Op-Ed
I Would Found a Motto...
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Agree to Disagree
Agree to Disagree
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No doubt you learned scholars recall Thomas Jefferson’s celebrated paean to the male-to-male embrace: “We hold these… men … that they are endowed.” Or Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 car advertisement, “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers bought … a … [Jeep] Liberty.”
If you’re hip to these ellipses, you might have read Cornell’s Aug. 6 press release with approval: “Cornell University’s ‘Any person … any study’ named nation’s best college motto by magazine.” Read on, and you’ll note vice president for communications Tommy Bruce’s praise for our own truncated slogan, “The beauty of the motto is its inherent accuracy.”
Which motto is he talking about? The one Motto Magazine recognized — and the one that until recently adorned our seal — is, “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study,” yet it’s the Cornell propaganda machine’s new slogan that made headlines, and it’s that same watered-down version that now appears on our school’s website.
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Just as Jefferson wasn’t coming out of the closet and Honest Abe wasn’t selling SUVs, so neither was Ezra Cornell promising any person … any study. Inherent accuracy? Try intellectual dishonesty.
As it happens, this University has a history of fudging its official motto. According to A.D. White’s autobiography, Ezra Cornell “expressed the hope that in the proposed institution every student might find instruction in whatever study interested him,” and “hence came the legend surrounding his medallion portrait upon the university seal.”
As Cornell professor Morris Bishop explains in his 1962 history of Cornell, “White liked to improve, for publication, the utterances of his rude companions.” Thus materialized the school’s motto, which was not, as our website suggests, a direct quotation from the University’s namesake.
So what our rude companions in Day Hall have concocted — “‘Any person … any study.’ /Ezra Cornell, 1868” — is nothing more than a poorly abridged, wrongly attributed redaction of something that may never have been said at all.
Yet let’s forgive them all that, and assume that Uncle Ezra did indeed utter our motto verbatim; still, we should be very critical of the University’s new neutered version.
The original motto (that is, the one we were just awarded for) projected a utopian and conditional vision for the University. Consider the wording: “I would found an institution” — a hypothetical endorsement, not a pronouncement that Ezra Cornell had founded such an institution.
Quite to the contrary, Cornell has never championed the simplistic mantra of “any person … any study.”
Any person? As Prof. Carol Kammen, history, wrote in the Ithaca Journal recently, A.D. White’s “ideal school was aimed at scholars, by which he meant men of bookish learning.” To that end, throughout much of Cornell’s history, women and minorities were drastically underrepresented.
And even today, despite major strides in gender equality, our underrepresented minority percentages are among the lowest in the Ivy League. For the Class of 2011, our legacy percentage (14 percent) is higher than that of blacks and Hispanics combined (6 and 5 percent, respectively), suggesting that men of bookish learning are just as preferred under the “any person” system as they were in 1868.
So as the Press Relations Office mindlessly recites the “any person” ideal, take note of its praise for the Class of 2011 as being “a more selective group than ever,” having rejected 23,880 any persons this year.
And any study? As Kammen notes, “such an impractical place” as a university offering any study “would require a vast faculty and a very versatile one.” So long as we’re divided into colleges, departments and majors (unlike, say, Brown, where a friend of a friend majored in “Vampire Studies”), our studies will be constrained by our organization and resources.
The reworked motto may be a lot more manageable on University stationary, but it’s historically inaccurate, intellectually unscrupulous and flat-out false. It’s also not the one that we won the fancy award for.
So why fix it if it ain’t broke?
“They liked it,” Marketing Consultant Claudia Wheatley with Cornell’s Office of Publications and Marketing said of teenage focus groups that were employed by the University. “When we use it, it resonates.”
So might promising them around-the-year sunshine and a flat-planed campus, but tour guides still march prospective students around the Slope in North Face jackets and Ugg boots in the dead of Ithaca winter. Sometimes we’ve got to play the hand we’re dealt.
It should be the University’s unwavering commitment to one day make Cornell a place where any person really might come to find any study. Until that day, let our time-tested slogan serve as much as a reminder of the challenges that lie ahead as it is a celebration of what we’ve accomplished.
It’s easy for the Press Relations office to print brochures depicting “any person” happily engaged in “any study.” What’s more difficult — and essential to the University’s ongoing progress — is for President Skorton to renew the commitment that was made over 150 years ago, and dream of a University which might be truly inclusive, both of all persons and of all studies.
Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rfishman@cornellsun.com. Agree to Disagree appears Tuesdays this semester.
That would be "brought," not
That would be "brought," not "bought." Taking things out of context is not an unusual way to manipulate historical statements, but it isn't typical to simply drop letters. It's about branding, Fishman.
About your article, and about your writing in general, it comes down to a simple question: So what?
You don't provide an answer, and you aren't keeping us reading.
Don't take it so literally,
Don't take it so literally, and you'll see a motto that represents Cornell's general acceptance of any kind of person, as well as the huge course catalog.