50 Fun Facts About Cornell University

Which fast-food staple did Cornell food scientist Robert Baker invent and publish without ever patenting it?

Chicken nugget credit often goes to McDonald's, which did not sell McNuggets until the early 1980s. Baker also created Cornell chicken, a vinegar-marinated barbecue recipe popular across upstate New York.

Which NBC sitcom features Andy Bernard, forever boasting of his Cornell a cappella group, Here Comes Treble?

The Office cast Ed Helms as Andy, and its finale sends him back to Ithaca for a job in Cornell's admissions department.

Which TV science host earned a Cornell engineering degree in 1977, then invented a part for Boeing 747s?

Bill Nye quit Boeing in 1986 for a Seattle sketch comedy show, where he performed wacky science experiments on air.

Which Supreme Court justice studied literature under Vladimir Nabokov before graduating from Cornell in 1954?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg met her husband Martin at Cornell and married him a month after graduating. She later named Nabokov as a major influence on her writing.

Which future screen superhero chose Cornell because Ithaca was far from New York City's acting jobs?

Christopher Reeve had promised his mother he would finish college before acting full time. He went on to Juilliard and first played Superman in 1978.

Which animal, brought live to Cornell football games in 1915 and named Touchdown, became the mascot?

Bear number one cost the athletic association $25. Harvard students kidnapped him before the 1915 game by posing as his keepers on a morning walk.

Which object appeared atop Cornell's 173-foot clock tower in October 1997 and stayed there until March?

A pumpkin it was, as DNA tests later confirmed, and the pranksters have never been publicly identified.

Ezra Cornell made the fortune that endowed his university from stock in which company?

Western Union was formed when his lines merged with a rival's, handing him $2 million in stock. He got his start devising a plow to bury telegraph cable, then strung the poles for Samuel Morse's Baltimore–Washington line.

James McLamore, who arrived at Cornell with $11 in his pocket, went on to co-found which fast-food chain?

Burger King of Miami was formed in 1954 with David Edgerton, a fellow Cornell alumnus. The pair sold the chain to Pillsbury in 1967.

Cornell's library holds one of only five manuscript copies of which Abraham Lincoln speech?

Gettysburg Address manuscripts are scarce, and Cornell's is the only one still paired with the letter and envelope Lincoln sent with it.

Which Cosmos host joined Cornell after Harvard denied him tenure, and stayed nearly 30 years?

Carl Sagan worked on the Voyager Golden Record during his Cornell years and lived in an Egyptian revival house perched on a cliff edge in Ithaca.

Which author of Beloved earned a Cornell master's degree in 1955 with a thesis on Woolf and Faulkner?

Toni Morrison became the first Black woman of any nationality to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993, and later returned to Cornell as a professor-at-large.

Which Slaughterhouse-Five author studied biochemistry at Cornell before leaving to join the Army?

Kurt Vonnegut was an indifferent science student who also edited the student newspaper. Poor grades and a satirical article cost him his place in Cornell's ROTC unit.

Which Charlotte's Web author was nicknamed Andy at Cornell because he shared a co-founder's surname?

E. B. White shared a surname with Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's first president. He edited the student newspaper in his senior year and graduated in 1921.

Which Cornell law graduate and coach gave his nickname to a famous youth football league?

Pop Warner got the nickname for being one of the oldest students at Cornell. He later coached its team twice before moving on to Carlisle, Pittsburgh and Stanford.

Willis Carrier, a 1901 Cornell graduate, designed the first modern version of which home comfort?

Air conditioning began in 1902 as a fix for a Brooklyn printing company's air quality problem, and Carrier's key addition was humidity control.

In 1922 Cornell opened the world's first four-year program in which field, later funded by Ellsworth Statler?

Hotel management students still train at the Statler, a working hotel on campus. Its namesake was a skeptic until a visit to the school in 1927 won him over.

Cornell gave Daniel Salmon, namesake of salmonella, the first American doctorate in which field in 1876?

Veterinary medicine had a Cornell professor from 1868, the year the university opened. Salmonella was actually found by Salmon's assistant, Theobald Smith.

Cornell's free Merlin app identifies which animals from a photo or a sound recording?

Birds are the business of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, whose eBird project has gathered more than a billion sightings from volunteers worldwide.

Cornell's Steve Squyres led the science team for Spirit and Opportunity, twin rovers on which world?

Mars was meant to host each rover for about 90 days, yet Opportunity kept working for more than 14 years, until a dust storm silenced it in 2018.

What do Cornell hockey fans hurl onto the ice when archrival Harvard skates out at Lynah Rink?

Fish first hit the ice in February 1973. The student behind it said there was no symbolism: he just wanted something disgusting in the Harvard net.

Which goaltender won 76 of his 81 starts for Cornell before lifting six Stanley Cups with Montreal?

Ken Dryden put off the Canadiens in 1964 to study history at Cornell, and backstopped the college team to the 1967 national title.

Cornell gave back a 1940 football win after film showed it had scored on a fifth down against which rival?

Dartmouth accepted the forfeit by telegram, turning a 7–3 defeat into a 3–0 victory. Cornell's president at the time was himself a Dartmouth graduate.

Which graduate of Cornell's labor relations school became the NHL's first commissioner in 1993?

Gary Bettman spent a dozen years as an NBA lawyer and executive before taking the job. Rob Manfred, later baseball's commissioner, is a Cornell graduate too.

Where in New York City, reached from Manhattan by aerial tramway, did Cornell Tech open in 2017?

Roosevelt Island gave the campus a site in the East River where a city hospital once stood. Cornell won it in a contest launched by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Cornell opened the first American medical school abroad in which Gulf country?

Qatar's government helps fund the college through the Qatar Foundation, and students follow the same curriculum as at Cornell's medical school in Manhattan.

Until 2011 Cornell ran Arecibo, once the world's largest radio dish, where in the Caribbean?

Puerto Rico hosted the 305-metre dish, set in a natural sinkhole, from 1963 until its collapse in 2020. No single telescope was bigger for 53 years.

Which controversial 1955 novel did Vladimir Nabokov write during his years teaching at Cornell?

Lolita was written on his summer butterfly-collecting trips and nearly burned: his wife Véra stopped him destroying the unfinished drafts.

Robert Moog earned a Cornell doctorate in 1965 while developing which electronic instrument?

Synthesizer parts first took shape at Cornell with composer Herb Deutsch. Moog had already spent years designing and selling theremins.

Which surgeon, once drum major of Cornell's marching band, devised abdominal thrusts for choking victims?

Henry Heimlich earned both his degrees from Cornell, finishing medical school at 23. He first described the maneuver in 1974, three decades into his career.

George Papanicolaou of Cornell's medical college developed a smear test that detects which cancer early?

Cervical screening owes its nickname, the Pap test, to him. He reported finding cancer cells in smears in 1928, but the work was not widely recognized until the 1940s.

Which author of The Good Earth earned a Cornell master's degree while on leave from China in the 1920s?

Pearl S. Buck became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1938. Cornell is the only school with four alumnae who won unshared Nobels.

Barbara McClintock, holder of three Cornell degrees, won a Nobel Prize for jumping genes found in which crop?

Maize, or corn, kept her busy for life. She began studying its chromosomes at Cornell in the 1920s, and her 1983 Nobel was the first unshared one for a woman in her field.

Which physicist's Nobel-winning work drew on his study of a plate tossed in a Cornell cafeteria?

Richard Feynman taught at Cornell in the late 1940s. Puzzling over why the spinning plate wobbled gave him equations that later proved important to his prize-winning physics.

Which band's 1977 concert at Cornell's Barton Hall is preserved in the Library of Congress?

Grateful Dead fans rank the show among the most collected and traded concert tapes by any band. Tickets that night cost $7.50.

Which architect of the Louvre Pyramid designed Cornell's concrete Johnson Museum of Art?

I. M. Pei's building, completed in 1973, is named for Herbert Fisk Johnson Jr., a 1922 Cornell graduate who ran the S. C. Johnson wax company.

Each spring, Cornell's first-year architecture students build and parade which giant creature?

A dragon has been built and paraded since the 1950s, growing out of an architecture celebration begun by the class of 1901. Engineering students traditionally meet it with a rival phoenix of their own.

Cornell's breeding station at Geneva, New York, developed the Cortland and Empire varieties of which fruit?

Apples bred at the station also include the Jonagold and the Macoun, and its grape breeders have released new wine varieties as well.

Lee Teng-hui and Tsai Ing-wen, both holders of Cornell graduate degrees, each became president where?

Taiwan felt the fallout when Lee returned to speak at a Cornell reunion in 1995: the visit helped spark a military crisis in the strait.

Cornell's alma mater, set to the tune Annie Lisle, places the campus far above which Finger Lake?

Cayuga is the longest of the Finger Lakes, and Ithaca sits at its southern end. Dozens of other schools and colleges have since borrowed the same melody.

Which fraternity, the oldest intercollegiate one for African American men, began at Cornell in 1906?

Alpha Phi Alpha grew out of a literary and social club that Black students formed at Cornell. Its later members include Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington and Jesse Owens.

Cornell was founded with New York's share of land from which 1862 law signed by Abraham Lincoln?

Morrill Act grants were meant to fund colleges of agricultural and mechanical studies in every state. New York's allotment came to almost a million acres, all assigned to the new university.

Which benefactor, who shares her surname with Cornell's clock tower, gave its first nine bells in 1868?

Jennie McGraw married the university's librarian at 39 and died less than two years later. Students still climb 161 steps to play the chime, which has grown to 21 bells.

Which Cornell celebration marks the end of classes each May with a big outdoor concert?

Slope Day takes its name from Libe Slope, where the stage goes up. It traces back to Spring Day, a holiday Cornell declared in 1902 after a ball left classes nearly empty the next morning.

Which Cornell student center, named for a 1901 graduate, did Black students occupy in April 1969?

Willard Straight Hall emptied peacefully after talks, but the students walked out carrying rifles, and a photograph of the moment won a Pulitzer Prize.

Which Cornell newspaper, founded in 1880, is America's oldest continuously independent college daily?

The Sun, in full The Cornell Daily Sun, is fully independent of the university. In 1912 it became the first college paper to join the Associated Press.

Cornell's fight song, written by three roommates, borrows the melody of which George M. Cohan tune?

Give My Regards to Broadway came from the 1904 musical Little Johnny Jones. Cornell's version is named for Davy Hoy, the registrar who sat on the student conduct committee.

Which free archive of physics and math preprints, begun at Los Alamos in 1991, did Cornell host from 2001 to 2026?

arXiv moved with its creator, physicist Paul Ginsparg, when he left for Cornell in 2001. It changed how physicists announce new research, and became an independent nonprofit in 2026.

Which Cornell physicist, head of theory at wartime Los Alamos, won a Nobel for explaining how stars shine?

Hans Bethe was dismissed from a German university post in 1933 over his Jewish background. He started at Cornell in 1935 and spent most of his career there.

Which Cornell running back was the 1971 Heisman runner-up and later played a cop on Hill Street Blues?

Ed Marinaro was the first college back to rush for 4,000 career yards. He finished behind Pat Sullivan in the Heisman vote, then played six seasons in the NFL.