Universities: Taming Cayuga’s Waters

The happy hybrid of U.S. higher education is Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.—an Ivy League school with a Big Ten flavor. Part of it is private and impeccably elite; part of it is public and happily egalitarian. In riding such disparate horses, President Deane W. Malott, 64, has spent eleven years “trying to reduce chaos to disorder.” Now he is retiring in favor of James A. Perkins, vice president of the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation of New York. At 51, Perkins took the job partly because “I was ready for a large, tough proposition.” He got it. Says Cornell’s noted Political Scientist Clinton Rossiter: “This is the most unmanageable, undirectable university in the country.”

Kick the Wind. Cornell owes its uniqueness to an unlikely alliance during the civil war between two New York state legislators: Ezra Cornell, the self-taught Quaker millionaire who organized Western Union, and Andrew D. White, an urbane Yaleman and sometime history professor. White dreamed of giving New York one great land-grant college of such broad learning that it would teach everything from art to agriculture. The idea shocked conservative Easterners, who thought of college as mainly for God and Greek. But Cornell rammed it through the legislature, chipping in $500,000 and his own 300-acre farm in Ithaca as a campus.

When the university opened in 1868, with Scholar White as president, Businessman Cornell gave it a stunning lesson in fund raising. Spending some $525,000 for the privilege, he took charge of the bulk of the school’s federal scrip for 990,000 acres of public land. He swapped the scrip for choice Wisconsin timberland, which eventually soared in value. When sold off, it netted the university almost $6,000,000. White meantime scoured Europe for top scholars, set high standards, and took such a dim view of football that he once vetoed a game in Cleveland with the edict: “I refuse to let 40 of our boys travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.”

On its hilltop campus far above Cayuga’s waters—longest of New York’s Finger Lakes—daringly coed (since 1872) Cornell soon climbed to first-class status. Down the hill marched illustrious alumni, from F.D.R.’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. to Lawyer Arthur Dean, who now chairs the trustees. Other notables: Critic George Jean Nathan, Physicist Isidor Rabi, Authors Pearl Buck and E. B. White.

Scholars and Nymphets. Today Cornell is the Ivy League’s most complex campus. Endowment is up to $150 million; next year’s budget is $110 million, more than half from the state and federal governments. With 15 academic units, from a top-drawer liberal arts college to an open-door cow college, Cornell can teach its 11,823 students (one-third girls) anything from archaeology to pomology to sculpture to meat cutting.

In Buffalo, it runs a $15 million-a-year aeronautical research lab. In Manhattan, it boasts one of the top medical colleges in the country. From India to Peru, it counts 1,500 aid and research projects, including the world’s largest radar (for ionosphere study), abuilding in Puerto Rico. Scholarly names dot the faculty of 1,650—Physicist Hans Bethe, Astronomer Thomas Gold, Critic Arthur Mizener, Novelist Vladimir Nabokov taught Russian literature in Ithaca while writing Lolita.

The heart of Cornell is eight undergraduate colleges—four private, four public. Biggest and best of the private schools (tuition: $1,700) is arts and sciences, with 2,892 students, followed by engineering, architecture and hotel administration—an unmatched if untaxing innkeepers’ academy founded with Statler hotel money. The state-supported schools (resident tuition: up to $575) are among the best of their kind. Agriculture, for example, is the nation’s biggest, turns out researchers rather than farmers. Equally reputable: industrial and labor relations, home economics and the veterinary college.

Artsies & Aggies. With such varied aims and standards, Cornell has a natural pecking order. On top is the arts college, which takes in students from the university’s other schools for a year or so of broadening. In turn, “artsies” regard “aggies” as intellectual Lumpen, and nearly everyone sneers at hotel students. Nonetheless, artsies use and respect courses in all the other schools. Agriculture’s biology, for example, is usually more stimulating than its arts equivalent. Cornell’s best psychology course is child development in the College of Home Economics. And if football is any guide, Cornell puts studies first: Though it could easily import ringers via the state schools, the Big Red has not topped the Ivy League since 1954. In ten seasons, it has won only 38 games against 50 losses.

“The essence of Cornell is freedom,” gloats one professor. “You’re king of your classroom.” Student life is equally free; attendance is not taken after freshman year and upper-class drinking in rooms is unrestricted. The student guidebook even recommends “sour hour” at a local tavern noted for TGIF parties (“Thank goodness it’s Friday”). As in White’s “godless” day, Cornell still has no religion department. As campus speakers, it welcomes not only

Barry Goldwater but also Communist Gus Hall. The Cornell Daily Sun is free to complain about anything and usually does. Last summer it all but made a Dreyfus case out of a graduate student who got bounced for living with a professor’s niece. His defense was the university’s lack of specific regulations—how could he know he was sinning?

Shoot the President. All this freedom has consequences, some not good. Diverse and isolated, Cornellians tend to live in their own little ruts. They flock to 14 sororities and 53 fraternities, but the mix is mostly emulsion. Bright ones complain of faculty inattention. In fact, most arts students go through without seminars, independent study or senior theses.

What troubles Cornell is lack of any central force. It is run by faculty committees so fiercely independent that major change is difficult. By long tradition, the president’s powers are limited. He cannot hire or fire professors, or even expel students. In 1958, student rioters pelted the president with eggs, chanting “We want Malott shot!” He wanted the ringleader to go degreeless, but a faculty committee turned him down. When he tried to start a Dartmouth-style “great issues” course, he was also turned down, more or less because it was his idea.

Because he was once vice president of the Hawaiian Pineapple Co. (and later chancellor of the University of Kansas), Malott is sneeringly called “the pineapple president.” He has in fact raised faculty pay 87%, launched $105 million in new construction. But Cornell still needs strong educational leadership. Said James A. Perkins after his selection: “That’s why I’m here.”

Ripe for Strength. A Philadelphia-born Quaker, Perkins has a nonpacifist passion for U.S. military and foreign policy. He taught political science at Princeton, was No. 2 man at its school of public and international affairs. In World War II, he worked for the Foreign Economic Administration, later became vice president of his alma mater, Swarthmore, before joining Carnegie in 1950. Perkins helped to write the secret “Gaither Report” on U.S. preparedness, is a top-echelon adviser to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Two months ago, President Kennedy endorsed the “Perkins Report” on a proposed National Academy of Foreign Affairs, and the Senate will soon hold hearings on it.

Perkins has long steered Carnegie money into such ventures as a Harvard-based school for new college presidents, which he now plans to attend himself. He is quite aware of Cornell’s militant faculty. (“Who is he?” was a typical first comment. Another: “I feel sorry for him.”) But he suspects that “the community is ripe for a discussion leader.” What may strengthen his hand is a soon-due upsurge of students in Cornell’s public colleges. When they invade the private arts college, how will it maintain standards? “For the first time,” says Critic Arthur Mizener, “the Cornell situation is such that there can be a strong president.”