The Inauguration of Elizabeth Garrett: Cornell's Thirteenth President

By Elizabeth Garrett

On the occasion of the inauguration of Cornell's thirteenth president, Elizabeth Garrett, Cornell University Press is pleased to publish the official commemorative edition of her inauguration speech. This handsome volume also includes several other sections of interest to Cornellians, including a foreword by President Emeritus Frank H. T. Rhodes, remarks from Board of Trustees Chair Robert S. Harrison, poetry by Alice Fulton, selected texts by Ezra Cornell and A. D. White, a feature on Cornell’s Sesquicentennial, brief biographies of past presidents of Cornell, and a historical account of women at Cornell by Gretchen Ritter, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences.

President Garrett’s speech will be remembered for years to come, and this book is a wonderful keepsake of a historic occasion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781501702631

Elizabeth Garrett

Mike Marqusee (1953–2015) was a journalist, political activist and author who was born in New York City, and who emigrated to Britain in 1971, where he developed a love of cricket. As well as his many books, Mike published articles in the Guardian, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, BBC History Magazine and India Today. He also was a columnist for the Indian newspaper The Hindu and for the British left-wing magazine Red Pepper. In 1995, Mike helped set up 'Hit Racism for Six', a campaign against racism in cricket and in 2005 was named an Honorary Faculty Fellow by the University of Brighton in recognition of his 'contribution to the development of a critically-based form of journalistic scholarship in the social, cultural and political nature of contemporary global sport.'

Book preview

Inauguration Readings & Speeches

READING SELECTIONS

From Ezra Cornell & A. D. White

I hope we have laid the foundation of an institution which shall combine practical with liberal education, which shall fit the youth of our country for the professions, the farms, the mines, the manufactories, for the investigations of science, and for mastering all the practical questions of life with success and honor.

—Ezra Cornell, at Cornell’s inaugural exercises, October 7, 1868

There is needed a truly great University. First, to secure a place where the most highly prized instruction may be afforded to all—regardless of sex or color....to afford an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake....to afford a center and a school for a new Literature—not graceful and indifferent to wrong but earnest,—nerved and armed to battle for the right....to give a chance for instruction in Moral Philosophy, History and Political Economy unwarped to suit present abuses in Politics or Religion....to secure the rudiments, at least, of a Legal training in which Legality shall not crush Humanity.

—Letter from Andrew Dickson White to

Gerrit Smith, September 1, 1862

Coeducation of the sexes and entire freedom from sectarian or political preferences is the only proper and safe way for providing an education that shall meet the wants of the future and carry out the founders idea of an Institution where any person can find instruction in any study. I herewith commit this great trust to your care.

—Letter from Ezra Cornell in Sage College

cornerstone, May 15, 1873

ALICE FULTON

Ann S. Bowers Professor of English

SLATE

Neither pigeon, taupe, nor coal

black. Not a braille

pen embossing points on bond, the entrants

in a race, record of events, or gray

scales meshed in roofs.

Not to foreordain. But

all of the above, the future

scrubbed with fleshburn brush,

threshold unscented by event as

yet, the premise, the blackboard’s

dense blank screen, un-

reckoned rock complexion, the tablet un-

chalked with take and scene, opposite of

has-been, antonym to fixed, the

breadth of before, before

-lessness links with hope or mind or

flesh, when all is

-ful, -able, and -or, as

color, as galore, as before

words. The above,

yes, and beyond

measure—unstinting

sky, green fire of cornfields, the how

many husks clasping how

many cells, the brain to say

rich, new, if, and

swim in possibility, as it is and

ever more shall be, to fold, to

origami thought,

look, no shears or hands, the

blizzard, unabridged, within the black dilated iris

core and hold

it—little pupil can—in mind, in utero,

sculpt the is, the am.

From Felt (W.W. Norton).

SHY ONE

Because faith creates its verification

and reaching you will be no harder than believing

in a planet’s caul of plasma,

or interacting with a comet

in its perihelion passage, no harder

than considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmological

impromptu flung me here, a paraphrase, perhaps,

for some denser, more difficult being,

a subsidiary instance, easier to grasp

than the span I foreshadow, of which I am a variable,

my stance is passional toward the universe and you.

Because faith in facts can help create those facts,

the way electrons exist only when they’re measured,

or shy people stand alone at parties,

attract no one, then go home to feel more shy,

I begin by supposing our attrition’s no quicker

than a star’s, that like electrons

vanishing on one side

of a wall and appearing on the other

without leaving any holes or being

somewhere in between, the soul’s decoupling

is an oscillation so inward nothing outward

as the eye can see it.

The childhood catechisms all had heaven,

an excitation of mist.

Grown, I thought a vacancy awaited me.

Now I find myself discarding and enlarging

both these views, an infidel of amplitude.

Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time

making themselves felt, as when thirteen species

of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females

stay undiscovered due to bias

against such things existing,

we have to meet the universe halfway.

Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward