A Long International History
Photo by Abby Huber, Scotland
Cornell's first president, Andrew Dickson White, was a world traveler. A scholar, bibliophile, and diplomat to Germany, Russia, and the Hague, White attracted international students and professors to Cornell from the start: the first class included students from Nova Scotia, Brazil, England and Russia.
In the nineteenth century, Brazilians were so numerous at Cornell that they were able to support a Portuguese-language magazine, Aurora Brazileria. Soccer, only lately gaining a foothold in this country, was a common pastime in Ithaca a hundred years ago.
Chinese students also enrolled in great numbers. Sao-ke Alfred Sze, who graduated from Cornell in 1902, later became China's ambassador to the United States. And after the Boxer Rebellion, when President Theodore Roosevelt set aside Chinese reparation payments for the education of Chinese students in American colleges, Cornell was often their chosen destination. Hing Kwai Fung, the modernizer of Chinese agriculture, was a member of Cornell's Class of 1911. Hu Shih, renowned for his reform of the Chinese language, graduated in 1914. To this day, Cornell is one of the most readily identified American universities in many parts of Asia.
The university's first significant international project, the Cornell-Nanjing Crop Improvement Program, began in the 1920s, when three Cornell plant breeders led a team that developed new strains of rice, wheat, cotton, and other crops, increasing wheat yields alone by up to 50 percent. In the decades before World War II, Cornell professors trained a generation of Chinese plant scientists, including Shen Chung-han, considered the father of plant breeding in China. The Nanjing project became a model for technical cooperation and even spawned a popular literary masterpiece. Pearl S. Buck, M.A. '25, accompanied her husband, agricultural economist John Buck, to Nanjing, and out of her experience came The Good Earth.
Out of wartime demand for knowledge of foreign languages came Cornell's outstanding reputation in modern language study the foundation of many a career in international relations. Methods developed by Cornell linguists who worked with the Army Specialized Training Program in Ithaca during World War II spawned a revolution in the teaching of foreign language and culture.
Today, demand for Cornell's expertise has expanded beyond the university's traditional research spheres of agriculture, nutrition, engineering, and related areas, to contemporary subjects such as trade and productivity, centered in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations; tourism in the School of Hotel Administration; and housing and human development, in the College of Human Ecology.