Cornell's International Mission
Photo by Alex Shapero, Spain
As Cornell approaches its 150th anniversary, it seeks to become a truly international university, an intellectual community rooted in New York State while fully engaged with the larger world. In pursuing this vision, Cornell continues to pursue a goal traceable to its founder, Ezra Cornell, to create “an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
Cornell University has been called “the first American university” because at its founding in 1865 it responded to the challenges of the industrial revolution by opening its doors to all, and by combining traditional emphasis on the classic languages and humanistic disciplines with equal emphasis on theoretical and applied science. Today Cornell seeks to respond with equal vigor to the challenges of globalization by bringing the world to Cornell and Cornell to the world.
Five students from overseas joined another 407 students in Cornell’s first entering class. Today, more than 3000 students enroll from more than 120 countries. Over the years, many students from abroad have returned home to provide extraordinary leadership. To take just one example, after graduating from Cornell in 1914, Hu Shih returned to China to become one of that country’s greatest intellectuals, helping to transform his society through advocacy of a new, vernacular language as that country’s official written language.
Just as Cornell transforms the undergraduate and graduate students who come here from abroad, they in turn transform Cornell, exposing all Cornell students and faculty members to other perspectives and ideas.
Cornell is committed to providing more and more of its students the educational, social, and cultural benefits of living and studying abroad. Every year, more than 500 students study abroad in more than 45 different countries. Innovative new courses promote interdisciplinary exchange among faculty, staff, and students. Agriculture in Developing Nations II, for example, engages undergraduates in extensive field research in places such as India and Mexico. Even more dramatic are new interdisciplinary majors. Cornell’s unique China-Asia Pacific Studies Program, for example, offers students a combination of intensive language instruction, study of China’s history, politics, society, and foreign relations, and internships in policy positions in both Washington, D.C. and Beijing.
To bring Cornell to the world, the university is launching new teaching initiatives and forming new research partnerships in all corners of the globe. In 2004, Cornell’s Weill Medical College established the first American medical school abroad, in Doha, Qatar. The university’s Institute for the Study of the Continents leads collaborative studies of geodynamics with governments and universities in nine countries around the globe. And scientists in the life sciences are sharing the tools of molecular biology and genomics with colleagues around the world, transforming agriculture the way the International Rice Research Institute helped trigger the Green Revolution in the 1960s.
In every area of knowledge, from city planning to hotel administration and from engineering to law, international collaborations are transforming Cornell while they help to reshape and reform the world.
The future demands that Cornell educate its students as members of a global community, that faculty members participate fully in the ongoing global intellectual dialogue, and that the university fulfill an outreach mission that includes but is not limited to New York State. True to its tradition, Cornell will continue to innovate so that others may follow. In the nineteenth century, Cornell was established as the model for a new kind of university. As Cornell approaches its sesquicentennial, it will continue to renew that model, showing the way for higher education to meet the challenges of a changing world.