Cornell: One the Ivy League's Frontier

According to legend, a very proper New England lady, with an offspring ready for College, once fell into a conversation about education with a non-Bostonian acquaintance.

"Well," offered the friend innocently, "have you considered Cornell?"

"Oh," said the lady sharply. "We hadn't thought about any of those Western schools."

Her remark embodied more than a mere geographical misconception about the location of upstate New York. It also revealed a certain critical attitude of mind toward a University with so many departures from the New England norm.

An Ivy League school which waited until 1865 to be founded, teaches vocational subjects in addition to the tired and true liberal arts, combines both state and private support, and proclaims itself unashamedly co-educational is something decidedly out of the ordinary.

But to try to characterize a University as heterogeneous as Cornell, whether with the adjective "Western" or any other, is likely to result in a painful over-simplification.

There are, however, some tangible facts about the University which can at least help to set the scene. Cornell ranks on the IBM level of the Ivy League in enrollment, with slightly less than 10,000 students in all its various divisions, only a few behind the Harvard figure.

Great Physical Size

In sheer physical size, Cornell outdistances any other Ivy school by almost any standard of comparison. The Ithaca campus sprawls over thousands of acres, and the University also has considerable chunks of land in Geneva, N. Y., Buffalo, and New York City, where the Medical and Nursing Schools are located.

The main campus at Ithaca, perched "several hundred feet above the southern extremity of Cayuga Lake," as one official publication anatomically describes it, has long had the reputation of being one of the most scenic in the United States. On esthetic grounds alone, Cornell students show pardonable pride when they sing of their "noble alma mater, Glorious to view."

More than 150 buildings of one kind or another cover portions of this expanse. On many, the mortar between the bricks has barely had time to dry, for building seems to go on at a breathless rate at Cornell. For example the Veterinary College, a state-supported school, has recently erected almost twenty new buildings. For an Ivy League school, Cornell has remarkably little Ivy--in many places it just hasn't had time to grow yet.

The University's 10,000 students are scattered among no less than fourteen schools and colleges. The College of Arts and Sciences is the largest single division, with about 2600 students, but it does not have a majority even of the undergraduates.

The state-supported agriculture school, with about 1700 undergraduates and some 600 graduate students, is important numerically. But it hardly dominates the campus to the extent to which it has sometimes been pictured. Cornell students, with the possible but dubious exception of agriculture students themselves, do not plow their way to classes through herds of cows. Although cows in varying stages of contentment can be seen grazing in great numbers on the pasture lands, the chief student contact with Cornell's bovine enrollment goes no farther than drinking their milk, which is extracted in large quantities from the animals and processed in the Agriculture school's creamery.

The engineering school, also with about 1700 undergraduates, is the only other specialized division of the University to top 100 in enrollment. The Cornell Graduate School, which has about 1500 registered students, includes regular graduate students in the University, aside from those in the exclusively graduate schools like law and medicine.

The other undergraduate divisions, architecture, hotel administration--with a lavish Statler hotel on campus in which to practice--and the state-supported Home Economics and Labor and Industrial Relations schools, all have relatively small student bodies.

Two of the University's other divisions, the college of Veterinary Medicine and the school of Nursing, make two years of college training a pre-requisie for admission. The other units, the School of Business Administration, the Law School, the Medical College, and the small School of Nutrition are regular graduate schools, except that qualified Cornell undergraduates can enter them after three years of study. A fifteenth division of the University, the school of Education, has no full-time students of its own, but serves chiefly to guide prospective teachers in specialized fields in arranging their programs.

Public-Private Relationship

This diversity in educational structure undoubtedly gives Cornell something of the atmosphere of the large universities so prominent in many areas of the country outside New England. Cornell, with four state schools, Agriculture, Home Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations, and Veterinary Medicine, comes close to filling the bill of a central state university for New York.

Indeed, Cornell is one of the few American universities that combines state and private schools on the same campus.

The most important and direct state influence on the University lies in the support of the four public colleges through legislative appropriation. State residents, who made up about 85 per cent of the enrollment in the state schools, receive free tuition there, (although not, of course, in the private divisions), and out of state students pay only small tuition fees.

About half of all the recent construction work at Cornell has taken place at the state schools, even though most students are in the privately endowed colleges, another indication of the financial advantage that state institutions have over most private schools. At Cornell, of course, the state and private schools are complementary, rather than directly competing.

In practice, the state also makes some financial contribution to the private divisions of the University. Both state and private schools follow a policy of reimbursing each other for the number of hours devoted to instructing students who take courses outside their own divisions.

The privately endowed Arts college, for instance, pays the Agriculture school a certain sum for each hour Arts students spend taking courses in agriculture. Conversely, the state pays the Arts college for hours agriculture students spend there. An the system works out, more agriculture students spend more time taking more courses in the Arts college than vice versa. So the profit almost always lies on the side of the privately endowed colleges.

By the number and variety of its component units alone, Cornell is assured of obtaining a highly diversified student body. Not many Eastern schools have agricultural, engineering, veterinary, and liberal arts concentrators rubbing shoulders even figuratively on the same campus. Of course the contact is not that close or constant in the normal scholastic course of things at Cornell, since the student bodies in the individual schools tend to be clearly defined and fairly cohesive groups, especially in their later undergraduate years. But in extra-curricular activities, particularly in athletics, there is considerable mixing among students from the many branches of the University.

