Cornell University:
An International Key University for China
Remarks of Jeffrey S. Lehman at
The China Agricultural University
June 30, 2004
Thank you, President CHEN. It is wonderful to be here at China Agricultural University to see firsthand the important work that your faculty members and students are doing. It is exciting to be able to sign new memoranda of agreement between Cornell and China Agricultural University during my visit and to developing even closer ties between our two schools. And I am truly honored that you have chosen to make me an honorary member of your distinguished faculty.
In my remarks this morning I would like to explain why it was so important for me to visit China during my very first year as Cornell’s president. I will place this visit within the context of Cornell’s 139-year-long history and also within the context of today’s global interdependencies. I will describe how Cornell University’s commitment to serve humanity frames a course of action for the future. And I will elaborate upon that course of action’s special implications for our relationship with China Agricultural University.
We share the sentiments that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao articulated when he visited the United States last December: “To strengthen China-US cooperation is not only a mutual need but also a responsibility, which our two countries shoulder in the interest of world peace and development.”
For more than one hundred years, Cornell has enjoyed a uniquely important relationship with China, one that has been characterized by the most profound mutual respect and benefit. As I complete my first year as Cornell’s new President, I am excited to have the opportunity to bring that relationship to an entirely new level.
For those of you who have not yet visited Cornell, let me give you a brief overview of the university.
About 20 years ago, the historian Frederick Rudolph wrote a history of American undergraduate education. In that book, Rudolph described Cornell as “the first American university,” the expression of “revolutionary curricular reform.”
Before Cornell was founded in 1865, almost all America’s greatest universities had a very limited purpose. They were associated with a single religion and were established to prepare young men for the professions of law, medicine, and the ministry. To do so, they relied on a liberal education in the classics.
But Cornell was founded after our country had gone through an industrial revolution and its own civil war. There was an emerging sense that higher education was needed for more than just the young men of the professional classes. Cornell was created with the goal of providing an education that was open to all and that showed equal respect for traditional classical subjects and for more applied technological subjects like agriculture and engineering. A true university, universal in its approach to knowledge, universal in its approach to people. And from the moment of its founding, Cornell University has engaged the world. Among the 412 students who arrived for Cornell’s first classes in 1868, five students had come from overseas.
The creation of Cornell University forever changed the world of higher education in the United States. Today almost all of America’s finest comprehensive research universities have evolved to teach young men and women of all religions and races. They almost all strive to teach theory and application, humanities and science together.
And yet Cornell remains a very special kind of American university. Today Cornell is the most educationally and socially diverse university in the Ivy League. Cornell draws its 20,000 students from every one of the United States and from more than 120 countries. If one looks just at China, one finds that more than 600 Chinese students, professors, research scholars, other exchange visitors and family members are currently at Cornell.
Why so many? Part of the reason no doubt is that Cornell university has always taken an unusually strong interest in China. In 1879, only 11 years after it offered its first class, Cornell offered its students the opportunity to study the Chinese language. Today, Cornell is still the only American university to offer the Full-Year Asian Language Concentration program, a year-long immersion program in which students are expected to speak Mandarin Chinese all day long.
The students who have come from China to study at Cornell have been truly exceptional.
The first Chinese student to graduate from Cornell was Shi Zhao Zhi, who graduated in 1901. Mr. Shi became China’s Ambassador to the United States in 1921, and through his influence Cornell President Jacob Gould Schurman became U.S. Ambassador to China the same year.
Another prominent Cornell graduate, Hu Shih, Cornell Class of 1914, became a significant figure in educational and social reform in China and a champion of China’s literary renaissance. Other prominent Cornell graduates from the early 20th century include Zhao Yuanren, who became a leading linguist and a chief architect of China’s language reforms; Bing Zhi, who went on to found the Chinese National Institute of Biology; and Mao Yisheng, who became a leading engineer of bridges. In addition, Cornell trained so many Chinese agriculturalists that the university became known in China as “the cradle of modern Chinese agriculture.
In 1915, Chinese students at Cornell founded the Chinese Science Society, which evolved into one of the organizations that was united to form the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the same time the students established the journal Kexue, which remained the leading scientific journal in China for many decades, and brought about innovations that allowed the written Chinese language to handle scientific topics clearly.
In the 1920s, Cornell and China developed active research partnerships. Between 1925 and 1931, for example, Cornell professors directed a plant-breeding program in China, with sponsorship from Cornell, the University of Nanjing, and the International Education Board. This plant-improvement project led to substantial increases in the yields of major food crops, including rice and wheat, and trained a cadre of Chinese plant-breeding specialists to carry on the research.
