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EVAN EARLE: Welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming today for this presentation on the discussion of Beyond Borders. This is a really, really wonderful book, and you're just going to get a tiny taste of it today. The book is much more expansive than this presentation can cover. I'm Evan Earle. I'm the Dr. Peter J. Thaler Cornell University archivist. And it's my pleasure to introduce this presentation.
Many of you are familiar with "any person, any study," the motto that has shaped the history of our university from the very beginning. Cornell University and its members of its community are, not surprisingly, recognized worldwide for innovative work across an incredible array of fields of study. What may not be as well understood is just how vast and significant global impact tied to the university has been.
Dedicated Cornell faculty and students have engaged internationally from remote mountaintops, to jungles, to right here on campus to equally learn, but also to educate in crosscultural ways. While this work is tied to Cornell, the institution, a theme that is seen throughout the book is not that global outreach is done for Cornell, but that Cornell's global reach has been in service to the citizenry of the world. Cornell defines what it means to be a land grant university for the world, one charged with advancing the lives and livelihoods of citizens and communities, not just here in New York State, but well beyond.
Our distinguished panelists today will guide us through some of Cornell's pioneering efforts in fostering global connections by highlighting just a few of the 58 stories compiled for the book. As ambitious as Cornell's global efforts have been, a book project that successfully melds the writings of over 50 different authors, perhaps, is nearly as ambitious.
The panelists here today have done a tremendous service in capturing stories, many in the voice of legendary faculty who lived the history, and formulating it into a work that is not only now a valuable record, but is also an enjoyable read. So our panelists today are Roy Colle Professor Emeritus in the Department of Communication, who has been involved in international projects in organizations such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation.
Heike Michelsen, former director of the programming at Cornell's Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. She has served as a senior research officer at the International Service for National Agricultural Research. Elaine Engst, Cornell University archivist emerita. Elaine has played a pivotal role in preserving and documenting the university's rich history and has served as a wonderful representative for me on what the role of a university archivist can contribute. And last, Corey Ryan Earle, a lecturer in American Studies at Cornell. Corey is well known for his popular course on the history of Cornell University. He has a deep passion for sharing the university's legacy with students and the broader community. And he just might be related to myself.
[LAUGHTER]
So with that, I will turn it over to our great panelists for our discussion, and we'll have a Q&A afterwards.
[APPLAUSE]
ROY COLLE: Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us. And thanks to the library for including our book in the Chats in the Stacks program. To begin, we would like to acknowledge CAPE. Cape is Cornell Academics and Professors. Emeriti. And I think we have a slide. It shows some of the things that CAPE does.
CAPE's support was instrumental in getting this project off the ground. Let me tell you how CAPE was involved. Beyond Borders had its start about 20 years ago. I had retired after spending almost 40 years as an international professor in the Communication Department, as was mentioned.
I worked with development projects throughout the world. And after retirement, I sat on the board of CAPE, as did my colleague Bill Ward. And some of you may have met Bill Ward many years ago. Bill and I were on the board of CAPE. And one time, while we were waiting for a board meeting to begin, we chatted a little bit about where we had been in the world and what we had done.
But then one of us said, there should be a book about this. There are many books about Cornell's history, but none really does much justice to Cornell's global dimension. And so we proposed it to CAPE. And CAPE said, go ahead. Well, we got started on it 20 years ago.
[LAUGHTER]
But there were some interruptions. I got a couple of chapters done, and there they remain on eCommons. But there were some big changes that took place. I went and did some more work overseas, largely in Asia. And so the book didn't get started very much after those first couple of chapters. And then three years ago, CAPE said, get on track.
[LAUGHTER]
And so the project got on track. CAPE set up an advisory committee. And from that came a working group. And from that came an editorial team, and it's our team that's here today.
Beyond Borders highlights and celebrates Cornell's many historical achievements in international activities going all the way back to its beginning. The book reflects the accomplishments and impact of Cornell's global activities that have taken place both on campus and around the world. It was a project that really needed the involvement of many peoples. And collecting stories from the late 1800s to the early 2000s was an interesting challenge.
We invited many authors to participate in the book. Not just me writing chapters, now we were going to get other involvement. And we wanted them to tell stories that were both entertaining-- how's that for an academic challenge, entertaining and informative? Ultimately, as has been mentioned, more than 50 authors volunteered.
They were invited to tell their stories in three to five pages. And we call those vignettes, not chapters. It was certainly a challenge for academics who are used to writing much longer and complicated documents. Imagine, for example, asking one of our authors to address in three to five pages his more than a decade of working on issues related to how the government of Bhutan might protect wildlife diversity while also enhancing rural livelihoods. But somebody did it. It was Jim Lassoie. And his chapter, his vignette is in the book. And many others, of course, did the same.
I'd like to. Introduce you to one of the vignettes, and my colleagues will also introduce you to others in the book. But this vignette is about Ida Scudder, class of 1899 in the Cornell Medical school. Ida was an American girl born in 1870. She lived in India with her missionary father and six more missionary relatives.
Missionaries, missionaries, missionaries-- they were all over the place. And that was enough for Ida. Ida said she was never, never going to be a missionary. But her life took a dramatic change one night in India, and this was in the late 1800s. And let me go and read a little bit from that vignette.
"While she sat writing letters, three men came to her door, each one, strangely enough, with the same request, that she come to his house and try to save the life of his very young wife who was dying in childbirth. 'But I know nothing about doctoring,' she told each one. 'It's my father who is the doctor. I'll be glad to go with him.' 'Oh, no,' each one replied, the Brahmin, the Muslim, and another high-caste Hindu. It was not in accordance with his religion to allow any man outside of the family to enter the women's quarters. Better his wife should die than that. Three times this happened. And Ida was much troubled."
And the story goes on in the vignette. "She spent a sleepless night, and in the morning she sent a servant to find out what had happened to the three young women. Even before he returned, she heard the sound of funeral tom-toms as processions made their way to the riverbank. Each one of the three wives had died because there was no woman doctor to go to them. That was her call. All other ambitions were swept aside.
Thus it happened. Then in 1899, Ida became one of 12 women in the first graduating class of the newly established Cornell Medical College in New York City. As the new Dr. Ida Scudder, she returned to India, where she first set up a modest medical dispensary for women at her father's bungalow. But that was just the beginning. She later went on to found a medical college and hospital. And this list that you see shows her impact on health care in South India.
The typical daily activities that go on there today involve more than 2,000 inpatients and 8,000 outpatients, a dispensary service, training women to be doctors, and expansion of the Christian Medical College and Hospital. Dr. Ida Scudder died in her bungalow in 1960. She was 89. The Ida Scudder School in Vellore is named after her. And there's also a road in Vellore named after her."
The vignette finally tells about Dr. Madelon Finkel, a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. She continues the Cornell connection with Scida's India story. Dr. Finkel oversees programs in which Cornell Medical students annually do research and clinical rotations in the lower. And the Scudder family also funds the Ida Scudder 1899 Fellowship, allowing a Cornell medical student to spend four weeks annually in Vellore.
Many of the authors of the vignettes in Beyond Borders played pivotal roles in Cornell's global history. They take readers around the world, to China and the Philippines, with agricultural researchers; to Peru, with anthropologists' to Qatar and India, with medical practitioners; to Eastern Europe with economists and civil engineers; to Zambia and Sierra Leone, with students and Peace Corps volunteers; and to many more places. And the authors of those vignettes also highlight the many global activities rooted right here on the Ithaca campus.
My colleagues will tell you much more about many of these. We want especially to recognize three contributing authors who have died since the beginning of this venture. They are professors Gene German, Bonnie MacDougall, Tsu-Lin Mie. And now Heike continues with information on our interactions with authors, including how authors and vignettes were recruited and on the design of the book. Heike.
[APPLAUSE]
HEIKE MICHELSEN: Thank you, Roy, and welcome to all of you. I met Roy actually for the first time in 2005, and it was precisely on February 11th. I have a little memo about this meeting that I had with him, and it was the first month that I had just started working in the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies after I came from Europe, where I worked in an international research institute. And at that time, 2005, we discussed the project, his project on the history of Cornell's international dimension.
Time went by. 16 years later, I was just about to retire in summer '21, and I was appointed to become a member of the advisory committee. And yes, I thought that was a great idea. And then Roy asked me to become one of the editors. And for me, it was the perfect opportunity to reflect on 16 years in working in international studies here at Cornell, but also it provided a very meaningful transition into my retirement.
So I only had one condition-- and I was serious about it-- that we get this project done within a couple of years, and we did. So I'm very, very happy about this. And I thank Roy for his leadership in this project. As you can imagine, time and the right timing were definitely key factors during the whole production process.
We solicited and received feedback from-- I'll point this out here. Oops, I see now the center a little bit late, but here it's still listed. So we received feedback from key units, all the key colleges and schools at Cornell, but also across university units and on different topics for the book. And by spring 2020, the editorial team had already-- our team had conceptualized what we wanted to have in the book, had drafted some example chapters, and also identified all the potential topics that we wanted to have included definitely from each of the colleges, from different world areas. And we contacted potential authors.
And that was not always easy to identify the authors and find people who have the time and to volunteer to write all the different chapters. And sometimes we even felt this is so important. We really want to have this included, and started drafting chapters within the editorial team. And for some topics it was even just not possible to find enough information.
It was a real pleasure to work with, but also a challenge sometimes to work with, so many extraordinary authors from all over campus, but also internationally. They were given, as Roy already mentioned, very specific guidelines and very tight deadlines to write these relatively short chapters. And for many, it was just an additional task to an already very, very busy agenda. So sometimes we needed to follow up and follow up so that we finally had all the drafts together.
And many drafts were a little bit too long. Some had to be a little bit rewritten to just use a language that really, as we wanted to please a very broad audience with the book and not have it too academic, but really stories that are of interest. We had, each of us, communicated with one. Each author was only a one relationship. But we all of us, our whole editorial team, reviewed all the contributions that were made. So then, I would say, by the end of '22, we basically had a complete version of the book, a complete draft-- just a draft.
That brought us to the book organization. So the chapters, as you know, we had a lot of chapters from around the world, but also highlighted a lot of issues here on the Ithaca campus. There were chapters that were university wide, and others were from different colleges. And definitely we included chapters from each decade since Cornell was founded that we have information included.
And the scope of the chapters, worldwide-- some were regional. Some were very specific to countries. And then the activities that were described were either focusing on research, teaching services, outreach, or a combination of them or addressing all of them. So we had very long discussions in how do you do the outline of the book.
And in the end, we decided that all of these factors matter and that we just distinguish in the first part. You basically find vignettes, chapters, that focus on teaching, research, outreach fostered by the university and its colleges. And in the second part it's more highlighting those who are alumni and student experiences can be found.
So by the end of '20-- no, early in '23-- let me see. We come to the interesting part. Early '23, we signed a contract with CU Press, which we're very grateful for, and we had a wonderful collaboration with CU Press. And we had discussions about, so how do you want to have the overall design of the book? And they're responsible for this beautiful cover.
But then we also decided that for each of the chapters we would like to include two photos. Two photos is not much, but for some chapters we had a lot of photos. And for many other chapters we had none. And it was not only that you needed photos, but here it comes. The photos had, of course, they had to be very good in complementing the text. The photos had to be looking good in black and white. Many photos since 1970 were all in color. They had to be of very good quality, high resolution.
And a key issue that we had that we owned the copyrights. So we needed to know exactly who did the photo, who is in the photo. Do we have all the permissions? And we needed to have them in writing so that they gave permission for having the book and the photos in it in print, but also online. That was a challenge.
So it was about in the summer of '23, then, that we had basically 67 proofedited text files, 110 photos, and 101 permission files in the hands of CU Press. That was our, hmm, here we go. So at the end now, I just wanted to give you also an example of one of the vignettes that focuses on one of the international programs that we have here at Cornell, and this is the Southeast Asia Program, and the title is Global Cornell From the Beginning. And it was written by the director at the time, Tom Pepinsky.
The Southeast Asia Program, as many of you know as SEAP, is one of the world's preeminent centers for the study of Southeast Asia, a region of almost 700 million people living in 11 independent countries that basically lie between China, India, and Australia. SEAP faculty members, past and present, include some of the most prominent scholars of the region and its people, and its alumni can be found in teaching and research positions around the world.
So SEAP was formally established in 1950. This is actually-- you see Lauriston Sharp. He was the founder, after the University secured a major gift from the Rockefeller Foundation to support Southeast Asian studies. And that was-- Cornell was the second major center in the US after Yale. So Tom, in his vignette, he highlights three features for the Southeast Asia Program that are of particularly note.
The first one is related to its political engagement. Many of the program's most prominent founding faculty, including Professor Sharp and several others, were unabashedly committed to ensuring that the United States' foreign policy community had a more sophisticated understanding of the region and its people than they had earlier. Scholars also contributed to the public debate, and there were many since the 1950s, and the policy discourse about the region more generally.
The second point he highlights is that SEAP faculty institutionalize a model of Southeast Asia studies that functionally linked not only specific disciplines, like the social sciences, the humanities, but many might not know also the applied sciences here at Cornell. Yet they were nevertheless interdisciplinary in essence. So the role of the program was to build an inter disciplinary space, both literally and figuratively, in which students and faculty came together and learned from each other.
And the third factor that he highlights in his vignette is an that he says is perhaps most importantly because SEAP was founded at the time of great need for training on Southeast Asia studies. So this factor is that it relied very heavily on visiting faculty and scholars in the early years, which were not available here at Cornell because there was a shortage of knowledgeable US-based experts in the region. So this outward orientation of the program also meant that there were a lot of students that were welcomed from the region and from around the world that returned to their home countries after their graduation to found and to lead their own academic communities.
So now, 75 years after the founding of the Southeast Asia Program, it remains one of the most prominent, dynamic, and interesting area studies centers in the world. SEAP faculty continues to produce important scholarship not only specifically on the region, but also more comparative work that looks beyond the region and shows connections to a changing global landscape. But then SEAP also is unique in the sense that it enjoys the fortune of being the only continuously funded Title VI national resource center on campus. That means it allows them to do programming not only that helps to train the next generation of globally engaged experts on Southeast Asia, but they also support K-12 teachers, community colleges, as well as schools of education in the region.
I could continue, but I would like to hand it over now to Elaine. And she will comment on working on with Cornell's library and the archives and on the task of indexing the various chapters. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ELAINE ENST: Good evening. Even a book intended for a general reader needs an index. And that was our final task in putting together Beyond Borders. Creating an index for such a complex book was truly an accomplishment. Thanks to additional funding from one of our authors, Cornell alumnus Jeff McCorkle, we hired Ben Shaw, a local professional indexer. He was dismayed to learn that he would have only 20 to 24 pages for a book of 61 chapters and over 400 pages, necessitating an incredibly lean index. He would be unable to include names of people.
He would be unable to include names of people, places, institutions, et cetera, if they were in lists included in citations or captions or otherwise constituted a passing mention. So many references do not show up in the index. We wished we could have included the names of more countries, but space was at a premium. The four of us then edited the index to ensure that nothing was seriously wrong or obviously missing.
We made the decision that university departments should be listed under their names rather than all under "department of." And as those of you who've ever done any cataloging can relate, we had already struggled with the English versions of Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic names and with the placement of surnames, especially for Chinese, Japanese, and Icelandic names. The Romanization of Chinese names had changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. And early Chinese students at Cornell used nonstandard Romanization for their names, so it's actually very hard to find information about early Chinese students.
Despite all the complications, the index was submitted to the Cornell University Press at the right length and on time. We were very careful about having things on time. When I began this project, I thought I knew a lot about Cornell's history, but I was intrigued and surprised by many of the stories I read as part of the editing process.
For example, I knew that Cornell's first major international effort took place at the University of Nanking, now Nanjing, as a crop improvement project. But I didn't know that a variety of barley from China contributed to improved winter barley in New York state. I also knew a lot about Hu Shih, probably Cornell's most famous alumnus, but I hadn't known that he was the last foreign diplomat to meet with President Franklin Roosevelt on the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
I knew that Myron Taylor had been personal envoy to the Vatican under President Franklin Roosevelt. And I'd worked with Law Professor Herbert Briggs on his papers relating to international law. But I didn't know that Professor Rudi Schlesinger, a German émigré who came to Cornell in 1948, is seen as the dean of the discipline of comparative law in the US, with a textbook now in its seventh edition.
It's a bit nostalgic for me to be here in Olin 107 today, since during my career I was deeply involved with the library's Asia collections, which were housed here until the opening of Kroch Library in 1992. Maybe a few people in the room remember when this room actually was the Asia collection reading room, and they had stacks in the back.
So it was a special pleasure for me to write the vignette Asia Collections in the Cornell University Library, which gave me the opportunity to revisit some of those collections, to learn about new collections that came after I retired, and to work again with some old friends. And I don't see anybody here, but I was really pleased to be able to work with the Asia curators again.
And as you saw from the list of authors, a number of other library staff were also authors. Many of the other vignettes also fascinated me and added more dimensions to the picture that is Cornell. But I was personally particularly intrigued by Anthony Shelton's chapter on Bt Eggplant, Improving Lives with Biotechnology.
I knew that CALS faculty had many projects in Asia, but I had no idea that they were developing a genetically engineered eggplant called brinjal in Bengali, named Bt brinjal, for the bacillus that would confer resistance to the Eggplant Fruit and Shoot Borer, EFSB, a really nasty little critter, the main constraint to crop production in Asia. I really like eggplant. We grow it in our garden and did really well this summer. But I didn't know that it was an important food crop in Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines.
I learned that the project began in 2005 as part of a program "to use bioengineered crops to help boost food security, economic growth, nutrition, and environmental quality in selected countries," unquote. Eggplant seemed to be an obvious choice. It was a major crop, and the borer was its main enemy.
I was horrified by Professor Shelton's description. And to quote him, "I visited brinjal fields in India and heard how farmers tried to control EFSB using frequent, sometimes twice a day, insecticide spraying. Thinking I'd misunderstood the frequency, I asked the farmer again and again in different ways, but each time the answer was the same. The farmer further explained that he often sprayed on the day of harvest. When asked what insecticides he used, he replied, it was usually a cocktail of insecticides.
During my visits to Bangladesh and the Philippines, I heard similar stories and found them documented in the literature. In Bangladesh, farmers usually sprayed their crops barefooted. And as a result of widespread exposure, they reported experiencing multiple health effects, including headaches, eye and skin irritation, vomiting, and dizziness. In the Philippines, exposure of young children was of particular concern. They were often employed in vegetable production as young as six to nine years old. After the use of pesticides, children reported health symptoms, including headaches, skin irritation, and abdominal pain," unquote.
Of course, bioengineered crops are controversial and require safety laws and regulations which are different in each country. Neither India nor the Philippines were willing to allow the development of Bt eggplant in their countries. But Bangladesh, which had no prior experience with biotech crops, permitted the testing of Bt eggplant. After seven consecutive seasons under confined and open-field conditions, and with a high-level support within the Bangladeshi government, approval was granted in 2013.
Although there was some pushback from antibiotech organizations, the rate of adoption by Bangladeshi farmers was remarkably high. By 2021, more than 65,000 farmers grew Bt eggplant, with a 20% higher yield. And as the Bangladeshi minister of agriculture, Matia Chowdhury, who had visited Cornell in 2011, noted, "my job as minister of agriculture is to feed 160 million people and protect the environment. And if Bt brinjal will help us achieve this, we will move forward with it." In 2022, the Philippines also granted final approval for cultivation of Bt eggplant for food, feed, and processing. And now I'll turn this over to Corey, who will comment on his experiences and his favorite vignettes.
[APPLAUSE]
COREY RYAN EARLE: Thank you, Elaine. And thank you all for being here today. I want to start by expressing what a privilege it was to work with these three co-editors, who each is a legend in their own right and have had such an impact on the university over the years. Elaine actually helped launch my career. When I was a first-year student at Cornell, as an undergraduate, I went to Elaine in the university archives and said I was really into Cornell history and is there anything I could do for her? And she hired me to work at Kroch Library. So I got my start here in the library system. And I've been fascinated by Cornell history ever since.
I also appreciate my co-editors' patience with our generational differences at times. As the only member of the editorial team who has not yet retired, yet, I was not always able to be as responsive to their emails, and they graciously put up with my busy schedule over the last few years as the project came together. I'll speak a little bit about our editing process.
As you can imagine, one of the biggest challenges with so many authors is that we had so many different styles of writing to deal with, a lot of different formats we received the vignettes, a lot of different tones as they came in from the authors. And so many of these chapters went through several rounds of editing and sometimes rewriting with the authors and by the editors as they were submitted. Some chapters arrived as a 40-page thesis and were whittled down to a more bite-sized version for our purposes.
But we really did strive to preserve the author voice, the individual voices in each chapter. And so the real challenge was the formatting for consistency and style. We learned that Cornell University Press uses the Chicago Manual of Style for their books. So we became very familiar with Chicago style, and this included deciding when numbers are spelled out versus written as numerals, capitalization rules for geographical regions and titles, which were particularly complicated for a book like this, abbreviation, hyphenation, et cetera.
And with four different editors, you can imagine, sometimes we had different opinions about how something should be formatted as well. You never realize how vague the rules are around comma usage until you start trying to apply them consistently to 430 pages. That's a lot of commas we had to deal with.
The other big challenge was managing the editing process so that all four of us could have a say as we edited these and have input. So we had to develop a workflow, where I would do an initial edit for consistency and fact checking in each chapter. Then each of the three co-editors would then make edits and suggestions on that. I would then merge the edits together in one, new version, and then we would address any remaining agreements or disagreements, concerns about formatting, et cetera. And then each chapter had to go back to the original author. And they might have some changes or concerns about how we adapted it. So a lot of back and forth, a lot of version control and tracking, which complicated the process.
Perhaps the most time-consuming part of the editing process was formatting citations. The endnotes of each chapter were provided by authors in a very wide range of formats and often missing critical pieces of information. So the four of us had to carefully check each citation, reformat it for Chicago style, and that was quite a process. In several cases, we found quotes in chapters that had no citation, and so we did a lot of hunting down where these quotes came from as well. And with four editors, we were perhaps dangerously close to a too-many-cooks situation. But I do think that the result was a much higher quality product, thanks to each editor's input and perspective as we worked through the chapters.
So some of my favorite parts of the book are the chapters that focused on student life at Cornell. We take for granted that Cornell has an international student body today, but that was much more unusual in the 19th century when Cornell is founded. If you think it's difficult to get to Ithaca today in 2024, imagine arriving in Ithaca from Japan in 1870, which was when the first student from Japan enrolled. That was a long trip. He probably didn't go home for spring break.
That first Japanese student, he arrives in 1870. He becomes one of the first permanent residents of the United States from Japan. And that gives you an idea of how unusual that sort of global exchange was back then. And Cornell had an international student body from the very start, from when we opened in 1868.
Some of you might recognize this building in College Town. This is on Bryant Avenue. And this was built in 1911 for the Cornell Cosmopolitan Club. It was an organization founded in 1904 by a student from Argentina, and it was Cornell's International. National Student Club and basically a fraternity of sorts for many decades.
You can see the range of national flags hanging over the porch in this photo. The Cosmopolitan Club closed in 1954. The building is now a private apartment building. But the club really paved the way for dozens of international student organizations on campus today. It provided a really important community for international students, as well as an opportunity to highlight different cultures, often through these national nights that they would host there, with food and entertainment from a particular country or culture. Today, we have the Holland International Living Center on campus, a residence hall that's on North Campus, that opened in 1970, sort of a successor of the Cosmopolitan Club. And that's still going strong today, and there's a chapter on the Holland International Living Center as well if you'd like to learn more about that.
While I knew that Cornell's institutional support for international students extended far back in our history, one thing I learned while working on this project was that Cornell was the very first university with a dedicated staff member who was in charge of supporting international students all the way back in 1933. Even more interesting is that first staff member was John L. Mott, who happened to be the son of John R, Mott, class of 1888, who you might know is the only Cornell alumnus to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Both Motts, John Sr. and John Jr., were involved with global movements and organizations to promote brotherhood across national boundaries. And so it's interesting that John Jr. ended up being this first staff person dedicated to international students at Cornell.
Now, as an alumnus of the Cornell University Glee Club in my undergraduate days, I wanted to make sure that that organization's role as an international ambassador was included in the book. Cornell student musicians have been traveling around the world since 1895, when the musical clubs followed the Cornell crew to the Henley Regatta in England. Unfortunately, in that particular trip, the crew was accused of poor sportsmanship at the regatta, and the glee club's tour was poorly planned, resulting in many of the concerts being canceled.
They didn't have enough money to return home, and the glee club was stranded in England over the summer. And so they basically dispersed in London and said, find your way home, students. This was before risk management departments were at universities. But that trip in 1895 is how the Savage Club of Ithaca was formed. Some of you might be familiar with that organization.
It's a gentleman's club of artists, musicians, writers that was in London, called the Savage Club. And it adopted these Cornell musicians who were stranded in London. It helped them find their way home and invited them to their meetings and hosted them in their homes. And those Cornellians, who came back from England, then founded the Ithaca chapter of the Savage Club of London upon their return. And that organization still exists and performs in Ithaca today.
The glee club's most famous tour is probably its visit to East Asia in 1966. Students took the entire semester off from classes and spent 86 days traveling to 10 different countries, funded by the US State Department as goodwill ambassadors. It was estimated that more than 100 million people heard the glee club's performances through 49 formal concerts, 38 radio and television appearances, and over 50 informal or impromptu performances on that trip.
This photo was taken on their visit to Okinawa, and that's Glee Club Director Tom Sokol. Some of you might remember Professor Sokol leading the ceremonial dance at the Teahouse of the August Moon. Several of the students who went on this trip later returned and lived or worked in Asia, and one even met his future wife on that trip. Over the last few decades, the glee club, chorus, wind ensemble, orchestra have all toured semiregularly overseas, giving students unforgettable opportunities and experiences for cultural exchange. In fact, the tie I'm wearing came from one of those trips. In 2008, the glee club and chorus went to China, and this was brought back from that adventure.
One last chapter in the book, or the very last chapter, actually, in the book is chapter 58, and it's about another form of student exchange, and that's the transatlantic series that began in 1921 with the Cornell and Princeton track-and-field teams competing against Oxford and Cambridge. The British teams came to the US that year. And the American teams later returned the favor.
And it began a series that continues to this day, although Princeton was replaced by the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s. It's likely one of the longest-running, recurring international exchanges in college athletics. And it's another great example of the impact that these trips can have on students, many of whom have never traveled overseas before. By the way, that's notable Ithacan Charles Treman, second from the left in the front row, a name you might recognize, and Carl Meinig, father of late, Cornell Board of Trustees Chairman Pete Meinig, is fourth from left in the second row from this particular trip in 1930s.
So that wraps up the formal discussion here. But we're now going to open it up to Q&A. So I'll invite the co-editors to come up and join me. And we're happy to talk about the process of developing the book or the content in the book. And so come on up, and we'll do some Q&A. Thank you.
EVAN EARLE: Thank you all for being here and enlightening us with this great presentation. Again, I just want to emphasize how important this book is as a record for the university history, that if it wasn't for the work and experiences of these four individuals, these stories might not have been tied together and recorded into this piece that we can now reference into the future to make sure that these amazing stories are told. It really is a wonderful thing that's going to have longevity. We'll open it up to questions for anyone in the room.
AUDIENCE: One of the things I would suggest, if you can do it, that book that we got, I think should be mandated that every freshman read it somehow. Whether they do or not, of course, is there. And also the business school gets a lot of people who did not go to Cornell undergraduate or graduate, but they're there. So I think you should really, if you can, that is, get them to read this book, because what you're mentioning, it's fantastic. Any Cornellian should know about this book. Thank you. As you can imagine, getting faculty to agree to New requirements for students is a difficult process, but we certainly agree with you, by the way, the book is now available in both hardcover and in softcover. And online and e-book. Did
COREY RYAN EARLE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Did you consider calling it Far Beyond Cayuga's Waters?
[LAUGHTER]
COREY RYAN EARLE: I can't remember did that. I think that did come up, yeah. We had a long list of title options that--
HEIKE MICHELSEN: Just on the title, I think it was for us very important that when you talk about international and global, that it's really recognized how much there is ongoing international on campus and that we really put credit to that and not only when people step off campus and go far beyond Cornell.
EVAN EARLE: We have an online question. "I appreciate this talk and look forward to reading the book. I'm wondering if Cornell has been part of any harmful imperialism or colonial exploitation across the globe. Does the book address this issue, or is the focus mainly on Cornell's positive contributions?
ELAINE ENST: We didn't really address that issue, specifically. It's hard to do, in fact, because you have really changing attitudes. Certainly, Cornell President Jacob Gould Schurman was the-- it's hard to document that. We certainly know that there's been some discussion about how Jacob Gould Schurman, the third president of the university, was the head of the first Philippine commission, when the United States basically took over the Philippines. Schurman didn't approve of that. On the other hand, he did serve in that position.
We didn't deal with that issue. We could have done a chapter on Willard Straight. I once, actually, did something on Willard Straight, which I wanted to call imperialism without guilt. (LAUGHING) I never wrote that piece. It's a complicated subject. There are lots of subjects we didn't deal with in the book. And certainly people have said, well, when's volume 2 coming out? Fortunately, we're all pretty old, so somebody else might have to do-- except Corey. Somebody else will have to do volume 2.
ROY COLLE: I wonder if I could add a very quick footnote to our presentation. None of the authors received anything for participating except our gratitude. No one-- in fact, none of us got anything either. But the book is an example of dedication to Cornell University.
ELAINE ENST: And proceeds from the sale actually go back to CAPE. So we don't make any royalties. And the major motion picture, probably not.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Since, like Corey, I got my introduction to archiving from Elaine, it's an archival question. You talked about things like a manuscript that was 40 pages that had to be pulled down. But that means that there's a lot of additional information that your authors provided that isn't in the book. Is there a volume 2? Is there some way that that information's going to become available?
ELAINE ENST: Actually, there were very few chapters that were really significantly longer. The one that particularly came to my mind was the one on the Cornell Nepal program, which I did a lot of editing on, and I felt really terrible. And I actually had to write the author and said, you will probably hate me. I didn't make it better, but I made it shorter. But really, most people kept pretty much to-- so there's not really a lot of extra information there. What there is a lot of information that is not in the book because we didn't have anybody to write on it or we just ran out of space.
HEIKE MICHELSEN: There was one additional comment on this because Roy mentioned already earlier there is an eCommons site that was created quite in the beginning when he started working on the project. And there are even some interviews that he did and led with a number of faculty, some of them already dead by now, but really talk about their experience in international. And there are some articles, also some of the chapters that Roy first drafted that are featured there. And also, for example, I wrote a chapter on the Bartels Fellowship, which is since 1984 that we have this at Cornell.
And I was passionate about it. I was a coordinator for a while. And it was just there was a lot of information that is there and that I pulled together. But then for the book, the chapter, you really had to bring it down to the essence and just make it a much more lighter story. So the longer version is on eCommons. And I think if anybody is interested, from the author's side in particular, then we can review that and potentially post over there. It could be also-- this site could potentially be welcoming other contributions that we haven't. And then maybe at a certain point, if there are many, many, many, one could think about putting this together differently.
