Despite the rain and cold, the tour of West Campus was a really wonderful way to learn more about the community we live in. While I’ve admired the beauty of West every time I’ve walked down the slope this year, this event made me realize that I didn’t know much about it. The tour was placed perfectly in the year at a time where we had adjusted to calling West Campus home, but where we still had a long time to directly benefit from knowing more about it.

I thought that beginning the tour with a brief history of Cornell’s origins set the tone of the event very well. At first I wondered how talking about Ezra Cornell’s life story was relevant to West specifically, but as Professor Blalock asked more and more basic questions that none of us knew the answers to (like “Where did Ezra Cornell go to college?”) I realized that learning about West would be meaningless without understanding the larger context of Cornell.  Because we ended the tour talking about West’s very recent history, such as the new House system and the institution of our own Scholars program, the event flowed naturally from broad to specific and from past to present.

I gained snippets of information about a surprisingly wide range of topics while on the tour. I had no idea that Cayuga Lake connected to the Erie Canal (even though I live five minutes from the Canal at home), and I didn’t know you could get free massages in Noyes on Tuesdays. I loved getting to hear about Quill and Dagger and the Memorial Room inside Lyon Tower, and I enjoyed getting to actually see this room even more, because it’s locked up so much of the time. What I found most interesting, however, was the bitterness that many Cornell faculty apparently have towards West Campus. I had heard professors talk about the intense cutbacks and the low morale after the 2008 stock market crash, but I had never made the connection to this being when West opened up. Luckily (at least in my opinion) the new West Campus has turned out to be extremely successful, so the University’s spending doesn’t seem frivolous in hindsight.