April 30, 2008 - 12:00am
By Rob Fishman
“I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
Taken quite literally, the Cornell motto envisions a perfect synthesis between access and higher education: a university where students of any stripe, station or color might encounter a limitless field of knowledge.
Yet in its recent bastardization of the slogan, to the simple, “any person … any study,” the University has compromised the implicit, and far more profound, message of Cornell’s mission statement. As was the case in 1865, and as remains the situation today, such an educational utopia is all but impossible; the truest ambition of Ezra Cornell was not to achieve the unachievable, but to challenge Cornellians to continuously reinvent our soon-to-be alma mater.
