Cornell University: Any Person, Any Study

On the hill above you, on a high plateau between two deep gorges overlooking Cayuga Lake, stands Cornell University. It began with two state senators and one radical idea. Ezra Cornell was a self-made man who had grown rich building telegraph lines and becoming the largest shareholder in Western Union.

He wanted to give his fortune away in a way that would last. His partner was Andrew Dickson White, a young scholar who would become the university's first president. Together they persuaded the New York legislature, and on April twenty-seventh, eighteen sixty-five, the university was chartered.

Ezra Cornell gave his own farm as the campus site, plus a founding gift, and he made a promise that still defines the place. His words were, I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study. Read that again.

Any person. Any study. In an age when most colleges were small, religious, and open only to wealthy white men, Cornell would be nonsectarian, and it would teach everything from classics to agriculture to engineering, treating a farmer's son and a poet as equals.

As New York's land grant university under the Morrill Act of eighteen sixty-two, it married public purpose with private ambition. When the doors opened on October seventh, eighteen sixty-eight, four hundred twelve students walked in, the largest entering class any American university had ever seen, taught by twenty-six professors. Within two years, in eighteen seventy, women were admitted too, making Cornell one of the first major coeducational universities in the country.

White designed the academic structure to be broad and secular, and the motto endured on the university seal. Look at the campus and you can read that founding argument in stone. The Arts Quad, the towering McGraw clock tower, the libraries and laboratories all sit above the gorges as if to say learning belongs to everyone willing to climb the hill.

Nearly every hour, the chimes ring out over the valley, a daily reminder of two men who bet that knowledge, offered to any person in any study, could remake a democracy.