“…land-grant mission…writ large.”

President Frank H. T. Rhodes asserted: “Cornell has not been content for the world to come to campus; it has also reached out to the world. Its land-grant mission has been writ large.” Most recently, President David Skorton defined Cornell’s international engagement as “utilizing education, research, and academic partnerships to effect positive change in the world.”

From its very beginnings, Cornell has always looked both inward and outward. On his 1868 trip to Europe, A.D. White sought out European professors for the new university, hiring James Law, a young veterinary professor from Edinburgh, and Goldwin Smith, an Oxford professor of history. Over the years, many other distinguished scholars from around the world have joined the Cornell faculty. International students also came from the beginning. Cornell’s presidents Andrew Dickson White and Jacob Gould Schurman were active diplomats. During and after his years as president, White served as United States Minister to Berlin, as Minister to Russia, and as Ambassador to Germany, among other posts. While still president, Schurman chaired the First Philippine Commission. He served as Minister to Greece and Montenegro, and after retiring from Cornell, to China and Germany.

While there were some missionary programs in the nineteenth century, in 1922, a Cornell-in-China Club formed “to establish and foster a Cornell educational enterprise in China.” Cornell faculty and graduates joined the “Plant Improvement Project” at the University of Nanking, Cornell’s first major international effort.

More international programs began in the wake of the Marshall Plan (1947), in an effort to export American values and the American way of life. Cornell anthropologists worked in Peru, Thailand, and India as part of an experiment in applied anthropology. Cornell led an assistance project to rebuild the University of the Philippines. Cornell faculty and staff provided expertise to help reorganize the University of Liberia, and Cornell Law faculty assisted in the codification of Liberian laws. Today, Cornell has campuses outside Ithaca, and students and faculty participate in a broad array of programs in more than forty countries each year.

Andrew D. White’s Trip to Egypt and Willard Fiske’s Project of a New “Egyptian Alphabet for the Egyptian People” (1889-1916)

In 1889, former Cornell President A.D. White and former Cornell Librarian Willard Fiske (here photographed in Cairo) stayed in Egypt for three months. They were interested in all aspects of this country, from the ancient pyramids to the pre-modern University of Al-Azhar, founded in 970, to the most recent development, the Suez Canal. White, who had taught a history class on “Mohammedanism” at Cornell, even dreamed of a branch of Cornell in Cairo, to train local English teachers. As for Fiske, he worked tirelessly on a romanized version of dialectal Arabic; it was his opinion that “the general adoption of this alphabet will do much to hasten the extension of universal education in Egypt.” In 1893, he issued a vocabulary of some seven thousand words in the new transcription. On display is a card sent to him by an Egyptian student, using the Western alphabet. In 1916, his undistributed publications were posthumously collected by Cornell, and sent to more than fifty libraries worldwide.

The Work of Cornell Experts in China (1925-1931) and Japan (1951-1954)

From 1925 to 1931, Charles Myers and Harry Love, professors in the Department of Plant Breeding, supervised a large plant breeding program and conducted classes to train Chinese workers in crop improvement and genetics. The University of Nanking assumed financial responsibility for their traveling expenses to and from Ithaca, and for the maintenance of the “Cornell representatives,” who were granted sabbatical leaves without pay. The Rockefeller Foundation’s International Education Board paid their salaries. Love continued to work in China until the geopolitical situation made it impossible: a letter dated September 4, 1937 refers to the bombing of Nanking by the Japanese. After World War II, he was involved in new agricultural programs in Thailand and Japan.


Cornell in Rome

In 1882, Cornell participated in the founding of the American School of Classic Studies in Athens; in parallel, the American Academy in Rome also gave students opportunities to study abroad. Edward G. Lawson won the first-ever “Prix de Rome” in landscape architecture in 1915. During his tenure in Italy from 1915 to 1920, he photographed and documented the iconic gardens of the Italian Renaissance, which became the subject of his teaching at Cornell. Currently, the Cornell in Rome Program, created in the early 1980s with the goal that “the Eternal City becomes an extension of the classroom,” focuses on instruction in the disciplines of architecture design, history, and theory; visual arts; art history; urban studies; and Italian language, history, and culture.

Cornellians at the College of Agriculture of Los Baños, Philippines (1952-1972)

In 1952, the University of the Philippines signed a contract with Cornell University, and over the next twenty years, Cornell sent thirty-five professors of agriculture and home economics to Los Baños, Philippines to assist in research and rebuild rural facilities damaged during the Japanese occupation. Professor Marlin G. Cline and his wife Agnes kept a diary, published in 1995 in the hope that “the Philippine experience in which so many Cornellians participated become a more personal reality.” Beyond technical expertise regarding the suitability of soils for coffee or coconut or the best use of machines and fertilizers, the authors stress the importance of learning about a foreign culture and participating in social events, which “while not strictly part of the contract functions [are] important contributors to contract objectives.”


The Weill Cornell Medical College in Doha, Qatar

Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar was established in 2001 by Cornell University in partnership with the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development. Cornell became the first American university to open an American medical school outside the country. Weill Cornell in Qatar now has almost three hundred students from more than thirty countries.

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