In terms of geographical distribution, the Cornell student body does not exhibit an equivalent degree of diversity. While the University has students from every state and from nearly 70 foreign countries, and admissions officers strive for ever wider distribution, Cornell is still to a large extent a New York State school, with close to sixty per cent of its students from within the state.

In the Arts college, enrollment is more evenly divided between in and out of state students. But the state-supported schools, about 85 per cent composed of New York State residents, tip the balance in the University as a whole. This heavy proportion is not really surprising, since the New York State population probably contains enough college students to fill a dozen schools of Cornell's size. But the heavy New York State representation, especially in the undergraduate divisions, probably makes the Cornell community somewhat less cosmopolitan than are several of the other Ivy League schools.

One persistent problem of American education which perhaps appears in more acute form at Cornell than at any other Ivy League institution is the question of specialization versus so-called "liberal education."

New Educational Philosophy

Cornell pioneered among Eastern colleges in introducing the elements of technical and vocational training into higher education along side the liberal arts. One of the aims of the guiding spirits behind the establishment of the school, Western Union magnate Ezra Cornell and first president Andrew Dickson White, was to create an institution in which "any person could study any subject."

At the time, in the middle 1860's, such an educational philosophy seemed to challenge much of the basis of American higher education, with its emphasis on purely classical training. White and Cornell immensely broadened the college curriculum. In addition to teaching "agriculture and the mechanic arts", they placed the natural sciences on a level with the humanities. They also helped to make modern languages and literature, and above all, history and political science standard parts of college training. The first chair of American history in the United States was established at Cornell.

The great historian Carl Bocker, who taught at Cornell for many years, went so far as to say that White probably had a greater influence on American higher education in the nineteenth century than any other person. That was high praise, since among White's contemporaries were Charles W. Eliot who began his reform of Harvard in 1869, Daniel G. Gilman, who helped to found Johns Hopkins in 1875, and John W. Burgess, who began to introduce radical changes in the curriculum at Columbia a few years later.

Problem of Specialization

But the question can be raised as to whether Cornell has not succeeded almost too well in diversifying its curriculum and opening opportunity for undergraduate study in just about every field, from agriculture to hotel administration. In recent years, the trend has been, if anything, away from this idea--American educators have tended to re-emphasize the importance of an education which will attempt to produce graduates of broader interests and accomplishments than they can obtain in their own academic specialties.

One Cornell professor, Milton Konvitz of the Industrial and Labor Relations School has written pungently on the subject. His statement deserves quotation at some length:

"The aim of liberal education is to turn relatively undifferentiated boys and girls into mature, intelligent, thinking, passionate, and compassionate persons: into men and women with convictions and the courage of their convictions, and possessed with the central conviction that until their dying day they must continue on an endless, fretful, feverish quest after thoughts, and more thoughts, and still more thoughts."

Does Cornell achieve this aim? Konvitz is not quite sure and apparently more than a little dubious.

"Too often we permit our students to think that they have come have only to equip themselves with skills and 'knowhow' to become America's butchers, bakers, and candle-stick makers. Thousands of our students acquire skills and techniques to qualify them well-enough for the vocations and a professions; but what of the greatest vocation of man--to be a Man?"

With this Emersonian diagnosis, Konvitz proceeds to offer a solution. He writes: "I would like to see serious thought given to the possibility and advisability of requiring two years of General Education, with an emphasis on the Humanities, for all Cornell students. During these two years, there should be a prohibition upon anything that looks 'practical' or vocational or directly related to the bread-and-butter aspect of education."

General Education Proposed

Kenvitz' proposal is, of course, one that has been tried in varying forms in several of the other Ivy League schools in the past few years. But it must be remembered that most of the schools that have experimented with a program of General Education, by whatever name it is called, do not have Cornell's complex educational structure. Undergraduates in schools like Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia are almost all liberal arts students of one kind or another and presumably shares, within limits, certain interests and capabilities.

To impose a program of General Education on a liberal arts student body may create many problems along the way, but it is not intrinsically as difficult as to impose one on undergraduates whose fields of study vary as widely as at Cornell.

Thus far Cornell has approached the problem cautiously without attempting to adopt a single over-all plan. Most of the non-liberal arts undergraduates colleges have made provision for their students to take as many courses as possible, often up to one-fourth of their total college credits, outside their own specialized curricula, preferably in the Arts college. And considerable interchange does take place--the Arts college does almost half the undergraduate teaching in the University although it does not have nearly half the undergraduates.

Not all the undergraduate divisions seem to co-operate equally in encouraging their students to take liberal arts courses. A complaint heard in many quarters at Cornell was that the engineering school urged its students to take more specialized engineering courses in their elective time, rather than liberal arts subjects. This is especially ironic since the engineering program was recently increased from four to five years, presumably to allow engineers to spend more time in acquiring the elements of a liberal education in the Arts colleges.

In part, the problem of achieving broader study by non-liberal arts student is an admissions one. At Cornell, each school and college has control over its own admissions; the central admissions office passes on admission of students to the Arts college, but it acts mainly as a clearing house for applications to the other schools, with no final power of decision over them. Consequently considerable responsibility rests with these other divisions to admit students who have shown by their previous records that they have the ability and inclination to take varied courses as well as skills within their own fields.6Cornell students in full dress Ivy League uniform at Cornell's Statler Hotel Not all Cornell men ordinarily dress quite so formally. Grey fiannel suits and sport jackets are not as much in evidence in places like the agricultural campus. Except for special occasions, they are not usually worn anywhere at Cornell.