We urge you to look at the Cornell publication, Courses of Study. It is available in hard copy by calling the Academic Advising Center (607-255-5004). It is also available on the World Wide Web (http://cuinfo.cornell.edu/Academic/Courses/). Whether in newsprint or on-line, it has a less than inviting presentation. Nonetheless, Courses of Study is the most important single source of information about the college and Cornell. We take pains to explain what students need to know to navigate and negotiate the institution. Further, the descriptions of departments and interdisciplinary programs and the array of courses are rich and exciting, much altered during the last decades.
Working together and working independently, Cornell faculty members create undergraduate curricula. Two big advantages of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell are that all faculty members teach undergraduates and that virtually all courses are taught by faculty members. Curricula in the sciences tend to conform to national norms; science faculty jointly design their core courses and rotate teaching them. Curricula in the social sciences and humanities reflect both the "state" of the field and the interests of individual faculty members. Humanities and social science courses tend to be associated with individual instructors.
Cornell Arts and Sciences students design their own individual educations by selecting courses each semester. Beyond the minimal requirements for the degree, college faculty -- either individually or as a body -- prescribe nothing.
In fact, Cornell, as one of the very first genuine universities in the United States, has consistently eschewed defining any subject or set of courses as core, as somehow more important than other subjects. Laurence R. Veysey's The Emergence of the American University (University of Chicago Press, 1965) provides an enlightening and well-written account of structural and curricular developments in American higher education, including Cornell's place within them. Veysey also describes the changes and accretions of roles American colleges and universities have assumed. Cornell’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, occupies a special place in the history of American higher education: while still at the University of Michigan, A. D. White introduced a reform that was to become ubiquitous, that now standard unit of academic currency, the credit hour.