One of those scientists, Teng Shu Chun, studied at Cornell from 1923 through 1928, then taught at several universities in China while documenting the fungal diseases of wheat, rice, and cotton. His extensive collection of fungi from China was sent to Cornell for safekeeping at the start of World War II. Cornell looks forward to repatriating the collection to China once its maintenance and preservation can be assured.
After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Cornell was one of the first American universities to enter into academic exchange agreements with China. The Cornell-Oxford-China Nutrition Project, carried out by Cornell’s T. Colin Campbell in rural Chinese villages beginning in 1983, remains the most comprehensive research project on the link between diet and disease ever undertaken.
When I became Cornell’s eleventh president last year, I challenged our university to consider what our founding values imply about who we should be in the twenty-first century.
Our world has been transformed by a series of revolutionary changes over the past fifty years, and those revolutionary changes are continuing today. We have seen a true revolution in the technologies of communication, computation, and transportation. We are seeing the breathtaking implications of that technological revolution for the movement of people around the globe and for their appreciation of one another. We are seeing the consequences of that movement for the spread, adaptation, and mixing of political, economic, and cultural values. Despite the persistence of misunderstanding and conflict, we are witnessing the evolutionary development of a truly transnational pluralistic culture.
Such a culture includes profoundly important universal aspirations while retaining equally important regional, national, and local variation. It is based on a vision of universalism that reinforces and is reinforced by pluralism. And today this vision is animating progress everywhere.
In my speeches around the world, I have insisted that the emergence of this transnational pluralistic culture is profoundly important, for education and for all humanity. It concerns more than just economic change.
To be sure, falling transportation costs and rising technological capacity are important factors. They are what make it so easy for me to be standing here before you today. But the transnational imperative goes far beyond that.
Why are human beings of the twenty-first century so interested in other countries, their people, their
societies? One reason is that they hope to gain new insight into themselves and their own society by better understanding how other societies and cultures have taken different paths to resolve similar social questions.
Yet I think an even more significant reason has to do with our shared humanity. Even while we respect the importance of national borders, a core part of us believes we belong to a community that includes all human beings. We are affirmed whenever we recognize ourselves in people from different cultures. We are ennobled when we appreciate that people everywhere share a joint responsibility to care for the planet we all inhabit.
Higher education today must prepare students to live in this exciting new world. And I believe that, because of its revolutionary founding values, Cornell has a special duty to nurture a transnational perspective on the human condition.
A transnational perspective must be open and engaged. Open to new ideas, new ways of thinking, new ways of feeling. A transnational perspective must recognize the variety among the world’s cultures without rushing to presume some variants superior and others inferior. A transnational perspective is different from a global perspective because it transcends nationalism without insisting on a unitary global substitute. It embodies a vision of universalism that reinforces and is reinforced by pluralism.
Such a vision entails much more than a detached acceptance of alternative perspectives, however. A transnational perspective implies a willingness to engage. To participate in the efforts of people everywhere to better understand the world and to improve the conditions of their lives. To advocate for certain humanist values, even while listening carefully and respectfully to those who might reject those values.
Shi Zhao Ji, Cornell’s first Chinese student, graduated more than a century ago. In our second century of partnership with China, Cornell University, a transnational university for the twenty-first century, must take our special relationship to take our relationship to a new level. Cornell must be, in effect, one of China’s overseas key universities. We must sustain relationships of trust and friendship with China’s national key universities and key research institutions. This relationship will express itself in distinct programs of joint research and teaching. But it will be more than just a collection of individual programs. It will be a spirit of cooperation, a philosophy of shared destiny, a commitment to one another that will make it natural and easy to add new joint programs whenever we see that such programs have the potential to improve the human condition. I am calling this spirit of shared destiny the Cornell-China New Century Initiative.
During our current visit to China, we are exploring and developing exciting new joint programs of research and teaching at the China Agricultural University, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, at Peking University Medical College, at Peking University, and at Tsinghua University. But we are doing more than that. In our meetings with leaders of these universities and with government ministers, we are strengthening our special partnership, establishing the relationships that will define the Cornell-China New Century Initiative.
These is an exciting moment for Cornell University, just as it is an exciting moment for China. I am honored to have been invited to speak with you today. And in the time we have left, I would be happy to answer your questions.
