Cornell University

Cornell University is home to 20,000 students and 2,600 faculty members. It's a city unto itself. The sprawling college campus encompasses some 260 buildings on a lush 745-acre landscaped hilltop.

Start your visit to Cornell University with a campus tour, offered daily starting from Day Hall. Other must-see campus locations include the I.M. Pei-designed Johnson Museum of Art, the 4,000+ acre gardens and natural areas of Cornell Plantations, and some of the most dramatic gorges in New York near Bebe Lake and Triphammer Falls. When you are done touring, visit Cornell Dairy Bar to enjoy fresh homemade ice cream right in the city that invented the ice cream sundae! 

Day and night, Cornell's event calendar is always full, offering a wide array of films, lectures, exhibits, sports and arts events year ‘round:

• Slope day music and festivities
• Lectures and discussions with leaders of industries and nations
• World-class art exhibitions and displays
• On-campus cinema

Visiting the School

If you're visiting the school, there are a variety of hotels in Ithaca are available in the area to accommodate visits to this world-renowned campus in the Finger Lakes Region.

More about Cornell University

Bright Idea

America's first electric streetlights were lit on the Cornell Campus in December 1875, making Ithaca the first city in North America with outdoor electric lighting.

Burning Lolita

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov was a little known émigré professor when wrote "Lolita" between semesters at Cornell—and he almost destroyed the novel here in a fiery case of writers block prior to publication. His wife Vera changed literary history when she rescued the manuscript from the incinerator at their rental house on East Seneca St.

Cornell Creations & Discoveries

The chicken nugget, invented by poultry scientist Bob Baker; the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, rediscovered (maybe) by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in 2005; the song "Puff the Magic Dragon," penned by Cornell Student Lenny Lipton and popularized by classmate Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary.

Brainy on the Hill

Cornell boasts 40 Nobel Prize winners including Pearl S. Buck, Richard Feynman, Hans Bethe and Toni Morrison. Other well-known Cornellians include Carl Sagan, E.B. White, Jane Lynch, Keith Olbermann and Ann Coulter.

Be sure to take a journey across town to the South Hill and visit Ithaca College, where concerts, theater productions, or lectures are scheduled nearly every day throughout the school year.