Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cornell University was founded on the 27th of April 1865, by Ezra Cornell, an entrepreneur and New York State senator, and Andrew Dickson White, an educator and fellow state senator. Cornell donated his farm in Ithaca, New York, as the initial campus site and contributed $500,000 as an endowment; White served as the university's first president.
Cornell is a private Ivy League research university, but it is one of only three private land-grant universities in the United States. Several of its colleges, including the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, are state-supported through the State University of New York and offer discounted tuition to New York residents.
64 Nobel laureates have been affiliated with Cornell University. Cornell is also the only institution with four female alumni who won unshared Nobel Prizes: Pearl S. Buck, Barbara McClintock, Toni Morrison, and Claudia Goldin.
Cornell's main campus is in Ithaca, New York, spanning approximately 745 acres. The university also operates two campuses in New York City: Weill Cornell Medicine on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. A fourth campus, Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, is located in Education City in Al Rayyan, Qatar, and opened in September 2004 as the first U.S. medical school established outside the United States.
In 1969, armed anti-Vietnam War protesters occupied Willard Straight Hall, a central building on the Cornell campus. The incident led to a restructuring of university governance and forced the resignation of then-president James Alfred Perkins.
As of 2024, Cornell's endowment stands at $10.7 billion, ranking it 14th among U.S. universities. In 2018, Cornell raised $743 million in private donations, placing it third behind Harvard University and Stanford University.