Cornell aspires to be the exemplary comprehensive research university for the 21st century on the basis of our distinctive status as a private university with a formal public mission. Faculty, staff, and students will thrive at Cornell because of its unparalleled combination of quality and breadth; its high standards; its open, collaborative, and innovative culture; the opportunities provided by beautiful, vibrant rural and urban campuses; and programs that extend throughout the state of New York and across the globe.
Discovery and Action: Cornell's Commitment to Diversity
Ever since Ezra Cornell and A.D. White joined forces to "found a university where any person can find instruction in any study," Cornell has been at the forefront of higher education in embracing students, faculty, and staff of both genders and of all backgrounds and ethnicities.
Most students of color ever enter Cornell's freshman class
The Class of 2013 is the most racially and ethnically diverse class since Cornell began tracking such statistics.
Cornell is committed to extending its legacy of recruiting a heterogeneous faculty, student body and staff; fostering a climate that doesn't just tolerate differences but treasures them; and providing rich opportunities for learning from those differences. To that end, each of Cornell's constituent assemblies endorsed the Statement on Diversity and Inclusiveness, "Open Doors, Open Hearts, and Open Minds." The current site is designed to let you know what we are doing, how we are doing and how you can get involved.
Our Diversity Goals
1. to ensure that the composition of our community and leadership reflects the composition of the broader society.
to ensure faculty, staff, students and administration have access to the knowledge and conceptual frameworks required to think critically about human diversity.
2. to ensure that our community embraces and supports individuals from all racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, and nationality groups in their chosen pursuits.
to ensure that individuals from all backgrounds achieve to their full potential.
3. to ensure that our community embraces and supports individuals from all racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, and nationality groups in their chosen pursuits.
4. to ensure that individuals from all backgrounds achieve to their full potential.
Marks of Distinction
Forty Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Cornell as faculty members or students. The 2006–07 Cornell faculty included 3 Nobel laureates, a Crafoord Prize winner, 2 Turing Award winners, a Fields Medal winner, 2 Legion of Honor recipients, a World Food Prize winner, an Andrei Sakharov Prize winner, 3 National Medal of Science winners, 2 Wolf Prize winners, 5 MacArthur award winners, 4 Pulitzer Prize winners, 2 Eminent Ecologist Award recipients, a Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion recipient, a Presidential Early Career Award winner, 26 National Science Foundation CAREER grant holders, a recipient of the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research, a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award in Literature, a recipient of the American Mathematical Society's Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement, a recipient of the Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics, a recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Earth and Environmental Science, 2 Packard Foundation grant holders, a Beckman Foundation Young Investigator grant holder, and a NYSTAR (New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research) early career award winner.
Cornell awarded the nation's first university degree in veterinary medicine and first doctorates in electrical engineering and industrial engineering. It awarded the world's first degree in journalism (and taught the first university course in that subject), and established the first four-year schools of hotel administration and industrial and labor relations.
Cornell endowed the nation's first professorships in American history, musicology, and American literature. It was the first U.S. university to offer a major in American studies.
Cornell is the only Ivy League/Ancient Eight university that also is its state's federal land-grant institution; whose official motto is in English ("I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study"—Ezra Cornell); and whose board of trustees includes student, faculty, and staff voting members. It was the first among all U.S. colleges and universities to allow undergraduates to borrow books from its libraries.
Cornell was the first university to teach modern Far Eastern languages. Cornell's Full-Year Asian Language Concentration (FALCON) program provides unusually comprehensive and intensive one-year study of Chinese or Japanese.
Cornell University Press was the first university publishing enterprise in the United States and is one of the country's largest university presses.
The New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center is a pioneer in biomedical technology. Its alliance with Columbia University's medical center and Houston's Methodist Hospital is one of the most extensive and effective health-care-provider networks in the nation, whose facilities include the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility, AIDS Care Program, Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine, Greenberg Division of Cardiology, Institute of Genetic Medicine, Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health, Pain Management Center, and Center for Vascular Biology.
Cornell's 2005–06 research expenditures totaled $605.3 million ($419.1 million of this funding was from federal sources; $186.2 million was nonfederal).
Cornell ranked first in National Science Foundation funding for programs in academic science and engineering in 2003–04 (the most recent data available).