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So What’s It Like to Work at Cornell?
In Brief
Cornell is a vibrant and varied community of learning set within an amazing natural environment. The more you get to know Cornell, the more impressed you’ll be by the diversity of its people, its rich opportunities, and its room for personal and professional growth.
An Amazing Natural Environment
To start with, the place is big, but the community you build around yourself can be as large or as small as you choose.
The Ithaca campus of 745 acres and 260 major buildings is set amidst 3,600 acres of gardens, natural preserves, woodlands, trails, streams, and gorges, collectively known as Cornell Plantations and open to the public, and the Laboratory of Ornithology, which includes the 200-acre Sapsucker Woods, a wildlife sanctuary with more than four miles of trails, a 10-acre pond and a bird-feeding garden.
A Vibrant and Varied Community
To educate its approximately 20,000 undergraduate and graduate students, Cornell employs over 9,500 staff and faculty members. Life experience spans from children in the early-childhood program and children of staff and faculty attending summer camp to retirees and professors emeriti. It has been said that Cornell is like a city on a hill—from electricians to engineers, artists to architects, business managers to bus drivers, printers to psychologists, chefs to coaches, admissions assistants to anthropologists—veterinarians, ornithologists, librarians, accountants, research and administrative assistants, dining staff and heavy machine mechanics, and almost any other occupation possible. The interests, skills, and expertise of Cornell’s faculty and students range throughout the classical and the practical academic disciplines, making possible the pursuit of countless careers.
Rich Opportunities
For those who work on the Ithaca campus, there are opportunities usually found only in metropolitan areas—theatre, fine dining, library and computer resources, recreational and athletic facilities, and hundreds of staff- and student-interest groups. Downtown Ithaca is full of historic buildings and districts, restaurants, bookstores, art galleries, and specialized shops.
There is also the geographic diversity of Cornell, which extends far beyond Ithaca. In addition to the Ithaca campus, there are staff, students, researchers, and faculty at the Weill Medical College and Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences, located in New York City; at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y.; at the Shoals Marine Laboratory off the coast of Maine; at the fifty-seven Cooperative Extension offices across New York State; at our development and program offices across the country; and at the Arecibo Observatory, located in Puerto Rico and site of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope.
Contract and Endowed Colleges
Seven privately endowed colleges and four contract colleges are based in Ithaca. This union of private and state-assisted education has its origins in Cornell’s founding in 1865, realizing the dual vision of a classicist, Andrew Dickson White, and a pragmatist, Ezra Cornell, who wanted to “found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” Called “the new American university,” Cornell is the youngest Ivy and New York’s only land-grant institution. And as New York State’s land-grant university, Cornell has received both federal and state funding for organized research and extension-service programs that serve the state, the nation, and beyond.
This division between state and private funding creates complexities only those familiar with the system can truly appreciate. Take the benefits Cornell offers to its staff, for instance. All benefits-eligible staff members are covered by Cornell’s group term life insurance (“Basic Life Insurance”), workers’ compensation, and short- and long-term disability. All are eligible to enroll, should they choose, in Cornell’s supplemental group life (“Group Universal Life”), personal accident, select benefits, and tax-deferred retirement plans. Endowed employees (funded from the private side of the university) are eligible for the health care plans and basic retirement plans offered by Cornell, whereas state contract college employees (employed and/or supported in part by funds from New York state through the “contract” colleges) are eligible for the health care plans and basic retirement plans offered by the State of New York. The pages that follow explain these different benefits and their applicability to contract college and/or endowed staff.
All non-bargaining unit staff members, whether employed within the state contract colleges or endowed divisions, are included in the university’s Staff Compensation Program, which provides the guidelines that affect how staff are paid, and earn promotions, raises, and/or bonuses. Bargaining-unit staff wage-administration matters are determined through collective-bargaining processes and are documented in their contracts.
The Future and the Past
Like many other institutions of higher education, Cornell is in a period of radical change. The opportunities of the Information Age, increased competition for federal research dollars and decreasing state funding, the need to be increasingly competitive in order to continue to attract a diverse, high-quality student, faculty, and staff population—these are all real and pressing issues. But there is a vibrancy that comes from these challenges—people meeting together, discussing, debating, developing solutions—that make this place come alive with discovery, innovation, and camaraderie.
There is an agelessness to Cornell. The Gothic arches of our west campus dorms contrast with the glass and concrete cubism of the Johnson Museum and our biotechnology and theatre-arts buildings. Cornell’s original buildings replaced cow pastures; its later ones overlook gorges that were carved from rock shaped at the time of the glaciers. The people who learn, teach, and work here reflect the university’s mix of past and future, unity and diversity. While students come and go in a flurry of activity every year, staff can count with pride generations of families who have worked at Cornell and live in Ithaca and the surrounding towns.
So, what is it like to work at Cornell? It is what each person makes of it. For many, it is a road of discovery, a place that encourages continual learning and allows people to realize their true potential. For most, Cornell is a way of shaping the future by contributing either directly or indirectly to the experience of the students of today.
Just about the time that you will become convinced that your individual role seems small in comparison to Cornell’s size and complexity, you will run into someone who knows someone who . . . and you discover your place in the vast network that makes up the Cornell community.
DISCLAIMER: The policies contained in this handbook are not conditions of employment, and are not intended to create a contract between the university and its employees. The university reserves the right to amend or revoke the policies in this handbook at any time without notice. The university reserves the right to change the content of this handbook at any time. Nothing contained in this handbook constitutes a promise or guarantee of continuing employment or benefits.