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A couple days ago I alluded to Henry Morgenthau’s premature departure from Cornell after some study of agriculture. I tried to find information about Morgenthau in The 100 Most Notable Cornellians, but discovered that the authors had instituted stringent criteria: you had to have completed an undergraduate degree. No famous faculty (no Richard Feynman or Vladimir Nabokov), nobody who got only a graduate degree (no William Gass), and no flunkouts. So no notability as a Cornellian for FDR’s Treasury Secretary and the President of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Or for Kurt Vonnegut either.
It was a joke when I was an undergraduate that more famous people had flunked out of Cornell than finished. (Huey Lewis was often mentioned. Hey, it was the 1980s.) Even some of the more famous who finished only “finished”; Christopher Reeve received a Cornell degree but actually completed his education at Juilliard.
There’s something typically Cornellian about the refusal to count those who tried to make it but couldn’t. Cornell likes the idea that you aren’t good enough for it. It’s a tough place. The school’s fight song is about getting kicked out.
Somehow it makes sense that there are a fair number of sharp Cornellians in the law (e.g. Janet Reno and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) but there has never been one occupying the Oval Office. You have to really believe you’re special to run for President.
The Edge of the American West 
20 comments
September 8, 2010 at 9:15 am
Spike
I was three-generations legacy when I applied to Cornell, and they still wouldn’t take me. So yeah, they don’t mess around.
September 8, 2010 at 9:34 am
Melinda
It’s an odd contrast with Chicago, which will pretty much claim anybody who passed through its airspace despite being (on average) a better school. And I know people who got into better schools in their field and still didn’t get into Cornell. I think that one difference is that Chicago is primarily a graduate school and allows people decades to finish; someone who’s still alive might *eventually* get around to writing that dissertation.
The conventional wisdom around Ithaca about admissions was that the Cornell administration, having been embarrassed by Negroes With Guns running around Willard Straight Hall in the late 1960s, was anxious to avoid having anything similar happen again and so tended to favor people who didn’t look like boat-rockers in the admissions process. That doesn’t address the question of why the author of that book didn’t consider people who never completed, though. Maybe Cornell takes itself very seriously because other people, oh, nevermind.
September 8, 2010 at 10:48 am
Kieran
It’s an odd contrast with Chicago, which will pretty much claim anybody who passed through its airspace
Princeton is the same, with the added bonus of insinuating that anyone worthwhile who went there did so as an undergraduate.
September 8, 2010 at 10:50 am
eric
Maybe Cornell takes itself very seriously because other people, oh, nevermind.
I think there’s something chip-on-the-shouldery about Cornell’s culture. You know, it’s an Ivy but. It’s the second Ivy in New York State. It’s a state university and an ag school.
I should have mentioned, Cornell even kicks out famous fictional characters: according to Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane got expelled from Cornell.
September 8, 2010 at 10:57 am
kevin
Cornell likes the idea that you aren’t good enough for it.
There’s a reason they brag about the suicide-enabling gorges on those t-shirts.
Princeton is the same, with the added bonus of insinuating that anyone worthwhile who went there did so as an undergraduate.
Not having a law school or a med school will do that.
September 8, 2010 at 11:00 am
Kieran
Not having a law school or a med school will do that.
Their problem is that their Nobelists have generally had the bad manners to only show up there for graduate school.
September 8, 2010 at 11:39 am
dana
I think there’s something chip-on-the-shouldery about Cornell’s culture.
We’d never noticed.
September 8, 2010 at 11:48 am
Vance Maverick
“It is our privilege and honor to single out and, in most cases, pay tribute to Cornell’s most distinguished sons and daughters.”
Who are the bad Cornellers who are singled out but don’t rate tribute?
September 8, 2010 at 12:03 pm
eric
Clifford Irving (featured in F for Fake) was one.
September 8, 2010 at 12:20 pm
F. P. Smearcase
I think a number of notables dropped out of UT Austin, my alma mater. At least when I was there, this was more consistent with Austin culture than anything about the university, which was too large to have detectable institution-wide characteristics. But dropping out was a very Austin-in-the-90s thing to do.
September 9, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Robert Halford
Cornell doesn’t give out honorary degrees, either.
September 9, 2010 at 6:38 pm
Robert Halford
Also, is it me, or is Melinda’s comment a bit dickish? (Full disclosure: I confess to Cornell alum status anxiety and an probably unjustified bias against the University of Chicago). Anyhow, when I was at Cornell, post 68, there were various riots and campus takeovers and the like, so there’s that in re campus troublemakers. Also, the U of C has a terrible evil genius+annoying nerds and not in a good way/smart people ratio and generally can blow me.
September 9, 2010 at 7:01 pm
eric
Cornell doesn’t give out honorary degrees, either.
I forgot about that! It also doesn’t have outside commencement speakers. (It’s always the university president.)
September 9, 2010 at 7:20 pm
eric
Also, you’re calling out Melinda, but not dana?
September 9, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Robert Halford
My Cornell-derived insecurity can only handle a fight with one commenter at a time. Also, I’m not really sure why I publicly asked the University of Chicago to blow me.
September 9, 2010 at 8:24 pm
Robert Halford
Jesus, if it hadn’t been for the Ag and Hotel Schools, I probably would have learned how to spell.
September 9, 2010 at 10:28 pm
grackle
I thought Cornell is the Hotel school. It has an Ag school too?
September 10, 2010 at 4:15 am
silbey
The conventional wisdom around Ithaca about admissions was that the Cornell administration, having been embarrassed by Negroes With Guns running around Willard Straight Hall in the late 1960s, was anxious to avoid having anything similar happen again and so tended to favor people who didn’t look like boat-rockers in the admissions process.
That was not the conventional wisdom when I was growing up in Ithaca. If it was what they were doing, they did a very bad job, given the range of protests that happened post-’68.
We’d never noticed.
Headline in New York Times, years ago, the day after Cornell football managed a triumphant victory over that school in Boston (one of its few triumphant victories, I might add): “Harvard Loses.”
September 10, 2010 at 9:43 am
ben
bias against the University of Chicago
Hardly surprising for such a jock.
September 11, 2010 at 4:05 pm
bitchphd
There’s a reason they brag about the suicide-enabling gorges on those t-shirts.
Which look a lot like Joy Division tshirts.