department of Government, CorneU University, Ithaca, New York, 14853-4601. Cornell is the only one of the "ancient eight" founded under the Ameri- can flag. When Cornell opened its doors in 1868, all of its Ivy League sisters (as they would later be known) had already been training students for over a century. Harvard, Yale, and the others were founded by prayer- ful, anxious clergymen in precarious coastal colonies. Cornell was estab- lished in a very different America, a continental nation awash in new industrial fortunes, bursting with confidence-and impatient with hoary tradition. (So the Cornellian of 1870 bridled at characterizations of the university as "Mr. Cornell's experiment": "To be sure, we cannot look back upon a long and eventless period of years, bounded by a modest origin and equally modest prospects for the future...nor do we claim to be journeying in the old beaten road which education has followed since the days of the Humanists.") Ezra Cornell, a principal organizer of the Western Union telegraph em- pire, had set out to found a great university in his home town of Ithaca, New York. No one in that era thought it odd for a man of limited schooling to found a university in such a place-if he had made the fortune to fund it. In fact, the university's first president, Andrew Dickson White, was able to real- ize Mr. Cornell's ambition almost overnight. With Ezra Cornell's financial backing, White simply went on a shopping spree, buying up libraries, art Please address correspondence to Academic Questions/NAS, 575 Ewing Street, Princeton, NJ 08540-2741; <[email protected]>. 63 64 Academic Questions/Spring 1998 collections, laboratory equipment-and distinguished professors-sufficient for a great university. "It is easy to be liberal," Mr. Cornell remarked, "the only hard part is drawing the check." But while Cornell aspired to be ranked with the most distinguished older schools, it was always a different sort of institution. Unlike most older colleges (and all of the other Ivy schools at their origin), Cornell was founded as an avowedly non-sectarian institution. It prided itself on its devotion to sci- ence and progress-and in its first decades was continually fending off at- tacks from suspicious New York clergymen. Cornell's founding vision was not disdainful of religion, but it was decid- edly impatient with sectarian dissension. Mr. Cornell's overriding concerns were practical. He persuaded New York State to devote its land grant funds to a state agriculture college adjoining, and sharing facilities with, his own privately endowed liberal arts college. Cornell wanted to offer instruction in a range of practical subjects, along with sciences and the classical cur- riculum. The university's official shield still carries Ezra Cornell's resolu- tion: "I would found a university where any person can find instruction in any subject." Within its first decade, the university realized one implication of this pledge by admitting women students-one of the first major colleges in the country to do so. But Ezra Cornell wanted to do still more to expand the university's reach. To make university training available to students from poor families, he proposed to establish a shoe factory and a furniture factory adjacent to his new university, where students could work part-time to earn their keep. He was with difficulty persuaded to abandon this scheme. Mr. Cornell also wanted to put a brake on collegiate snobbery by having students board with local families. Here he was more successful: in its first decades, the university of- fered no housing alternative (and still has nothing like the grand residential houses of some other schools). The founding vision provoked skeptical reaction from the outset. In En- gland, Matthew Arnold raised a refined eye-brow in the 1869 preface to Cul- ture and Anarchy: "the university of Mr. Ezra Cornell...seems to rest on a misconception of what culture truly is, and to be calculated to produce min- ers, or engineers or architects, not sweetness and light." But Cornell continued on its original program of combining practical studies with more traditional fields of scholarship. In time, the College of Agri- culture was joined by state-funded colleges of Veterinary Medicine, Home Economics (subsequently renamed, Human Ecology), and Industrial-Labor Relations, while the College of Arts and Sciences was joined by privately endowed colleges of Engineering, Management, Hotel Administration, and Architecture, along with a law school and a medical school. Today, when the cost of an undergraduate degree at the Arts College exceeds $100,000, the university may seem rather removed from the demo- Rabkin, Greene, Tutorow, and Anastaplo 65 cratic and populist hopes of its founder. But the presence of the state divi- sions and the mix of different schools on the same campus certainly spares Cornell from the sort of precious or pretentious atmosphere of some older, liberal arts colleges. Cornell remains a place where sports and fraternities absorb a lot of student energy-along with libraries and lectures. For all its outstanding library collections, laboratory facilities, and Nobel laureates in chemistry and physics, Cornell remains a place where respectable callings are respected. No one dares to mock the School of Hotel Administration- or dispute that its pre-eminence in its field is anything less than an honor to Cornell. In some ways, however, Cornell is different from what it was. Under the terms of the Morrill Act, Cornell was required to provide students with military training, and all male students received such training until well after World War II. The honor roll of Cornell casualties in the World Wars attests to the tradition, as Cornell launched a disproportionate number of officers into front line service (and over twenty generals in World War II). But A.D. White saw military training as much more than an insurance policy against future wars. He foresaw, as he noted in his Autobiography (1905), "serious internal troubles" in a rapidly industrializing country and thought it would be "a source of calamity, possibly of catastrophe, if the power of the sword in civil commotions [should] fall into the hands of ignorant and brutal leaders, while the educated men of the country, not being versed in military matters, shall slink away...and cower in corners." Today's Cornell still has a sizable ROTC program, but its administration is quite averse to using any kind of force against "civil commotions." When black students took over the student union building in 1969-brandishing guns and ammunition belts to underscore their militancy-President James Perkins insisted that the university must give in to their demands rather than risk bloodshed. A quarter century later, in a comic replay of this tragic epi- sode, a much smaller group of unarmed Hispanic students took over the office of President Frank Rhodes, who immediately agreed to establish a special Latino House, despite his previously announced opposition to such special program houses. No one was surprised last spring when the new president, Hunter Rawlings, decided to impose no punishment on black students who burned copies of the campus conservative newspaper, disrupted a university awards ceremony, and blocked traffic for several hours. The campus Judicial Administrator blandly explained that "when large numbers of students violate the Campus Code, that is not a judicial question but a political question for the President to decide." A.D. White could display the intellectual self-confidence to match his Vic- torian moral confidence. Though he favored the teaching of modern literature, he insisted that students need not spend time with the "bubbles floating on the surface of sundry literatures": "when I hear of second-rate critics sum- 66 Academic Questions / Spring 1998 moned across the ocean to present to [American] universities...the coagu- lated nastiness of Verlaine, Mallarme and their compeers, I expect next to hear of courses introducing young men to the beauties of absinthe, Turkish cigarettes and stimulants unspeakable." We may presume that President White would not approve of the French Literature Department's current course in "Perfume,Jewelry and Cigarettes." He might be still more exasperated to learn that Jacques Derrida, master of deconstructionism, had been summoned from Paris to serve as an "A.D. White Professor at Large" and that one of his acolytes in French literary studies is now dean of the Arts College. It is simply too painful to contemplate stern old A.D. White's reaction to the English Department's current course in "Queer Theory," or the German Studies course in "Lesbian Theory" or other cross- listed oddities in Cornell's current program of "Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Studies." Of course, such ventures are not at all unique to Cornell. But an earlier Cornell was proud of setting its own course. One might also say that courses in debasing literary fads are, after all, an extension of the founding vision- "instruction in any subject." But that, I believe, quite misconceives the founding vision.

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