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History Cornell University was created on April 27 1865 by a New York State Senate bill that named the university as the state's land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and experienced educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the initial two buildings and traveled about the country, attracting students and faculty.• On April 19, 1969, more than eighty members of Cornell's Afro-American Society took over the student union building, Willard Straight Hall. The takeover was precipitated by increasing racial tension at the university in the 1960s; earlier incidents included a reprimand of three black students for a December 1968 incident and a cross burning in front of the black women's cooperative. The crisis ended on April 20, 1969, with Cornell ceding to the society's demands, including the creation of a black studies program. The students emerged making a black power salute with guns in hand. (The guns had been brought into the hall after the initial takeover, following an attempt by members of an all-white fraternity to reclaim the hall.) James A. Perkins, president of Cornell during the events, would resign soon after.• Organization Cornell is a private institution, receiving most of its funding through tuition, research grants, and alumni contributions. Three of its undergraduate colleges and the graduate-level College of Veterinary Medicine are called contract colleges. These divisions 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 pay reduced tuition. Furthermore, the governor of the state serves as an ex-officio member of the board of trustees. Despite some similarities, Cornell's contract colleges are not public or state schools – they are private institutions that Cornell operates by contract with the state government. Cornell is decentralized, with its colleges and schools exercising wide autonomy. Each defines its own academic programs, operates 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, take two physical education courses, and satisfy a writing requirement. Although students are affiliated with their individual college or school, they may take courses in any of the colleges, provided they have fulfilled the course prerequisites. A handful of inter-school academic departments offer courses in more than one college. Seven schools provide undergraduate programs and an additional seven provide graduate and professional programs. Students pursuing graduate degrees in departments of these schools are enrolled in the Graduate School. The School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions offers programs for college and high school students, professionals, and other adults.• Endowed Contract | width='40' | | Graduate and professional Endowed |} Main campus
New York City campus
Qatar campus Weill Medical College in Qatar is in Education City, near Doha. Opened in September 2004, it was the first American medical school outside the United States. The college is part of Cornell's program to enhance its international influence. The College is a joint initiative of the Qatar government to strengthen its academic programs and provide better medical care in the country. Along with its full four-year MD program, which mirrors the curriculum taught at Weill Medical College in New York City, the college offers a two-year undergraduate pre-medical program with a separate admissions process. This undergraduate program opened in September 2002 and was the first coeducational institute of higher education in Qatar. The college is partially funded by the Qatar government through the Qatar Foundation, which contributed US$750 million for its construction. The medical center is housed in a large two-story structure designed by Arata Isozaki. In 2004, the Qatar Foundation announced the construction of a 350–bed Specialty Teaching Hospital near the medical college in Education City. The hospital will be completed in 2009 and is supported by an $8 billion endowment. Other facilities
Profile For the undergraduate class of 2010, the admission rate was 24.7%, the most selective in the university's history. For the class of 2009, 33.8% enrolled through early decision. Of enrolling students, 67% scored above 650 on the SAT Verbal exam and 82% scored above 650 on the SAT Math exam. Eighty-two percent of enrolling students were ranked in the top ten percent of their high school classes. Sixty-eight percent of new undergraduate students hailed from public high schools. Cornell enrolls students from all 50 U.S. states and more than 120 countries. As of Fall 2005, 28% of undergraduate student identified themselves as members of ethnic minority groups. Ninety-six percent of first-year students return for their second year. Of 13,515 undergraduate students, 4,251 (31.5%) are affiliated with the largest college by enrollment, Arts and Sciences, followed by 3,153 (23.3%) in Agriculture and Life Sciences and 2,680 (19.8%) in Engineering. By student enrollment, the smallest of the seven undergraduate colleges is Architecture, Art, and Planning, with 515 (3.8%) students. In 2005, the Graduate School accepted 21.6% of applicants, the Johnson School of Management accepted 34.4%, the Law School accepted 20.6%, and the Veterinary School accepted 10.9%. The Weill Cornell Medical School accepted 4.3%. Faculty Main article: List of Cornell University people For the August 2005 to May 2006 academic year, Cornell University had 1,594 full-time and part-time academic faculty members affiliated with its main campus. The New York City medical divisions count 1,005 faculty members and