What Makes Cornell Unique?
Every Cornell student has no doubt received, whether from their friends, family, fellow interns, assembly-line-mates, comrades-in-arms, fellow chain-gang members, or, after this year’s internship season, the rowers beside them in the black belly of a trireme, unwanted commentary about one of Cornell’s most famous attributes: our student body’s peculiar propensity for dramatic suicide-by-gorge. It’s better than being famous for the ILR school, but suicide nets are far from the best institution from which our university could derive its fame. Is this really what sets us apart? Is this what it means to be a Cornellian?
In 1981, Dr. James Siegel, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Asian Studies at Cornell, published a piece in Diacritics (that would later be responded to in 1983 by none other than Jacques Derrida, as it were). Siegel recounts how, triggered by a spate of suicides, a proposal to add preventative barriers to one of the bridges was met with fierce resistance. Despite the fact that such barriers would save lives, the value of being able to see the beauty of the gorges unobstructed, opponents held, could not be stressed enough. Opponents claimed that that value could even outweigh that of the lives saved. Some responses claimed (not entirely convincingly) that the depression induced by the inability to encounter the gorges would effectively reverse their salutary consequences. A problem fit for the most ardent Bay Area Benthamite.
One letter quoted in Dr. Siegel’s article stepped beyond mere calculation:
“… a society in which suicide is impossible would be an intolerable physical and psychic prison… Simple survival is not the absolute value in this or any other society.”
Confronted by the gorges, one gains an intimation of something beyond all worldly value, what that letter called “God’s beauty.”
And Dr. Siegel’s conclusion is that this position holds that “the view is valuable precisely for being the place of death, the sight where death may be safely located” after one has touched that beauty and held back from the brink.
No one can see the face of God and live. But the encounter with beauty that the gorges provide allows Cornellians to, not unlike a sungrazing comet, leave that encounter revivified by a new ferocity.
Cornell’s distinctiveness, some would say, originates in the conditions of its founding. Back in the day, “Any person, any study” was a revolutionary creed. And not just the “person” part– even more revolutionary is extending the university’s purview of teaching and research beyond all boundaries.
The revolution won. In 1865, to create a university along the lines above, and non-sectarian to boot, was avant-garde. But not in a way totally upsetting to the prejudices of its time: rather, Ezra Cornell was the latest step in a long, self-aware journey of progress.
“New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! We ourselves must Pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,
Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key. “
This final stanza from the 1845 poem of James Russell Lowell, “The Present Crisis”, which belongs to the same general intellectual and spiritual tendency as Ezra Cornell, could have been written today. Well, not really–at the very least, it would have to be written in free verse– but the same sentiment is alive today in the hearts and minds of tens of millions of Americans. Once again, Ezra Cornell’s beliefs are like water to us now, if anything, not radical enough for contemporary tastes.
Perhaps what makes Cornell what it is, what makes it different from any other university in America, is not the now-universal ideas it started out with but something to do with its matter. Perhaps Cornell is defined by a specific aspect of campus geography which conditions student life.
At this point, it’s a tired observation to make that we are in an age of sameness, of cultural repetition, and of homogenization. Does Cornell’s fractured campus geography hold the key? Could the radicality of the separation between campus and not-campus, the ritual of crossing the brink, especially now that border-crossing is an act carrying especial symbolic weight, make Cornell distinct?
Honestly? Probably not.
The most central, and most dreary, characteristic of the contemporary age is the constant deluge of information, bursting all banks. If you’ve ever looked at your phone when crossing one of Cornell’s bridges, you’ve already lost. You’ve already gotten trapped in a crevice narrower than any gorge, the slow suicide-by-degrees of indifference to the real world around you and its particularities in favor of being everywhere and nowhere.
If there is anything left that’s distinctive about Cornell, or any other educational institution in America, those things will remain invisible to all save those who can transform into something else, something no longer inured to every possible spectacle, something once again able to reach out to beauty and step up to the brink (and hopefully not fall in).
So, Is Ithaca Gorges? That’s a question the answer to which you will have to determine for yourself.
