Linda Jarschauer Johnson ’60, MS ’63 has a natural gift for building connections; she has long been known to find ties to Cornell anywhere and everywhere.
But that wasn’t always the case. Linda had her eyes set on the University of Vermont until her mother suggested they visit Cornell’s Ithaca campus.
Linda stayed in a Statler Hotel room overlooking West Campus and Cayuga Lake, and she learned about the child development and family relationship major in what was then the College of Home Economics (now Cornell Human Ecology).
“Between those two things, I was sold,” Linda said.
On the advice of her favorite professor, Harry Levin, who later chaired the psychology department and became the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Linda joined the honors program and pursued a master’s in child development. Afterward, she stayed in Ithaca to teach at the Cornell Nursery School, located in Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, and met her husband— Albert Johnson, who was earning his PhD in engineering.
The pair moved first to New York City, and then to Washington, D.C., with their two children.
Linda had separated from her husband and was working for the D.C. public school system when Cornell launched its Cornell in Washington program in 1983. She was hired as the executive director, a position she held for the next 25 years.
“People think I talk way too much about Cornell, and that I’m always finding people who went to Cornell or encouraging people to go to Cornell,” Linda said.
But meeting around 50 students a semester (for 50 semesters!), Cornell became just another part of life, she explained. She connected students with events and resources. Every semester, the Cornell in Washington students met with Janet Reno ’60, President Bill Clinton’s attorney general and a member of Linda’s class, as well as Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’54, President Clinton’s appointee to the Supreme Court.
In retirement, Linda deepened her Cornell ties even further. She served as a board member of the Cornell Club of Washington and as a member of the Cornell University Council (CUC) for 12 years; she is now a CUC life member. Linda also found great meaning as a class officer for her Class of 1960, holding positions as Reunion chair and class president. As a testament to her extraordinary impact, Linda was awarded the William ‘Bill’ Vanneman ’31 Outstanding Class Leader Award in 2022.
Linda has made a habit of paying it forward to other generations of Cornell students and has helped her class forge a special relationship with the Class of 2020.
When the Class of 2020 missed many milestones due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Class of 1960 donated $25,000 from their class treasury for the Class of 2020 to make their fifth Reunion a true milestone celebration, complete with a belated Slope Day-style concert.
“It’s like we’re their grandparents. This was something we truly felt good about,” said Linda. “We thought, ‘Let’s help them have something really special because they’d missed out.’”
Linda’s own children, Seth Johnson ’89 and Suzannah Johnson Creedon ’92, and granddaughter Eleanor Creedon ’24 followed in her footsteps to Cornell. Linda wanted to share her Cornell student experience with her family, and luckily, she still has the hundreds of letters she wrote home to her parents several times a week. Linda typed up the handwritten notes and sent them to her daughter one at a time. And then, the stories passed down to the third generation, via phone during the pandemic.
Looking back across more than six decades of Cornell connections—her own, her children’s, and the countless students and classmates she’s brought into the fold along the way—it’s the relationships that have meant the most to Linda.
“Working on Reunion and working for my class, as people I knew had nieces, had grandsons, who wanted to go to Cornell, I would then end up having a friendship with them,” Linda said.
“I have a special love for Cornell. It has been a great experience all around for me.”
