Cornell University

“ In the year 1868, Cornell University was founded in the town of Ithaca, from the gifts of Ezra Cornell; and this university had almost exactly opposite aims. It has aimed to create a 420university for the people, where every man could find what he needed for his own education; it has become a stronghold for the utilitarian spirit. The truly American spirit of restless initiative has perhaps nowhere in the academic world found more characteristic expression than in this energetic dwelling-place of science. ”

“ Not unlikely there thus came into my blood the strain which has led me ever since to feel that the building up of goodly institutions is more honorable than any other work,—an idea which was at the bottom of my efforts in developing the University of Michigan, and in founding Cornell University.
To Cortland Academy students came from far and near; and it soon began sending young men into the foremost places of State and Church. At an early day, too, it began receiving young women and sending them forth to become the best of matrons. ”

“ High above Ithaca, standing upon the brow of the ridge making its eastern border, are the imposing buildings of Cornell University, devoted to the free education of both sexes in all branches of knowledge, the spreading college campus elevated four hundred feet above the lake. Here are educated eighteen hundred students, who have about one hundred and eighty instructors. ”

“ I regret to say that some eminent men connected with important universities in the country showed far too much readiness to acquiesce in this unfavorable view of our founder. From very few of our sister institutions came any word of cheer; and from some of them came most bitter attacks, not only upon the system adopted in the new university, but upon Mr. Cornell himself. But his friends were more afflicted, by far, than he; all this opposition only served to strengthen his faith. ”

“ During my life, which is now extending beyond the allotted span of threescore and ten, I have been engaged after the manner of my countrymen, in many sorts of work, have become interested in many conditions of men have joined in many efforts which I hope have been of use; but, most of all, I have been interested in the founding and maintaining of Cornell University, and by the part I have taken in that, more than by any other work of my life I hope to be judged. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was in the troublous early days of Cornell, when the nonsectarian character of the university was bringing it from its rivals on every side the charge of godlessness, and when Mr. Cornell and Mr. White himself were rewarded for their labors by such epithets as infidel and atheist and by the suspicion of good Christian people everywhere, that it first occurred to him to find comfort and assurance in the study of this stage in the history of all the great intellectual movements through which civilization has been won. ”

“ As I now approach the end of life and look back over the development of Cornell University, this at least seems to me one piece of good fortune—namely, that I have aided to establish there the principle of using our means, so far as possible, not for indiscriminate gratuitous higher education of men unfit to receive it; not, as President Jordan has expressed it, in ``trying to put a five-thousand- dollar education into a fifty-cent boy'' ”

“ The coalition of all these forces against the Cornell University bill soon became very formidable, and the committee on education in the Assembly, to which the bill had been referred, seemed more and more controlled by them. Our only hope now was to enlighten the great body of the senators and assemblymen. To this end Mr. Cornell invited them by squads, sometimes to his rooms at Congress Hall, sometimes to mine at the Delavan House. There he laid before them his general proposal and the financial side of the plan, while I dwelt upon the need of a university in the true sense of the word ”

“ Ezra Cornell, uneducated and once in poverty, nevertheless gives all his surplus, once secured, to found a university in which 'any man may find instruction in any study' and interests himself most of all in providing for the poor man's son; Hiram Sibley, owing his millions to the same sturdy, manly and vigorous spirit, fighting his way from the bottom to the top, finds his noblest pleasure in organizing a college in which the education of the young mechanic and engineer may be carried up into the realms of applied science and the highest departments of professional work. ”

“ INTELLECTUAL DRY-ROT There are a few other universities, which in past times have established reputations in America; for example, Cornell University, located at Ithaca, New York, on the Lackawanna Railroad, with a Cornell trustee, a Columbia trustee, and a Princeton trustee; also on the Lehigh Railroad, with a trustee and recent president of Lehigh College, a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania, and a trustee of Lafayette College for directors. Cornell today has some six thousand students, and as choice an outfit of trustees as a plutocratic imagination could invent. ”

“ It is needless here to recount further the tangled story of the establishment of Cornell University, or to describe the happy policy by which the nation's gift, frittered away for a song by most of the States, became in time for the New York university the source of millions. Large as was Mr. White's share in securing for it the charter and the land grant, what was peculiarly his own was the educational shaping of the new institution. He was its spiritual founder not less than Mr. Cornell its material—a fact too much obscured, perhaps, by the name which he, against Mr. ”

“ To complete our story we have to bring another inventor upon the stage. This was Ezra Cornell, memorable to-day as the founder of Cornell University, a man at that time unknown, but filled with inventive ideas, and ready to undertake any task that might offer itself, from digging a well to boring a mountain tunnel. One day Mr. Cornell, who was at that time occupying the humble position of traveling agent for a patent plough, called at the office of an agricultural newspaper in Portland, Maine. ”

“ It was Al Sharpe, that great Cornell coach, who, in the fall of 1915 found it possible to break through the Harvard line of victories, and hanging on the walls in the trophy room at Cornell University is a much prized souvenir of Cornell's [Pg 355] visit to Cambridge. That was the only defeat on the Harvard schedule. But sometimes defeats have to come to insure victory, and perhaps in that defeat by Cornell lay the reason for the overwhelming score against Yale. ”

