Cornell

A History, 1940–2015

Glenn C. Altschuler, Isaac Kramnick

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780801471889
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

In their history of Cornell since 1940, Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick examine the institution in the context of the emergence of the modern research university. The book examines Cornell during the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, antiapartheid protests, the ups and downs of varsity athletics, the women's movement, the opening of relations with China, and the creation of Cornell NYC Tech. It relates profound, fascinating, and little-known incidents involving the faculty, administration, and student life, connecting them to the "Cornell idea" of freedom and responsibility. The authors had access to all existing papers of the presidents of Cornell, which deeply informs their respectful but unvarnished portrait of the university. Institutions, like individuals, develop narratives about themselves. Cornell constructed its sense of self, of how it was special and different, on the eve of World War II, when America defended democracy from fascist dictatorship. Cornell's fifth president, Edmund Ezra Day, and Carl Becker, its preeminent historian, discerned what they called a Cornell "soul," a Cornell "character," a Cornell "personality," a Cornell "tradition"—and they called it "freedom." "The Cornell idea" was tested and contested in Cornell's second seventy-five years. Cornellians used the ideals of freedom and responsibility as weapons for change—and justifications for retaining the status quo; to protect academic freedom—and to rein in radical professors; to end in loco parentis and parietal rules, to preempt panty raids, pornography, and pot parties, and to reintroduce regulations to protect and promote the physical and emotional well-being of students; to add nanofabrication, entrepreneurship, and genomics to the curriculum—and to require language courses, freshmen writing, and physical education. In the name of freedom (and responsibility), black students occupied Willard Straight Hall, the anti–Vietnam War SDS took over the Engineering Library, proponents of divestment from South Africa built campus shantytowns, and Latinos seized Day Hall. In the name of responsibility (and freedom), the university reclaimed them. The history of Cornell since World War II, Altschuler and Kramnick believe, is in large part a set of variations on the narrative of freedom and its partner, responsibility, the obligation to others and to one's self to do what is right and useful, with a principled commitment to the Cornell community—and to the world outside the Eddy Street gate.

PART I 1945–1963

1

Building a Research University

The news of Japan’s surrender August 14, 1945, burst from loudspeakers and swept over Cornell students assembled in front of Willard Straight Hall, who answered the announcement, which effectively signaled the end of World War II, with vigorous chants: “We want liberty!”¹ The university had itself made an extraordinary contribution to the war effort: 4,500 of its undergraduates had left campus for the armed services; 3,758 army and 13,577 navy personnel, and 30,144 workers in twenty-three New York State industrial centers, received training in various Cornell programs, and the university was remunerated $10.6 million for training and research from the United States government. A substantial number of professors did war-related research on campus even as scores of others left Ithaca to do war work in this country and around the world. In important and intangible ways, Cornell would be forever reshaped and redefined by World War II.

At the end of the war, Cornell confronted a changed world with profound implications for its physical campus, its culture, academic and student affairs, and the university’s engagement with American political, economic, and social life. In the 1930s, research had played a relatively minor role at Cornell and other American universities. Publication was often not a requirement for tenure. Faculty members who did conduct research, including those in the sciences, relied almost entirely on financial support from corporations and foundations. At the end of the decade, the federal government allocated less than $100 million to all universities for research and development, most of it directed at agriculture and public health. During World War II, however, Washington enlisted academics to work on radar, atomic bombs, and other weapons, and after the war, the Cold War generated substantial increases in federal funding, distributed by the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, often for research related to “national security.” Committed, as well, to eradicating diseases, the federal government established the National Institutes of Health in 1947. In 1954, the NIH disbursed $74 million for research; by 2010, its budget had risen to more than $30 billion. By the twenty-first century, through these agencies and others, the federal government supplied almost 60 percent of the support for research at universities.

Cornell would become a premier “research university,” an institution that privileged research over teaching, research “sponsored” principally by the state and federal governments, foundations, and private corporations. This transformation, which had implications for all academic disciplines, would occur under the leadership of two presidents, Edmund Ezra Day and Deane Waldo Malott.

In an era when presidents still administered the internal affairs of the university and occasionally claimed the mantle of national spokesman for intellectual and cultural life, the new Cornell was being shaped by two leaders whose characters mirrored in many ways those of Cornell’s legendary founders, Andrew Dickson White and Ezra Cornell, the one the scholar, the other the businessman. When Day became Cornell’s fifth president in 1937, he had been an academic for over three decades. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate from Dartmouth in 1905, he received a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1909. After teaching economics, first at Dartmouth, then Harvard, where he became chair of the department, Day moved in 1923 to the University of Michigan to become dean of the business school and subsequently dean of the university. He left Michigan for the Rockefeller Foundation, where until 1936 he directed its activities in the social sciences, while also serving as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The author of four books, and holder of fifteen honorary degrees, Day brought to Cornell a deep commitment to linking academic excellence to public service, the sense of responsibility that Carl Becker paired with rights and freedom. Most of the new programs and colleges established at Cornell during his years, Nutrition, Industrial and Labor Relations, Business and Public Administration, even Nuclear Studies, were principally schools of public service. During his tenure, Day pressed the need for heightened social consciousness throughout the university, as he had in his president’s inaugural address in 1937: “The time has passed when it can be assumed that social well-being will flow automatically from self-interested individual enterprise. If democratic institutions are to be preserved and individual liberty remain our proud possession, the citizen must recognize his obligation to make his life add to the commonweal.”²

So, too, after the war, Day called on Cornell to demonstrate “the ways of democracy in a combination of individual and collective freedom and responsibility; it stands for strengthening the forces of good will among men, makes a constant effort to establish and maintain common justice among men.”³

Day was a Socratic gadfly, who, according to his friend Morris Bishop ′13, MA ′14, PhD ′26, “liked to shock, unsettle and disturb. He disliked complacency and satisfaction with routine.”⁴ Day could be sharp, abrupt, and even tactless with those he considered fuzzy thinkers. He enjoyed confronting faculty with provocative questions. Although he made it a priority to restore the humanities to its “proper importance” after the war, he still challenged an English professor with, “What are you trying to do? What are the educational outcomes of studying literature?”⁵ He delighted in moving faculty to think about the purposes and aims of their calling.

Edmund Ezra Day, president of Cornell from 1937 to 1949. (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library)

Toward the end of his presidency, Day articulated what he took to be the unique and distinguishing characteristics of Cornell. There was Cornell’s extraordinary physical setting, its diverse student body, “a cross section of American life,” and its unusual combination of public and private support. Finally, there was its most significant attribute, “the spirit of educational adventure, which at its founding was the first revolt from the accustomed ways of higher education in America and whose innovations have swept the field and become traditional.”⁶

Many members of the faculty respected Day’s seriousness and fairness, his zeal for social betterment, and his devotion to Cornell. They were impressed when he turned down a request in 1946 from the State and War Departments to head the program of reeducation in postwar Germany, a position subsequently accepted by Harvard’s president, James Bryant Conant. Robert Cushman, a professor of government, remembered at Day’s retirement the president’s courage in the face of claims that Cornell leaned too far left. “With tact and good temper, but with force and tenacity, he defended the principle of freedom of thought and freedom of speech on the campus and elsewhere,” Cushman wrote.⁷ Day’s provost, the historian Cornelis de Kiewiet, wrote that Day “is looked upon as one of the half dozen foremost college presidents in the United States, whose influence upon national educational statesmanship has been profound.”⁸

Suffering from heart troubles, Day retired at the end of June 1949. The board of trustees appointed him to be the university’s first-ever chancellor, with responsibilities for fund-raising, relations with New York State, and activities of the medical school. Provost de Kiewiet was appointed acting president, while a search for a new president was mounted. Eight and a half months later, Day died at the age of sixty-eight.

A historian, born in the Netherlands and educated in South Africa, who had served as dean of Arts and Sciences before becoming provost, de Kiewiet expected the board of trustees to offer him the presidency. In fact, members of the board had another candidate in mind—their chairman, Arthur Dean. Raised in Ithaca (his father, William C. Dean, was Cornell’s superintendent of steam heating and water service from 1894 to 1910), Dean ′19, JD ′23, was a senior partner in the prestigious law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, had been a trustee since 1935, and was one of the few non-industrialists on the board.