Qatar has 34. In total, 40 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Cornell as faculty or students. Among Cornell's notable former professors are Carl Sagan, Charles Evans Hughes, Norman Malcolm, Vladimir Nabokov, Hans Bethe, Richard Feynman, Kip Thorne, Archie Randolph Ammons, and Allan Bloom. Cornell's faculty for the 2005-06 academic year included three Nobel laureates, a Crafoord Prize winner, two Turing Award winners, a Fields Medal winner, two Legion of Honor recipients, a World Food Prize winner, an Andrei Sakharov Prize winner, three National Medal of Science winners, two Wolf Prize winners, five MacArthur award winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, two Eminent Ecologist Award recipients, a Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion recipient, four Presidential Early Career Award winners, 20 National Science Foundation CAREER grant holders, a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research, a recipient of the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a recipient of the Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, three Packard Foundation grant holders, a Keck Distinguished Young Scholar, two Beckman Foundation Young Investigator grant holders, and two NYSTAR (New York State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research) early career award winners. On June 11, 2005, Jeffrey S. Lehman announced that he would resign from the position of Cornell President effective June 30, 2005, citing "differences with the board regarding the strategy for realizing Cornell's long-term vision." Former Cornell President Hunter R. Rawlings III served as interim president for the 2005-06 academic year. David J. Skorton, former president of the University of Iowa, assumed office July 1, 2006. International programs Cornell offers undergraduate curricula with international focuses, including the Africana Studies, French Studies, German Studies, Jewish Studies, Latino Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Romance Studies, and Russian Literature majors. Cornell was the first university to teach modern Far Eastern languages. In addition to traditional academic programs, Cornell students may study abroad on any of six continents. The Asian Studies major, South Asia Program, Southeast Asia Program, and the newly launched China and Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS) major provide opportunities for students and researchers in Asia. Cornell has an agreement with Peking University allowing students in the CAPS major to spend a semester in Beijing. Similarly, the College of Engineering has an agreement to exchange faculty and graduate students with Tsinghua University in Beijing, and the School of Hotel Administration has a joint master's program with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has signed an agreement with Japan's National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences, as well as the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, to engage in joint research and exchange graduate students and faculty members. It also cooperates in agricultural research with the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. In the Middle East, Cornell's efforts focus on biology and medicine. The Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar trains new doctors to improve health services in the region. The university is also developing the Bridging the Rift Center, a "Library of Life" (or database of all living systems) on the border of Israel and Jordan, in collaboration with those two countries and Stanford University. Cornell has partnered with Queen's University in Canada to offer a joint Executive MBA. The only program of its kind in the world, graduates of the program earn both a Cornell MBA and a Queen's MBA. This program is made possible through videoconferencing, and so students in Canada and the United States share an interactive virtual classroom. Rankings
Library The Cornell University Library is the eleventh largest academic library in the United States, ranked by number of volumes held.• In 2006, The Princeton Review ranked it as the 11th best college library.• The library plays an active role in furthering online archiving of scientific and historical documents. arXiv, an e-print archive created at Los Alamos National Laboratory by Paul Ginsparg, is operated and primarily funded by Cornell as part of the library's services. The archive has changed the way many physicists and mathematicians communicate, making the e-print a viable and popular means of announcing new research. Press The Cornell University Press, established in 1869 but inactive from 1884 to 1930, was the first university publishing enterprise in the United States. It was established in the College of the Mechanic Arts (as mechanical engineering was called in the 19th century) because engineers knew more than literature professors did about running steam-powered printing presses. From its inception, the press has offered work-study financial aid: students with previous training in the printing trades were paid for typesetting and running the presses that printed textbooks, pamphlets, a weekly student journal, and official university publications. Today, the press is one of the country's largest university presses. It produces approximately 150 nonfiction titles each year in various disciplines including anthropology, Asian studies, biological sciences, classics, history, industrial relations, literary criticism and theory, natural history, philosophy, politics and international relations, veterinary science, and women's studies. The