Cornell University: Encyclopedia II - Cornell University - Organization

Cornell University - Organization

Cornell University - Academic units

Cornell is a private institution, receiving most of its funding through tuition, research grants, and alumni contributions. However, three of its undergraduate colleges as well as the graduate-level College of Veterinary Medicine, called contract or statutory colleges, also receive partial funding from the state of New York to support their research and service mission in niche fields. Residents of New York enrolled in the contract colleges enjoy reduced tuition. Further, the governor of the state serves as an ex-officio member of the board of trustees. It is a common misconception that Cornell's contract colleges are public institutions. They are not — they are private institutions that Cornell operates by contract with the state government.

Cornell is highly decentralized; its colleges and schools have wide autonomy. Each defines its own academic programs, organizes 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 and take two physical education courses. Periodically, the university attempts to resolve naturally arising redundancies by creating special interschool departments. While students may take courses offered by the division, their enrollment remains with their individual college or school. With that said, any student may take any course in any of the colleges, provided they have fulfilled the pre-requisites for enrollment.

Seven schools offer undergraduate programs. Students pursuing graduate degrees in departments of these schools are enrolled in the Graduate School. In addition, there are six units offering graduate and professional programs.

• College of Architecture, Art and Planning
• College of Arts and Sciences
• College of Engineering
• School of Hotel Administration

• New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
• New York State College of Human Ecology
• New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations

All of Cornell's graduate and professional schools are endowed, except for the statutory veterinary school.

• Graduate School
• Cornell Law School
• S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management
• Weill Cornell Medical College (New York City)
• Weill Cornell Medical College (Qatar)
• Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences (New York City)
• New York State College of Veterinary Medicine

• School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions

Cornell University - Non-academic units

The Cornell University Library (CUL) consists of twenty units. It holds 7 million volumes in open stacks, 8 million microforms, and some 76,000 sound recordings in its collections in addition to extensive digital resources and the University Archives^[15]; it is one of the twelve largest (by volume) academic research libraries in the United States. It was the first among all U.S. colleges and universities to allow undergraduates to borrow books from its libraries.

CUL plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. The arXiv.org e-print archive, created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg, is operated and primarily funded by Cornell as part of CUL's services. The archive has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the eprint a viable and popular form for announcing new research.

The Project Euclid initiative creates one resource joining commercial journals with low-cost independent journals. The project is aimed at enabling affordable scholarly communication through the Internet. Besides archival purposes, primary goals of the project is to facilitate journal searches and interoperatibility between different publishers.

The Cornell Library Digital Collections are online collections of historical documents. Featured collections include the Database of African-American poetry, Historic Math Book Collection, Samuel May Anti-Slavery Collection, Witchcraft collection, and the Donovan Nuremberg Trials collection.

Cornell University Press, established in 1869, but inactive from about 1890 to 1930, was the first university publishing enterprise in the United States and is one of the country's largest university presses^[16]. It produces approximately 150 titles each year in various disciplines including anthropology, classics, cultural studies, history, literary criticism and theory, medieval studies, philosophy, politics and international relations, psychology and psychiatry, and women's studies.

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