“ But Cornell University has now, within forty years from its foundation, accumulated very nearly three hundred thousand volumes, many among them of far greater value than anything contained in the Yale library of my day; and as I revise these lines comes news that the will of Professor Fiske, who recently died at Frankfort-on-the-Main, gives to the library all of his splendid collections in Italian history and literature at Florence, with the addition of nearly half a million of dollars. ”

“ Hiram Sibley, of Rochester, has given fifty thousand dollars for the College of Mechanic [249] Arts, and John McGraw, one hundred thousand for the library and museum. Cornell University is now one of the most liberally endowed institutions in the country, and has already sent out over one thousand graduates. ”

“ The New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University, through its investigations and bulletins, its lectures and demonstrations with farmers, and its large number of students receiving instruction, is rendering its best service to the people of the State. If it has not met all expectations, it is largely because its facilities have been almost trivial as compared with the work it has been expected to do. The demands that come to the College from the folks on the farms and in the rural schools are far and away beyond the facilities for meeting them. ”

“ Win games! Advertise the college!'
'Our friends, the professors, will perforce hold forth in their accustomed cells from eight till one of that fair morning. The benches, no doubt, will derive great benefit therefrom....
'We want the football team to have as much support as possible. The Faculty should want the football team to have as much support as possible. The Faculty should foster true Cornell spirit whenever it can honestly do so, and intercollegiate athletics is the greatest single thing that unites the different colleges into Cornell University. ”

“ In Cornell University (to which the United States Land Grant of 989,000 acres of land was assigned by the Legislature of New York, and which Mr. Ezra Cornell has endowed with the sum of $525,000, securely invested and drawing interest at seven per cent.) , the military tactics is incorporated into the general organization of the students, and made the basis of the College of Military Science. (1.) Attendance on military exercises is made obligatory on every able-bodied student ”

“ He accepted the non-resident professorship of history in Cornell university in 1881, where annually he gave a course of fifteen lectures till 1885, when he succeeded Andrew D. White in the presidency. In 1869 he founded the historical seminary of the university of Michigan, and introduced the seminary method of instruction in that institution. When the school of political science was established in the university he was made dean. ”

“ The medical mind of the United States is arrayed in a very ill-tempered opposition, on assumed physiological grounds, to the higher education of women in a continuous curriculum, and especially to that coeducation which some colleges in the Western States, Oberlin, Antioch, inaugurated twenty years ago, and which latterly Cornell University has adopted. The experience of Cornell is too recent to prove any thing; but the Quaker college of Swarthmore claims a steady improvement on the health of its girl-graduates, dating from the commencement of their college course ”

“ This is in conformity to the system of nature; it is the survival of the fittest. This was the main reason which led me to insert in the charter of Cornell University the provision by which at present six hundred students from the State of New York are selected by competitive examinations out of the mass of scholars in the public schools, and to provide that each of these best scholars shall have free instruction for four years. ”

“ From these lands, with which the generosity and foresight of Ezra Cornell endowed the university, there have been netted under [Mr. Sage's] administration, not far short of $4,000,000, with over 100,000 acres still to sell. Ezra Cornell's contract with the state was for twenty years. It expired August 4, 1886, when a ten years' extension was granted by the state. The trust will be closed in 1896." J. G. Schurman, Address at Inauguration to the Presidency of Cornell University, November 11, 1892. EDUCATION: A. D. 1866-1869. The United States. ”

“ He was professor of English literature, political economy and psychology at Acadia College in 1880-1882, of metaphysics and English literature at Dalhousie College, Halifax, N.S., in 1882-1886, and of philosophy (Sage professor) at Cornell University in 1886-1892, being Dean of the Sage School of Philosophy in 1891-1892. In 1892 he became president of Cornell University. ”

“ In the early days of the University, the agricultural teaching was given in a Department of Agriculture. In 1896 the University was divided into eight colleges, of which the College of Agriculture was one. By act of the legislature, Chapter 655 of the Laws of 1904, approved by Governor Odell, May 9, 1904, the College of Agriculture was established as a State Institution under the title of "The New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University." ”

“ A selection of articles and poems that have appeared in the Cornell Era since its founding in 1868 to the present day. It has been the policy of the magazine to obtain for publication articles by prominent men on all phases of college life. “As a result,” says the preface, “the bound copies of the Era, covering nearly fifty years, are a storehouse of articles valuable for all who may be interested in that wonderful phenomenon, the American university.” With few exceptions the authors of the selections are either Cornell graduates or members of the Cornell faculty. ”

“ It has been, and is, a great pleasure to me to see young men joining in religious effort; and I feel proud of the fact that from this association at Cornell many strong and earnest men have gone forth to good work as clergymen in our own country and in others.
In the erection of the new group of buildings south of the upper university quadrangle, as well as in building the president's house hard by, an opportunity was offered for the development of some minor ideas regarding the evolution of university life at Cornell which I had deeply at heart. ”

“ CHAPTER IX GENERAL GRANT AND SANTO DOMINGO—1868-1871 During the two or three years following my senatorial term, work in the founding and building of Cornell University was so engrossing that there was little time for any effort which could be called political. ”