Cornell announced the creation of the Ashley School of Global Development and the Environment within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences on Dec. 16 after a $55 million donation from Stephen B. Ashley ’62, MBA ’64. The school plans to combine the department of global development and the department of natural resources.
According to its website, the Ashley School will comprise 600 undergraduate students, 170 graduate students and 107 faculty members. The school aims to provide students with more interdisciplinary academic opportunities and offer “real-world engagement with communities” in order to “improve lives and livelihoods and promote environmental stewardship.”
The Ashley School will support two undergraduate degrees — global development and natural resources — five undergraduate minors, four master’s degree programs and two Ph.D. programs.
CALS plans to recruit at least 10 faculty members to the new school, and three of these faculty members are expected to focus on environmental economics. According to the Cornell Chronicle, these economists will have joint appointments in both CALS and the Cornell S.C. Johnson College of Business, through the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
The Sun spoke to students and CALS administration to better understand what the Ashley School will look like.
“Early Days”: The Vision of the School and Finding a Director
Prof. John Sipple, director of undergraduate studies in global development, spoke to The Sun about these changes. Sipple said that while there is “no clear roadmap for change” right now, the Ashley School will “reinforce the global nature” of the major.
“The Ashley School came out of an idea that if we study the environment… and the economics of the world…through a much more multidisciplinary lens, we’ll learn more, and hence we can be more useful to the local community or a community across the world,” Sipple said.
By combining natural resources and global development, Sipple explained that this allows for the school to more closely explore the complicated nature of the world, “creating an environment in which social scientists and natural scientists can come together and study… everything from climate change to sustainable farming.”
Benjamin Houlton, the Ronald P. Lynch dean of CALS, explained in a statment to The Sun that the new school does not mean a new curriculum.
Faculty working groups are considering options for the school's administrative design, aiming to adopt the best model in “pedagogy, research, and real-world applications,” Houlton wrote.
Regarding current students and faculty, Houlton explained that both departments “will continue to function administratively and pedagogically as currently designed,” indicating that no immediate structural changes are expected. Additionally, CALS leadership told the Chronicle that there were not any new “programs, majors, or minors” currently being created.
An essential feature of the school will be the way in which it operates with “partners from the private sector, governments, NGOs, foundations, and community groups in New York state and internationally,” Houlton wrote.
Prof. Richard Stedman M.S. ’93, former chair of the department of natural resources and the environment, was appointed as interim director for the Ashley School, announced along with the launching of the new school.
“Our top priority is searching for the inaugural director of the Ashley School,” Houlton wrote, noting that the search is currently underway and interviews will be occurring over the next two months.
Once appointed, the inaugural director will be “charged with faculty recruitment in critical areas” and tasked with developing a “strategic plan to chart a bold future of impact from New York to the world and back again,” according to Houlton.
“Discussions around these topics are still ongoing and information is still evolving in real time,” Stedman wrote in an email statement to The Sun. “We do have processes moving forward about structure, funding, governance, etc., but these are still very ‘early days’ in those processes.”
Students’ Hopes and Reactions
“When I first heard about the Ashley School, I thought it was amazing, but also a little surprising,” said Hanna Lighthall ’27, who is majoring in global development.
“The major itself was formed not that long ago. It was formed as a kind of a combination of other majors, and now it’s part of this larger presence in CALS,” Lighthall said.
The global development major was first introduced to students in Fall 2022, formed by merging the pre-existing international agriculture and rural development major with the development sociology major.
The global development major currently requires a total of eight core classes, two engaged learning requirements, one internship and various electives within a chosen concentration.
Lighthall was able to complete all her required classes in two years and now is able to conduct research and take “niche classes.” She said that she hopes the Ashley School will bring more structure to the major, especially after a student finishes their requirements.
Lighthall added that she hopes that the $55 million donation will be used to “hire more professors, specifically in specialized research like global food security or gender issues.”
Benjamin Quint ’27, who studies global development, also hopes for student support outside of coursework. He explained that hiring more specialized faculty with industry experience would be “able to bring students into that realm and get [on] that pathway to writing [things like] global consensus reports,” improving student opportunities and facilitating connections on the international level.
As New York State’s and the Ivy League’s only land-grant university, meaning it is designated by state legislature to receive federal funding, Cornell is under the mission to “improve lives for not only citizens of New York, but also the nation and people around the globe,” according to the CALS land-grant webpage.
In order to uphold the land-grant mission, the Ashley School hopes to “uniquely integrate world-class research and education” along with “community engagement in service of the public good,” according to their website.
With the global development major “only starting four years ago,” Quint expressed that having its own school now “really represents the urgency of the work that [global development] majors are doing, and where it could go in the future.”
Svetlana Gupta is a member of the Class of 2029 in the College of Engineering. She is a contributor for the News department and can be reached at sg2622@cornell.edu.
