Cornell University: Encyclopedia II - Cornell University - History

Cornell University - History

Cornell University - Conception of Cornell

When Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White met in the New York Senate in January 1864, each a newly elected member, their eventual partnership seemed unlikely. Although both valued egalitarianism, science, and education, they had come from two very different backgrounds.

Ezra Cornell, a self-made businessman and austere, pragmatic telegraph mogul, made his fortune on the Western Union Telegraph Company stock he received during the consolidation that led to its formation^[6]. Cornell, who had been poor for most of his life, suddenly found himself looking for ways that he could do the greatest good for with his money — he wrote, "My greatest care now is how to spend this large income to do the greatest good to those who are properly dependent on me, to the poor and to posterity."^[7] Cornell's self education and hard work would lead him to the conclusion that the greatest end for his philanthropy was in the need of colleges for the teaching of practical pursuits such as agriculture, the applied sciences, veterinary medicine and engineering and in finding opportunities for the poor to attain such an education.

Andrew Dickson White entered college, at the age of sixteen, in 1849. White dreamed of going to one of the elite eastern colleges, but his father sent him to Geneva College (later known as Hobart), a small Episcopal college. In Geneva's library, White would read about the great colleges at Oxford University and at the University of Cambridge; this appears to be his first inspiration for "dreaming of a university worthy of the commonwealth [New York] and of the nation"; this dream would become a lifelong goal of White's. After a year at Geneva, White convinced his father to send him to Yale University. For White, Yale was a great improvement over Geneva, but he found that even at one of the country's great universities there was "too much reciting by rote and too little real intercourse."

The state senate was charged with the allotment of New York's allocation of the federal land grant, an endowment of public lands for education, granted by Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Initially, Cornell wanted the grant to go to the New York State Agricultural College at Ovid. However, White "vigorously opposed this bill, on the ground that the educational resources of the state were already too much dispersed." He felt that the grant would be most effective if it were used to establish or strengthen a comprehensive university.

In the face of this disagreement, on September 25, 1864, in Rochester, New York, Ezra Cornell proposed establishing a new university on his farm in Ithaca, which he would endow with $300,000 (soon thereafter increased to $500,000) to be combined with the full proceeds of the land grant. Ezra Cornell had found a purpose for his fortune, and White had found an opportunity to fulfill his dream of building his vision of a great university for the state.

Cornell University - Establishment of Cornell

On February 7, 1865, Andrew D. White introduced an act to the state senate "to establish the Cornell University," which appropriated the full income of the sale of lands given to New York under the Morrill Act to the university^[8]. The bill was immediately opposed by other colleges vying for a share of the land grant funds and by religious groups, who opposed the proposed composition of the university's board of trustees; Cornell's charter stated that "at no time shall a majority thereof be of any one religious sect, or of no religious sect."^[9] Despite this opposition, the bill was signed into law by Governor Reuben E. Fenton on April 27, 1865.

The university's Inauguration Day took place on October 7, 1868. There were 412 successful applicants; with this initial enrollment, Cornell's first class was, at the time, the largest entering class at an American university.^[10] On the occasion, Ezra Cornell delivered a brief speech. He said, "I hope we have laid the foundation of an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education. ... I believe we have made the beginning of an institution which will prove highly beneficial to the poor young men and the poor young women of our country."^[11]

Cornell was among the first universities in the United States to admit women alongside men. The first woman was admitted to Cornell in 1870, although the university did not yet have a women's dormitory. On February 13, 1872, Cornell's Board of Trustees accepted an offer of $250,000 from Henry W. Sage to build such a dormitory. During the construction of Sage College (now home to the Johnson School as Sage Hall) and after its opening in 1875, the admittance of women to Cornell continued to increase.

Significant departures from the standard curriculum were made at Cornell under the leadership of Andrew D. White. In 1868, Cornell introduced the elective system, under which students were free to choose their own course of study. Harvard University would make a similar change in 1872, soon after the inauguration of Charles W. Eliot in 1869.^[12]

It was the success of the egalitarian ideals of the newly-established Cornell, a uniquely American institution, that would help drive some of the changes seen at other universities throughout the next few decades, and would lead educational historian Frederick Rudolph to call Cornell "the first American university."^[13]

Cornell University - Research

Perhaps no single Cornell program has affected the life of the average American more than the Automotive Crash Injury Research project conducted by John O. Moore beginning in 1952 at the Cornell Aeronautical Research Laboratories (spun off in 1972 as Calspan Corporation). It pioneered the first-ever use of crash testing (originally using corpses rather than dummies). The project discovered that an extraordinary percentage of injuries could be prevented by improved door locks, energy-absorbing steering wheels, padded dashboards, and seat belts. The project led to Liberty Mutual's funding the building of a demonstration Cornell Safety Car in 1956, which received national publicity, and influenced carmakers. Carmakers started their own crash-test laboratories and gradually adopted the main Cornell innovations, all now taken for granted (although others, such as rear-facing passenger seats, never found favor with carmakers or public).

In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on estasblishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Theory Center, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. In 1985, development of NSFNet, a TCP/IP-based computer network that could connect to the ARPANET, was undertaken by a team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Cornell Theory Center. This high-speed network, unrestricted to academic users, became a backbone to which regional networks would be connected. Initially a 56-kbps network, traffic on the network grew exponentially; the links were upgraded to 1.5-Mbps T1s in 1988 and to 45 Mbps in 1991. The NSFNet was a major milestone in the development of the Internet and its rapid growth coincided with the development of the World Wide Web.^[14]

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "History", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki