Historical Facts

• Until the founding of Cornell Law School in late 1886, Cornell's faculty operated as one unit. Once the lawyers constituted themselves as an independent faculty, other faculty members took notice and soon created a number of separate departments, and colleges, similar to the situation today. The Academic Department was the largest of these units and later became known by its present name, the College of Arts and Sciences.
• The Academic Department (also known as the Department of Arts and Sciences) was the largest of those units, and in 1903 it was renamed the College of Arts and Sciences.
• In 1893, Cornell professors Edward L. Nichols, Ernest G Merrit, and Frederick Bedell created the Physical Review, the first American journal devoted to physics.
• Cornell endowed the nation's first university professorships in American history, musicaology, and American literature. It was the first U.S. university to teach a course in American history, and the first to offer a major in American studies.
• Jessie Redmon Fauset, the first African American woman to graduate from Cornell's college of Arts and Sciences (Phi Beta Kappa, in 1905) became a literary editor and monter, and a novelist, and played a significant role in the Harlem Renaissance.
• Cornell was the first American university to teach modern Far Eastern languages. Our unique Full-Year Asian Language Concentration (FALCON) provides intensive one-year study of Chinese, Indonesian, or Japanese.
• At present, Cornell is the only university in the nation to have all three of its Asian studies programs (East Asia, South Asia, and South-east Asia) designated as national resource centers by the U.S. Department of Education. This designation recognizes the programs' breadth and excellence in areas deemed critical to American national interests.
• Our former Department of Chemistry is now the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. This name change reflects the increasing importance of the interface between chemistry and biology.
• Cornell's Andrew D. White Professors-at-Large program brings to the campus (multiple times during each professor's six-year term) individuals who have "achieved high international distinction in the various areas of science and scholarship as well as in the learned professions, public affairs, literature, and the creative arts." Recent participants include Toni Morrison (A.M. '55), John Cleese, Jane Goodall, and Oliver Sacks.
• Teatrotaller, Cornell's Spanish-language theatre company formed by a group of students in 1993, seeks to preserve and promote Spanish, Latin American, and Latino cultures, and to bring people of different ethnicities and cultures together, through the production of high-quality and accessible theatre.
• The recent complete renovation and expansion of the Department of Music's Lincoln Hall has provided superb new teaching, rehearsal, performance, library, and collection and storage facilities to the entire Cornell Community.

Women at Cornell

• According to Morris Bishop (A History of Cornell, Cornell University Press, 1962), women's rights advocate Susan B. Anthony declared that the day Cornell University admitted women on the same basis as men "would be celebrated by posterity as sacredly as the Fourth of July or the birth of Christ." Bishop goes on to note that, some three years following Anthony's challenge, Cornell's trustees decided to do just that -- admit women on the same basis as men. The date was February 13, 1872. While celebration of the milestone event was considerably less grand than Anthony thought appropriate, the fact remains: Cornell was among the first coeducational institutions in the country.