Cornell University

Cornell University was founded in turbulent times. With the Civil War winding down, and less than two weeks after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the Governor of New York signed the school’s official charter in the state capital, Albany, where only the day before Lincoln’s funeral procession had passed through the city’s streets.

Two men were behind the drive to establish a first-class university in upstate New York: wealthy businessman Ezra Cornell, the founder of Western Union, who was originally from Ithaca (where the new school was to be located), and Andrew Dickson White, a prominent historian and educator, who hailed from nearby Syracuse. Later on, White would be best remembered as the author of A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), and from the beginning he envisioned Cornell as a rigorously secular institution with a special emphasis on the natural sciences.

This lack of an original religious orientation, as well as its geographical isolation from the American center of cultural gravity on the East Coast, make Cornell a bit of an odd-man-out among the eight schools that make up the Ivy League. However, the university’s right to a place among that elite grouping is more than justified by the intellectual firepower of its faculty. Moreover, despite its rural setting, Cornell’s sprawling campus and its total university population of over 23,000 (more than twice the size of the town of Ithaca itself) easily make it a rival of the other Ivy League schools in scale.

One of Cornell’s areas of particular strength is medicine. The Weill Cornell Medical School, located in Manhattan, is one of the most selective in the nation. Cornell also runs the Weill Cornell Medical College located in Doha, Qatar.

An astonishing 50 Nobel laureates are connected with Cornell, not to mention many other highly influential thinkers and authors. For example, among Nobel Prize– winners in physics, we many mention:

• Hans Bethe
• Richard Feynman
• Hannes Alfvén
• Kenneth Wilson
• Steven Weinberg
• Sheldon Glashow
• Pierre-Gilles de Gennes
• Kip Thorne

Cornell-connected chemistry Nobelists include:

• Peter Debye
• Richard Ernst
• Manfred Eigen
• Roald Hoffmann

In physiology or medicine, we may mention:

• George Beadle
• Fritz Lipmann
• Barbara McClintock
• Peter Medawar
• Harold Varmus
• Jack Szostak

Four Cornell-connected economists have won the Nobel Prize in their field:

• Amartya Sen
• Robert Engle
• Richard Thaler
• Robert Fogel

No fewer than four Nobel Prize laureates in literature have studied or taught at Cornell:

• American novelists, Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison
• Mexican poet, Octavio Paz
• Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka

However, perhaps the most distinguished of all Cornell-connected literary figures (and one of the Swedish Academy’s worst oversights) is the great Russian émigré novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, who taught here from 1948 until 1959, when the international succès de scandale of his novel Lolita (1955) permitted him to retire from teaching.

Among other distinguished Cornell-connected individuals (in addition to the above), we may mention:

• Physicists, Freeman Dyson & Huber Reeves
• Novelists, Kurt Vonnegut & David Foster Wallace
• Novelist, short-story writer, and essayist, Junot Díaz
• E.B. White, author of the beloved children’s book, Charlotte’s Web, and co-author of the ubiquitous writer’s manual, The Elements of Style
• Philosophers, John R. Perry & Thomas Nagel
• Psychoanalyst, Abraham Maslow
• Political scientist, Benedict Anderson
• Journalist, Raj Patel
• Television personality, Bill Nye
• Political author and columnist, Ann Coulter
• Actors, Christopher Reeve & Gillian Anderson
• Indian industrialist, Ratan Tata
• Former President of the Republic of China, Lee Teng-hui
• President of the Republic of China, Tsai Ing-wen
• US Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg