Cross-cultural learning and research have been a priority at Cornell University since its earliest days, sometimes in radical ways. A new book, Beyond Borders: Exploring the History of Cornell’s Global Dimensions, dives into dozens of international initiatives involving Cornell faculty and students over the years.

Cornell founders Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White appreciated learning about different cultures, says retired university archivist Elaine Engst MA ’72, who co-edited the book. Here, she shares some stories about Cornell’s international reach.

How did Cornell and White turn their cultural curiosity into a plan for a university?
Cornell grew up on a small farm in upstate New York, but saw how a university education could expand the world for young people who came from modest circumstances like he did. White was raised in a wealthy family and had studied and worked in Europe. Their perspectives complemented each other. They both saw the potential for a new kind of outward-looking university. It’s especially remarkable because the university was in the middle of nowhere, yet there were international students and faculty from the beginning.

What did that look like in the early days?
Ezra Cornell kept a pocket diary where he would list students and their home countries. My favorite entry is one he made for students from areas that we would not now think of as foreign countries: the Sandwich Islands, which is Hawai’i; and Texas, which had been its own country, the Republic of Texas, until just 20 years earlier. The first entering class had students from South America, Asia, and Europe. Soon after, students came from the Caribbean. In 1868, Andrew Dickson White traveled to Europe to seek professors and collections for the new university.

The Cosmopolitan Club brought together students and faculty for international discourse. What was its influence?
It was launched in 1904 by Modesto Quiroga, an Argentinian graduate student, as a hub for students from dozens of countries—including the United States. The club first rented rooms on Eddy Street and later moved into its own newly built residence on Bryant Avenue—with student rooms, a large dining room, and an auditorium. With dinners and presentations by faculty and students, the club nurtured appreciation and understanding across national lines on a personal level. In the words of Christian Bues, a German undergraduate student, it brought students from different nations into contact to “find the best in one another … so that in difficult international conflicts they might have a clear judgment and correct reasoning.”

The Cosmopolitan Club closed in the 1950s, but multicultural socializing continued.  Since 1970, Holland International Living Center has been home to thousands of international and domestic students who share a passion for cross-cultural exchange. HILC was renamed in 1985 in honor of distinguished alumnus Jerome H. Holland (Class of 1939) and his commitment to global understanding, respect for human rights, and the pursuit of education. Beyond Borders has chapters on both the Cosmopolitan Club and the Holland International Living Center.

Faculty have been organizing expeditions practically since Cornell’s start. Who were the earliest ones?
One of the earliest was Charles Frederick (Fred) Hartt, Cornell’s first professor of geology. He organized an expedition to the Amazon in 1870 with 11 students and was only 37 when he died in Brazil from yellow fever. There’s a plaque in Sage Hall commemorating him.

Another professor who got some press was Ralph Stockman Tarr. He also was a geologist. He led an Arctic expedition to study glaciers in 1896, but his steamship got hung up on an ice floe. They continued exploring and eventually made their way home. About 2,000 of Tarr’s photos of glaciers in Greenland and Alaska have been digitized and can be viewed online through the Cornell Library.

Liberty Hyde Bailey was a botanist and dean of what is now the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. He was an icon. He explored plants his whole life, specifically palms, on expeditions to Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia. He spent his 19th birthday collecting palm specimens in Grenada and his 91st in the West Indies. By the time he died in 1954, he had increased the taxonomy of palms from 700 in 1914 to several thousand. You can see his collections of preserved plants in the herbarium. The chapter “Exploring Our World: Cornell Expeditions” details all these trips.

How has this curiosity shown up in international programs in which Cornell has been involved?
Cornell’s vast international programs touch on topics that include: agriculture, anthropology and sociology, art and music, business, economics, engineering, health and medicine, hospitality, law, nutrition, politics, and religion. Our programs have consciously avoided operating as if we’re these important Western experts. The message isn’t: “We’re coming in to fix you.” That theme runs through many of the book’s articles. It’s about how much we want to learn from you. There’s an egalitarian element to it that goes back to the beginning of the university. We want to help you in a way you want to be helped―with practical problem-solving.

The book has many examples of this. One of my favorites is the eggplant project in Bangladesh. Cornell led a consortium program to boost food security through bioengineered brinjal, or eggplant. Brinjal is a staple crop for the primarily small subsistence farms in South Asia, and a pest known as the eggplant fruit and shoot borer was damaging the crops year after year. When farmers switched to the bioengineered variety, which is safe to eat, the crops thrived—and they no longer had to spray so many insecticides.

What are some of the lessons Cornell’s international programs have for students?
Many international projects take students to other cultures. They have experiences that ask them to figure out how to interact. You’re not just here to do your thing and leave. You need to learn about the culture, you need to become part of this culture, and you need to interact with students from this culture in a very one-to-one way. Going abroad to study is an exercise in cultural humility and respect.

One example of students studying abroad in the book is the Cornell-Nepal Study Program, which ran from 1992 to 2015. Cornell teamed up with Tribhuvan University, the oldest public university in Kathmandu. Students lived and learned with their Nepalese counterparts, interacting over meals, social activities, research, and coursework. The universities had to work at balancing competing needs to collaborate as equals. They wanted to foster a mutually beneficial scholarly exchange.

That seems to be another theme that runs through many of the projects in the book.
Yes, that humility and transparency. You could say that describes Cornell’s whole international philosophy.

International professor emeritus Royal Colle conceived the idea for Beyond Borders 20 years ago, citing a need to tell Cornell’s global story. Colle and Engst edited the volume with Heike Michelsen, former director of programming in the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, and Corey Ryan Earle ’07, Cornell’s unofficial historian and a visiting lecturer in the American Studies Program. It was published by Cornell University Press earlier this year.

Written by Sally Parker, a freelance writer for Alumni Affairs and Development.