press's acquisitions, editorial, production, and marketing departments have been located in Sage House since 1993, and the financial department is on Cascadilla Street in downtown Ithaca. Activities For the 2005-06 academic year, Cornell had 886 registered student organizations. These clubs and organizations run the gamut from kayaking to full-armor jousting, from varsity and club sports and a cappella groups to improvisational theatre, from political clubs and publications to chess and video game clubs. They are subsidized financially by academic departments and/or the Student Assembly, a student-run organization with a budget of $2.7 million per year. The assembly also finances other student life programs including a concert commission and an on-campus movie theater. Student organizations also include a myriad of musical groups that play everything from classical, jazz, to ethnic styles in addition to the Big Red Marching Band, which performs regularly at football games and other campus events. Organized in 1868, the oldest student organization is the Cornell University Glee Club. The Cornell Daily Sun is the oldest continuously independent college daily newspaper in the United States, having published since September 1880. In 1912, it became the first collegiate member of the Associated Press. Other campus publications include The Cornell Lunatic (campus humor magazine), The Cornell Review, Turn Left, The Cornell American, The Cornell Centrist, and The Cornell Moderator. WVBR is an independent radio station owned and operated by Cornell students, but not affiliated with or controlled by the university. During the week, it plays mostly rock music, and switches to specialty shows and community programming on the weekend. It also provides coverage of both Cornell and national sports. Cornell hosts the second largest fraternity and sorority system in North America, with 66 chapters involving 28% of male and 22% of female undergraduates. During the 2004-05 academic year, the Greek system committed 21,668 community service and advocacy hours and raised $176,547 in philanthropic efforts. However, the administration has expressed concerns over student misconduct in the system. In 2004-05, of 251 social events registered with the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs, 37 (15%) resulted in a complaint. In that same year, there were five reported instances of property destruction, five reports of bias, three hazing incidents, and various other allegations. Student misconduct is reviewed by the Judicial Administrator, Cornell's justice system. Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans, was founded at Cornell in 1906. Alpha Phi Alpha's charter was revoked in 1996 due to a hazing incident involving Cornell student Sylvester Lloyd due to allegations of intense physical beatings. Delta Sigma Theta article on Silvester Lloyd incident Housing University housing is broadly divided into three sections: North Campus, West Campus, and Collegetown. Since a 1997 residential initiative, West Campus houses transfer and returning students, whereas North Campus is almost entirely populated by freshmen. The only options for living on North Campus for upperclassmen are the program houses: Risley Residential College, Just About Music, the Ecology House, Holland International Living Center, the Multicultural Living Learning Unit, the Latino Living Center, Akwe:kon, and Ujamaa. In an attempt to create a sense of community and an atmosphere of education outside the classroom and continue Andrew Dickson White's vision, the university has undertaken the $250 million residential college project on West Campus. The Class Halls will be demolished and rebuilt as five residential colleges named after notable deceased Cornell professors. The first, Alice Cook House, was opened to students in 2004, followed by Carl Becker House in 2005. The next house will be Hans Bethe House and is expected to open in January 2007. The idea of building a house system can be attributed in part to the success of Risley Residential College, the oldest continually operating residential college at Cornell. Like Risley, the new houses will have their own dining halls, student governments, in-house lectures, house trips, and crests. The completion of the five-house residential college campus will occur in August 2009. Off campus, many homes in the East Hill neighborhoods adjacent to the university have been converted to apartments. Several high-rise apartment complexes have been constructed in the Collegetown neighborhood. Nine percent of undergraduate students reside in fraternity and sorority houses, although freshmen are not permitted to live in them. Housing cooperatives or other independent living units exist, including Watermargin, Telluride House, the Center for Jewish Living, and the Wait Cooperative. In its 2006 rankings of college campus food, The Princeton Review ranked Cornell's dining services fourth overall. The university has 31 on-campus dining locations, and a program called the Cross Country Gourmet Guest Restaurant Series periodically brings chefs, menus, and atmosphere from restaurants to Cornell's eight all-you-care-to-eat dining halls. Athletics
Cornelliana Cornelliana is a term for Cornell's traditions, legends, and lore. Cornellian traditions include Slope Day, a celebration held on the last day of classes, and Dragon Day, which includes the burning of a dragon built by architecture students. Dragon Day is one of the school's oldest traditions and has been celebrated annually since 1901.• The university's alma mater is "Far Above Cayuga's Waters" and its fight song is "Give My Regards to Davy". People associated with the university are called "Cornellians". "Cornellian" is also used as an adjective and as the name of the university's yearbook. Research
