One-hundred and forty-three years ago, on October 7, 1868, Cornell University opened in a rural setting on Lake Cayuga in Ithaca, New York, welcoming 26 professors and 412 students.
The university was founded by Ezra Cornell, a founder, director, and large stockholder in the Western Union Telegraph Company, and Andrew Dickson White. In his opening address, President White said Cornell, a private, nonsectarian institution, would aim "to develop the individual man as a being intellectual, moral and religious and to bring the force of the individual to bear on society."
The university’s goal was to contribute to all fields of knowledge, from the classics to the sciences, theoretical and applied. These ideals were stated in its motto, an Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
Today, Cornell is a coeducational, land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for some of its educational programs. It also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Qatar.
The university is organized into seven graduate divisions and seven undergraduate colleges, with each college and division defining its own admission standards and academic programs. Its graduate schools include the S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management, College of Engineering, Law School, Weill Cornell Medical College, College of Veterinary Medicine, and School of Hotel Management.
Cornell’s two largest undergraduate colleges are the College of Arts and Sciences and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The university’s ranking in the 2012 edition of Best Colleges and National Universities is 15. Its annual tuition and fees run about $41,541. Cornell counts over 255,000 living alumni, and the student body totals more than 13,000 undergraduate and 6,000 graduate students from all 50 states and 122 countries.
Cornell has more than 500 student organizations on campus and over 30 NCAA Division I varsity teams that compete in the Ivy League. The Cornell Big Red are celebrated for their men’s lacrosse team, which won seven consecutive titles from 2003-09. One of Cornell’s oldest traditions is Dragon Day, during which a dragon built by first-year architecture students is paraded through the campus and burned in a bonfire celebrating the arrival of spring.
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