Cornell always has had its history of housing issues. Last week, the Rose Scholars attended a tour of West Campus led by Prof Garrick Blalock, who spoke about Cornell’s history. We should take pride in that the intent behind Cornell’s founding is significantly different than that of the fellow Ivy League colleges. Prof Blalock went over how Cornell’s founder, Ezra Cornell only had the equivalent of a third grade education, but he worked his way up from being a carpenter to building the telegraph business, and he found Cornell to be open to “any person, any study”, in contrast to the other Ivy Leagues’ unofficial mottos: “any rich, white, Protestant male who wants to study theology”. However, because of Cornell’s unorthodox history, Ezra Cornell also didn’t want to have a dorming experience in which the students were isolated from the greater community; thus the majority of the students rented and lived in houses in Collegetown. Eventually, North Campus was developed for all the freshmen to live together, but there weren’t any great housing options for upperclassmen who wanted to stay on campus. Thus, West Campus was developed in response with the residential college system. The tour explanation, along with a similar “The History of West Campus” talk by Prof Kramnick at last year’s Rose/Becker Cafe Series, helped to illuminate how the housing system at Cornell came to be. Cornell’s extensive history helped to explain why Cornell doesn’t have a housing system like many other older universities and how West Campus came to be.
On the tour, we visited the War Memorial Room attached to Lyon Hall and the underground tunnel that connects the loading dock at Becker House and Rose House. The tour was a great experience, especially since the War Memorial is closed off during the rest of the year. The aspect I always loved about West Campus is that the architecture is a mix of the traditional, archaic gothics with the new, modern main house buildings. Living in the main buildings, it is easy to forget how much history that’s in West. The Baker Flagpole arch is something that all West Campus students pass by every day, but I had no idea that it was specifically a war memorial for Cornell students who served and died in WWI. It was also really nice to see the tunnel that connects the Becker loading docks and Rose House; since Rose doesn’t have a loading dock on its own, all the food served in Rose is transported through the Becker tunnel. Unfortunately, we need Becker card access to get into Becker, I was hoping we would have a convenient way to get from Rose to Becker when the snow piles up outside. The tour helped us all to appreciate the little intricacies on West Campus, and Cornell’s larger history.