COVER STORY
Action Teens, apples and the spirit of democracy: Cornell's culture of public engagement expands the definition of 'land grant'
By 2000, The New York Times was calling the institute "probably the most expansive legal reference tool online." Today it is without a doubt the most comprehensive collection of U.S. law and court decisions available without charge to anybody with access to the Internet. Between 110,000 and 140,000 people visit the site daily.
Ten percent of the site's content is original, mostly written by Cornell Law School students. A regular column analyzing Supreme Court cases is published in the Federal Bar Association journal and emailed to 20,000 subscribers and members of Congress.
The site's impact is widespread. One day, when he was in Japan for a conference, Bruce was introduced to a Vietnamese woman who, upon learning his name, "started acting like I was a rock star," recalls Bruce, who was mystified at first. "It turned out she worked for the ministry in Vietnam that had rewritten that country's commercial code. They'd used us as a primary source on American law."
Another example of engagement through digital access is Mann Library's The Essential Electronic Agricultural Library (TEEAL), which gives faculty, students and scientists in many parts of the developing world offline access (delivered via hard drives) to more than 240 full-text agricultural research and other scientific journals. Before TEEAL, which was founded in the early 1990s, their access had been spotty, outdated or nonexistent because so many of these areas have poor telecommunications infrastructure and limited financial resources.
The nonprofit, digital library continues to expand, thanks to heightened promotional efforts and funding opportunities; recently, new institutions in countries such as Vanuatu and Guatemala have also gained access. TEEAL reaches more than 370 subscribers in 86 countries.
An expanding proposition
In 2005, the Cornell Board of Trustees Committee on Land Grant and Statutory College Affairs, which was formed in 1980, issued its final report and recommended that Cornell become re-involved as a whole in its land-grant mission.
The report explained that while historically, external funding sources had influenced the focus of land-grant programming in the four statutory colleges, "… the land grant designation and mission belongs to all of Cornell." The report recommended further development of the service learning, applied research and outreach potential of Cornell as a whole.
In the years since that report, that broader and deeper engagement has continued – for example, through the creation of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, the most comprehensive institution of its kind in American academia; the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research; and the Engaged Learning and Research center.
"Being a land-grant university, in particular one as prominent as us – only one of two private land-grant institutions in the country and the only land-grant institution in the Ivy League – is a tremendous competitive advantage for Cornell," Harrison says. "We are able to, number one, address the world's problems in a way that many other universities are not, [and] number two, we're able to attract students who understand that; they appreciate that by coming to a place like Cornell they are able to address, meaningfully and immediately, the great challenges that the world faces."
For Cornell to remain successfully engaged, it needs to stay relevant to the prevailing forces of the day, Stoltzfus says, through "technology, increased diversity and globalization, and by responding to a new student generation and the public demand for relevance and career readiness.
"So that's our creative job," she says: "To keep being the land-grant university of the moment."
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