In early January 1950, Dean agreed to have his name put forward for final approval, with the understanding that he would assume the presidency in 1951, allowing him ample time to finish an antitrust suit in which he was chief counsel for the United States government. Before he could inform his partners and clients, however, the news of his choice was leaked to the Ithaca Journal, and the next day, the headline “Arthur Dean Slated to Head Cornell” appeared in the New York Times. Under intense pressure from clients as well as partners, Dean withdrew his name, citing “obligations and commitments which cannot be put asunder.”⁹

Once again de Kiewiet assumed the trustees would turn to him, but it was not to be. He was passed over again, perhaps in part because of an arrogant manner and penny-pinching memos complaining of faculty wasting heat and light or ordering too many mimeograph machines. When he learned that the new president was to be Deane Malott, the chancellor of the University of Kansas, de Kiewiet abruptly resigned as acting president in December 1950 to become the president of the University of Rochester. For six months preceding Malott’s arrival, Theodore P. Wright, the vice president for research, served as acting president.

The Cornell Sun celebrated the selection of a president who was “not a scholar…but a CEO of a vast educational institution…a businessman.”¹⁰ Malott was from Abilene, Kansas, where his banker father, known as the “dean of Kansas bankers,” was a friend of the Eisenhowers. He had served in World War I as a navy seaman, majored in economics at the University of Kansas, and then earned an MBA at Harvard in 1923. After six years as a faculty member and administrator at the Harvard Business School, he became a vice president of the Hawaiian (later Dole) Pineapple Company. An expert on agricultural economics, he returned briefly to the Harvard Business School before becoming chancellor of his alma mater, the University of Kansas, in 1939. His business connections, forged at Harvard and enhanced by memberships on numerous corporate boards, brought him to the attention of Cornell industrialists on the board of trustees: John Collyer ′17 of B. F. Goodrich, Walter Teagle ′99 of Standard Oil, Myron Taylor, JD ′94, of U.S. Steel, Spencer Olin ′21 and John Olin ′13 of Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation, Nicholas Noyes ′06 of Eli Lilly, Walter Carpenter ′10 of DuPont, and Victor Emmanuel ′19, owner of Avco, a manufacturer of agricultural tools and machines.

Deane Waldo Malott, president of Cornell from 1951 to 1963. (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of the Cornell University Library)

Malott had been on campus only three months when he became the center of an academic firestorm. Under the heading “Funny Coincidence Dept.,” the New Yorker magazine published side by side three paragraphs of President Malott’s inaugural speech of September 19, 1951, with the almost identical three paragraphs from an article written by the president of Sarah Lawrence College, Harold Taylor, in the Harvard Educational Review in the spring of 1949. After initially declining to respond to inquiries, Malott told the Sun on November 30 that the quotes, an application of a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson to issues then dividing traditionalists and innovators on college campuses, had come from “random notes in his speech file, having appeared in some educational handout or filler paragraphs in a weekly paper which was printed with no reference to source or authority. He had never seen Dr. Taylor’s speech, so he had no way of crediting Dr. Taylor with the authorship of these particular thoughts, which he would, of course, have gladly done, if he had known the source.”¹¹

Even though, according to the alumni office, “talk concerning the ‘New Yorker incident’ has been negligible,” perhaps because “the story broke just prior to the Cornell-Michigan football game,” Malott offered his resignation to the board of trustees.¹² It was refused. Malott would guide Cornell for twelve years, retiring in 1963, ten days short of his sixty-fifth birthday. He was one of Cornell’s greatest builders. Under his stewardship, Cornell doubled the university budget, trebled the volume of research, and increased the physical plant by more than two-thirds. The university expanded to the east with the new College of Veterinary Medicine buildings, south with the new engineering quad, and north with the purchase of land from the Ithaca Country Club, to be used for dormitories. Malott was delighted that Cornell became a major research university, driven by “big science,” but also, presciently, worried that faculty priorities were changing. A year before he retired he reported to the board of trustees that “the professor now has developed a loyalty to his profession through membership in national professorial societies. Likewise in the natural and applied sciences, the faculty member has developed a sort of loyalty to physical facilities in that he has developed a tendency to join that institution having the finest equipment with which to work.”¹³

Two principal issues dominated Malott’s presidency: navigating Cold War passions on campus, which he did well, and responding to the new undergraduate culture, with students’ demands for greater control over their private lives, which he did less well. Malott had a contentious relationship with the faculty, into whose domains he often intruded himself, presiding, for example, at faculty meetings in every college and interviewing nearly every faculty member being considered for tenure. His determination to reject Day’s more decentralized management style brought him into conflict with powerful deans. And for most of his presidency, Malott was seriously at odds with Cornell students, whom he felt “evidenced more freedom than responsibility.”¹⁴

Malott was a handsome ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Authors’ Note
• Part I 1945–1963
• Part II 1963–1977
• Part III 1977–1995
• Part IV 1995–2015
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index