Alumni Graduates of Cornell are known as "Cornellians". As of August 2005, the university counted 244,276 living Cornellians. Many are active through organizations and events including the annual Reunion Weekend and Homecoming, weekend festivities in Ithaca, and the International Spirit of Zinck's Night. For the 2004-05 fiscal year, Cornell ranked third for gifts and bequests from alumni, and fourth for total support from all sources (alumni, friends, corporations, and foundations) among U.S. colleges and universities reporting voluntary gift support. In October 2006, Cornell made public a 10 year capital campaign "Far Above..." to solicit alumni and raise $4 billion to improve the undergraduate experience, attract and retain faculty, and expand the physical plant. Far Above: The Campaign for Cornell, accessed 10/25/06]. Cornellians are noted for their accomplishments in public, professional, and corporate life. Former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, former President of Cuba Mario García Menocal, and former Iranian Prime Minister Jamshid Amuzegar all graduated from Cornell. In the United States, numerous Congressmen and Cabinet members, including Paul Wolfowitz and Janet Reno, and one Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have been Cornellians. After his Cornell education, David Starr Jordan went on to become the founding president of Stanford University and a president of Indiana University. M. Carey Thomas founded Bryn Mawr College and was its second president. Cornellian-founded businesses include Alamo Rent-A-Car by Michael Egan, Burger King by David Edgerton, Carrier by Willis Carrier, Coors Brewing Company by Adolph Coors, Gannett by Frank Gannett, Grumman Aerospace Corporation by Leroy Grumman, Palm by Jeff Hawkins, PeopleSoft by David Duffield, Priceline.com by Jay Walker, Qualcomm by Dr. Irwin M. Jacobs, and Staples by Myra Hart. In medicine, Dr. Robert Atkins developed the Atkins Diet, Dr. Henry Heimlich developed the Heimlich maneuver, and Wilson Greatbatch invented the first successful pacemaker. Dr. James Maas, both an alumnus and current faculty member, coined the term "power nap". Cornellians also include medical personalities Dr. Benjamin Spock and Joyce Brothers, as well as the Nobel laureate maize geneticist Barbara McClintock. A number of Cornellians have been prominent innovators, starting with Thomas Midgley, Jr., the inventor of Freon. Jeff Hawkins invented the Palm Pilot and subsequently founded Palm, Inc. Graduate Jon Rubinstein is credited with the development of the iPod. William Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two in 1958, one of the earliest computer games and the predecessor to Pong, and Robert Tappan Morris developed the first computer worm on the Internet. The most direct evidence of dark matter was provided by Vera Rubin. Jill Tarter is the current director of SETI and Steve Squyres is the principal investigator on the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Eight Cornellians have served as NASA astronauts. Bill Nye is best known as "The Science Guy". Nobel Prize in Literature winner Toni Morrison wrote Song of Solomon and won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel, Beloved. The Nobel Prize in Literature was also awarded to Pearl S. Buck, author of The Good Earth. E. B. White, author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, co-wrote the influential writing guide The Elements of Style with fellow Cornellian William Strunk Jr. Other Cornellian writers include Laura Z. Hobson, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut. Cornellian journalists include Margaret Bourke-White, Ann Coulter, Allison Danzig, Dick Schaap, Keith Olbermann, and radio personality/former congressional candidate, Dave Ross. Christopher Reeve is best known for his role as Superman, while comedian Frank Morgan is best known to younger generations as The Wizard of Oz. Stand-up comedian Bill Maher, host of the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher is said to have been Politically Incorrect even as an undergraduate at Cornell. Jimmy Smits, best known for his roles on L.A. Law, The West Wing, and in the Star Wars films Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith earned his MFA from Cornell. Charlie Bucket was played by Cornellian Peter Ostrum and Robert Smigel is the puppeteer behind Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. Cornellians have won Academy Awards and been enshrined on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Mack David wrote Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo from the 1950 film Cinderella. Robert Alexander Anderson wrote the Christmas song Mele Kalikimaka. Greg Graffin of the band Bad Religion, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, singer-songwriter Harry Chapin, pop star Huey Lewis, and modern composer Steve Reich all attended Cornell. The Empire State Building and Grauman's Chinese Theatre were designed by Cornell architects Richard Shreve and Raymond M. Kennedy, respectively. Edmund Bacon is best known for reshaping Philadelphia in the mid 20th century. In athletics, Cornellians have won Olympic gold medals, been inducted into sports halls of fame, and led numerous teams as GMs and coaches including Bruce Arena, former head coach of the United States men's national soccer team. Notes | |||||||||||||||||||||
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