COREY RYAN EARLE: And I think we went into the project fully expecting to be told of all the things missing from the book. We knew that there would be a lot that we wouldn't have room for or find writers for. And so I'm hopeful that we do hear from people saying, oh, you left out this, you left out that, because that will help inform the future because I do think there are a lot of great stories that we didn't get to tell.
ELAINE ENST: And we were pretty careful about footnotes or endnotes. So we really did try to include the longer sources if they were ones that were used.
AUDIENCE: Well, thank you. I got a copy of the book. I've been reading a couple of chapters. I was wondering, so what are your takeaways from the book and working on all these chapters and experiences in terms of the mission of the university? So Cornell is a land grant university. It has a mission to the state specifically. And it is a controversial mission, something that is complicated sometimes. But how this global effort is connected with that mission of a land grant institution, the role in development, and so on?
COREY RYAN EARLE: I think Evan touched on it a little bit in the introduction, this idea of Cornell being a land grant university to the world. And that's a phrase that some university presidents have used over the years, but the idea of not just serving the people of New York State, but serving humanity more broadly. And so I think that was certainly a theme within the book, that Cornell's goal is to improve humanity across the globe.
ELAINE ENST: And I think to get back to the online question, to do it in a way that was collaborative. And I think that is a theme that runs through a lot of the chapters, is that we weren't trying to bring culture, bring science to poor, benighted natives. This was something that we were collaborating. We were trying to find how can we help? How can we work together that will help you, but will also help us? So I think the collaborative sense was always very important.
HEIKE MICHELSEN: I think Roy is going to say something because he has been involved in some of the-- no, no. Just my comment is that over the centuries, and definitely since the founding of Cornell, a lot of things have changed in understanding. So I think that nowadays, some of the projects that were highlighted from the 1930s, '40s, 50s, like Cornell engagement in [INAUDIBLE] and others, are nowadays seen with a much more different eye than they were seen in the '50s. Let's say the intentions were always good.
And there are definitely some key characteristics of a number of these, whether it's this mutual beneficial or we really want to do for the broader good. It's definitely creating impact in the world, most definitely. But I think it is the educating global citizens here on campus is still one of-- the core mandate was definitely enriched by all these different activities. And I think that all the students who went through Cornell had a much different understanding of international than they would have gotten if they would have been at other colleges over all these years. And you really find so many stories from across the world that are not told.
And I think I always was amazed that before I worked in international development in Africa. And for me, going to European universities, it was kind of, oh, Cornell University? Mm, didn't mean much to me, honestly. But then I worked in Africa a lot, and I organized these conferences over there. It was francophone and anglophone. And then somebody said, oh, we should have a special meeting of those people who went to Cornell. And I-- what? You want to invite two or three people or so?
And then you get these huge groups of people together who actually have a degree from Cornell and are in the leadership position in some of these countries. And you really feel the importance, what it has. And nobody's really talking too much about it or knows about it, so.
ROY COLLE: I'd like to Thank my team. They're a wonderful, wonderful group of people. But we also want to make a little presentation here at the end. Where are our books? Actually, he's handing me the book, but I'm going to hand him the book.
[LAUGHTER]
This is our thanks to the Cornell Library. And the book is designed to go into the Cornell University Library archives. So we thank you very much.
EVAN EARLE: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
ROY COLLE: And thank all of you. And I don't know whether we're still internationally on this, but there are some people probably as far away as Qatar who have been with us during this presentation. So we want to say thanks to all of them.
[APPLAUSE]
EVAN EARLE: Thank you. Thank you all for coming. All right, time?
Since its founding, Cornell University has engaged in many internationally-focused activities. The new book Beyond Borders: Exploring the History of Cornell's Global Dimensions (Cornell Publishing, 2024) reflects on the diversity, accomplishments, and impact of these engagements, both abroad and on campus, through a collection of fifty-eight short chapters, many written by authors who played pivotal roles in this history themselves. In this Chats in the Stacks book talk, the editors, Royal D. Colle, professor emeritus of Cornell University Library, Heike Michelsen, former director of programming at Einaudi Center, Elaine D. Engst, Cornell University archivist emerita, and Corey Ryan Earle, visiting lecturer in the American Studies Program, discuss this collection of vignettes which takes the reader around the world with agricultural researchers, anthropologists, medical practitioners, economists, civil engineers, Peace Corps volunteers, and more, while also exploring the vital role of international studies and language programs on campus, as well as in Cornell’s library and museum collections. Beyond Borders shows how through the education of generations of global citizens, innovative research, and mutually beneficial relationship-building Cornell University has influenced the world.
