“…and in all knowledge.”

The Morrill Land-Grant College Act provided federal funding: “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.…” Accordingly, Andrew Dickson White’s Senate Bill reiterated that New York’s land-grant institution would be established for “the cultivation of the arts and sciences and of literature, and the instruction in agriculture, the mechanic arts and military tactics, and in all knowledge.”

The founders considered it essential that Cornell University integrate all studies. White’s 1866 Report of the Committee on Organization provided a detailed description of his concept of the new university. Agriculture and the mechanic arts were to be regarded as “the peers of any other” subject, and students would be given a great degree of freedom in their choice of studies.

The Cornell curriculum was unique in its diversity. The early course offerings ranged widely. Modern languages and literature would be taught side by side with theoretical and applied sciences. White’s innovations included the appointment of non-resident professors who would enhance the educational atmosphere. He promoted the first Department of Electrical Engineering in the U.S.; taught and encouraged historical studies, appointing the first professor of American History in the U.S.; founded a Department of Political Science “for practical training”; and developed the first four-year architecture program in an American university.

Over the years, Cornell has maintained the founders’ dream. Current undergraduates can choose from among more than four thousand courses in fourteen undergraduate, graduate, and professional colleges and schools in Ithaca, New York City, and Doha, Qatar.

The last printed catalog listing all of Cornell’s courses. Currently the “Courses of Study” is published yearly online by the Office of the University Registrar at courses.cornell.edu.

In the early days of Sibley College... Ezra Cornell would come into the machine shop and watch the boys at work. He would usually perch himself upon a high stool near some of them and ask them questions about what they thought of that kind of training, and how they liked it. And so in that way he soon gained the good will of every boy in the shop for they felt that he was their friend and had an interest in their welfare.

Professor George S. Moler, Class of 1875, in The Cornell Era: Ezra Cornell Centennial Issue, May 1907.

Even as Cornell’s President, Andrew Dickson White continued to write and teach. He published his lecture outlines with interleaved blank pages for students to take notes.

While Cornell taught physics from the beginning, when Hans Bethe returned to the university after working on the Manhattan Project, he and some of the most outstanding young physicists in the country brought Cornell into the cutting-edge field of high energy elementary particle physics. The F. R. Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies quickly developed into one of the world’s leading research centers. Cornell began constructing synchrotrons in 1946.

The Wilson Synchrotron Laboratory houses CESR (Cornell Electron-positron Storage Ring), CLEO, a multipurpose high energy physics detector, and CHESS (Cornell High-Energy Synchrotron Source). The location of the particle accelerator in a tunnel fifteen meters under Alumni field is outlined in this brochure.

Africana studies began at Cornell in 1968 with courses in African-American literature and politics in the civil rights movement. Actively supported by university presidents James Perkins and Dale Corson, and catalyzed by student activism, the Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC) opened in 1969 with 160 students, ten courses, and seven faculty members, including historian John Henrik Clarke, for whom the Africana Research Library is named. Currently, ASRC teaches about forty courses, including five African languages.

In the 1980s, Cornell created the American Indian Program, as well as Asian American and Hispanic American Studies. In 1991, Akwe:kon (“all of us” in Mohawk) opened as the first university residence in the U.S. purposely built to celebrate Native American heritage.

On December 19, 2011, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the selection of Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology as the winners of a challenge to institutions from around the world to propose a new or expanded applied sciences and engineering campus in New York City. Cornell Tech, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, features collaboration with companies, organizations, and individuals through a studio culture, project-based learning, an integrated curriculum sharing MEng and MBA programs, and disciplinary depth in subjects crucial to advancing the digital economy: Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Information Science, Operations Research, and Business. Rising on Roosevelt Island in New York City, Cornell’s newest graduate campus currently provides a one-year Masters of Engineering degree in Computer Science.

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