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Carol Kammen. Cornell: Glorious to View. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.264pp. Cloth $29.50.
Is Cornell different from other American universities? I have thought of this question off and on for the last thirty-five years. Cornell attracted the nation's, if not the world's, attention in 1969 with the armed student takeover of part of the university. Why had such an event happened at this seemingly isolated institution in western New York? My attention to Cornell increased in the summer of that year when I worked for a unique Cornell studentrun residential organization, the Telluride Association. It seemed unlike anything I knew at Yale. My own research at that time into the origins of the private-public distinction in American universities constantly drew my attention to Cornell which was all at once a "private" university and New York's land grant "state" university.
Carol Kammen's Glorious to View is the first comprehensive history of Cornell to appear since Morris Bishop's 1962 A History of Cornell. I approached the book with the hope that answers to my questions might be found. Within the first few pages, I quickly realized that the closer one is to Cornell the more one is drawn to that question of Cornell's "difference." Kammen's first paragraph is devoted to Cornell's distinctive origins as an institution in the 186Os-and the endurance of that distinctiveness over the ensuing decades to the present. Her simple phrase, "Cornell remains unique," sets the tone (p. 3). If Cornell seems more like other institutions today, Kammen concludes this is because those other institutions now "look amazingly like Cornell" (p. 3). Cornell's role in changing and shaping American higher education continues throughout the volume, as does the theme that succeeding generations at Cornell...