By Joe Wilensky, Cornellians

The two statues have faced each other, gazing across the Arts Quad, for more than a century. One, of course, depicts founder Ezra Cornell—standing resolutely, one hand holding his hat and a walking stick, the other resting on a copy of the University Charter. A telegraph receiver behind him represents the industry that made his fortune.

Several hundred feet away is the statue of A.D. White, the University’s co-founder and first president. He’s depicted seated, looking relaxed, scholarly, grandfatherly, and approachable. The weathered bronzes anchor the historic center of campus—representing the complementary ideals, experiences, and roles that birthed not just one university, but a revolutionary model of higher education.

“I always found Andrew Dickson White to be an extraordinary figure,” says Elaine Deutsch Engst, MA ’72, Cornell’s archivist emerita. “He truly can be seen as the architect of the modern American university.”

White was an educator, historian, and politician; an erudite and passionate book collector; and, later in life, a statesman and diplomat. His reputation as a cultured academic and intellectual is often juxtaposed against that of Ezra, the practical, no-nonsense, and sometimes gruff farmer, entrepreneur, and businessman. Indeed, in Cornell University: Founders and the Founding, historian Carl Becker vividly contrasts White, “the nervously active, buoyant and vital man, a young intellectual Lochinvar out of the academic world,” with the older, “dour and austere” Ezra, who was “as well weathered as a hickory knot.”

And while Ezra famously wrote “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study”—and donated his land and much of his fortune for the University—it was White who drafted most of its founding charter, designing Cornell’s academic and educational workings, principles, and character.

Says University Archivist Evan Earle ’02, MS ’14: “The breadth of the University’s studies, accomplishments, and influence on a global scale would have to make him proud.”

The elder son of Horace and Clara Dickson White, A.D. was born into privilege in Homer, NY, in 1832; his maternal grandfather was a state legislator and his father was a leading Syracuse merchant and banker.

“While his family was prominent and prosperous,” Engst points out, “they were also connected to the progressive atmosphere of the area—abolitionism and women’s rights, for example.”

White grew up in Syracuse and attended Geneva College (now Hobart and William Smith) before transferring to Yale. After graduation, he spent three years in England, France, and Germany—visiting countless libraries and museums while studying at the Sorbonne and elsewhere. He also served as an attaché and translator for the U.S. ambassador to Russia.

In A History of Cornell, Morris Bishop 1914, PhD 1926, quotes a friend of White who described him as a “small man, very slight, weighing not over 120 pounds, all energy and endurance, but stooped under mental labor and thought.”

He was only 25 when he joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1858, teaching history and English literature. By 1862—two years before Ezra began pondering what to do with his fortune—White had begun thinking about a new kind of university that would lead the way in reforming the nation’s higher education system. At age 30, following his father’s death, he returned to Syracuse and got involved in state politics. In a letter to Gerrit Smith—a wealthy abolitionist and reformer who was potential co-founder—he laid out his idea.

“There is needed a truly great university,” he wrote. Such an institution would be open to all, “regardless of sex or color” and would “afford an asylum for science—where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake—where it shall not be the main purpose of the faculty to stretch or cut science exactly to fit ‘revealed religion.’”

The institution White envisioned would also teach modern literature, moral philosophy, history, and political science. As he wrote: “It must have the best libraries; collections in different departments: laboratory, observatory, botanical garden perhaps; professorships; lectureships.”

While Smith ultimately declined due to poor health, two years later, the fates aligned when White—newly elected as one of the State Senate’s youngest members—met Ezra, who at 57 was one of its oldest. The two soon found themselves working together, maneuvering politically and legislatively to ensure their nascent university could obtain funding via the recent Morrill Land Grant Act.

White not only shared Ezra’s view that it be nonsectarian and open to all—he urged that its students be offered greater freedom of choice in selecting their coursework. And it was White who insisted, over his cofounder’s initial objections, that the school be called “The Cornell University.”

New York’s governor signed the bill that constituted its charter on April 27, 1865.

Over the next three years, Ezra oversaw the construction of Morrill and White halls on a portion of his donated farmland. Meanwhile, White traveled—mainly overseas—to purchase books, collections, and lab supplies, and to recruit faculty. The knowledge he gleaned about innovations in technical education led to state-of-the-art facilities for mechanical engineering on the Hill, as well as the establishment of the nation’s first electrical engineering department.

The University opened in October 1868, with 412 students who’d just passed entrance exams reporting for classes.

Later writing in his autobiography, White said he was heartened that the University’s progressive academic structure had drawn such a fine group of undergrads.

“In this way, a far larger number were interested than had ever been under the old system of forcing all alike through one simple, single course,” he wrote.

As he went on to observe: “Even from the first, the tone at Cornell was given, not by men who affected to despise study, but by men who devoted themselves to study.”

Former history lecturer Carol Kammen notes that, out of everything White had envisioned for the University, only one aspect wasn’t realized: he’d hoped that students would live in local residents’ homes, rather than in dormitories—offering additional perspective and integrating them into the community.

“All of his other goals,” says Kammen, author of Cornell: Glorious to View, “are evident and can be found on campus today.”

Another of White’s notable contributions was his instrumental role in developing the library. In addition to serving as its founding acquisitor, he gifted his personal collection—more than 30,000 volumes in all—to the University when he stepped down as president in 1885.

The tone at Cornell was given, not by men who affected to despise study, but by men who devoted themselves to study. Even today, the collections he built—on the French Revolution, the Reformation, witchcraft, architecture, the American Civil War, slavery, abolitionism, and the history of science—are among the world’s finest and most exhaustive.

And for generations of Cornellians, a favorite spot on campus is the space that originally housed those collections: Uris Library’s ornate, multilevel A.D. White Reading Room.

In 1871, White commissioned two Cornellians to create an elegant campus residence; he’d live in the villa—now known as the A.D. White House—the rest of his life, when he wasn’t traveling or working abroad.

Throughout his older years, White continued to teach and write. His most influential work—the two-volume A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the culmination of 30 years of research—was published in at least six languages during his lifetime. His two-volume Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White came out in 1904.

He served as U.S. ambassador to Germany (twice), as minister to Russia, as president of the American delegation to the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, and as the first president of the American Historical Association.

White’s first wife, Mary Outwater White, died in 1887. His second, Helen Magill White, holds her own academic distinction: she was the first American woman to earn a doctoral degree, a PhD in Greek from Boston University in 1877.

Cornell’s founding president died in November 1918 at age 85. While he had four children who lived to adulthood—three from his first marriage, one from his second—he has no living descendants.

A quarter-century after his passing, speaking on the occasion of Cornell’s 75th anniversary, then-President Edmund Ezra Day lauded the tradition of academic freedom that prevailed on campus. He described a “rebelliousness” that could be traced directly back to its founding president. It was White, Day said, who had “released the forces that transformed higher education in this country. It was he who made men see the narrow restriction of the old academic schooling.”

White lived to see his statue erected on the Arts Quad in 1915—and was even present for its unveiling. In A History of Cornell, Bishop notes that White once wrote: “I can bear to die, but not to be forgotten.”

“Surely he will not be forgotten,” Bishop writes. “Not alone his works and deeds, but the admirable bronze statue … will preserve his memory through mortality’s measurable time.”

Original article published in Cornellians (March 18, 2025)

Image courtesy of Rare and Manuscript Collections.