Cornell is a learning community that seeks to serve society by educating the leaders of tomorrow and extending the frontiers of knowledge.
"I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
Ezra Cornell, 1868
In keeping with the founding vision of Ezra Cornell, our community fosters personal discovery and growth, nurtures scholarship and creativity across a broad range of common knowledge, and engages men and women from every segment of society in this quest. We pursue understanding beyond the limitations of existing knowledge, ideology, and disciplinary structure. We affirm the value to individuals and society of cultivation and enrichment of the human mind and spirit.
Our faculty, students, alumni, and staff strive toward these objectives in a context of freedom with responsibility. We foster initiative, integrity, and excellence, in an environment of collegiality, civility, and responsible stewardship. As the land-grant university for the state of New York, we apply the results of our endeavors in service to our alumni, the community, the state, the nation, and the world.
The First Transnational University
"Cornell -- birthplace of the integration of theory and application within American higher education, champion of the equal dignity of humanism and science, exemplar of openness to all peoples and to the critical examination of ideas -- has a special duty to nurture a transnational perspective on the human condition. We believe that Ezra Cornell himself would be proud of the way that his American university has matured into the transnational university of the future....A transnational perspective is different from a global perspective because it transcends nationalism without insisting on a unitary global substitute."
-- Jeffrey S. Lehman, 11th president of Cornell University, in his inaugural address in Doha, Qatar