Cornell University is located in Ithaca, New York, a small town in the center of the state.

The name of Ithaca is not unfamiliar to people schooled on Taiwan. If they search their childhood memories, they'll recall it as the place where the noted scholar Hu Shih once counted apples.

The story in the textbooks goes like this: As a foreign student in the United States during the early part of the century, Hu Shih had originally wanted to study agriculture. One day he and his classmates went out to an orchard to sort apples. As he watched them working deftly away, while he was still racking his brains over which variety was which, he asked himself, "Why did I come all the way overseas to count apples?" That was when he decided to switch to Literature. Hu Shih went on to found China's vernacular literature movement.

The moral of the story is to teach children the importance of finding a direction early in life, but the little tale adds an interesting footnote to the ties that link China and Cornell.

Chinese students at Cornell today may not be aware of how much effect the school had on Hu Shih, but they do wax eloquent about the apple orchards and the picturesque beauty of the campus.

Ko Hsiang-tang, executive director of the Taipei City Planning Commission, who studied at Cornell more than ten years ago, recalls that his feelings on first arriving there were, "It's simply a paradise on earth!"

At the first touch of fall, the maple trees, apple trees and nameless other varieties that cover hill and dale start changing hue, and "the campus is awash in clusters of red, yellow and purple," says Kao Fu-jen, president of the Cornell R.O.C. Students' Association, "It's a real symphony of nature, when you come to think of it." Chen Ching-fu, a doctoral candidate in electrical engineering who often roams about taking pictures of the scenery, says he has come to realize that Cornell's claim to having "the most beautiful campus in America" is the simple truth.

Besides having a beautiful campus, Cornell University has recently become famous as "the alma mater of Lee Teng-hui, president of the R.O.C."

Lee Teng-hui entered the doctoral program in agricultural economics at Cornell in 1965, at the age of 42. One of his teachers describes him as "very different from the other students. He was hardly ever seen at outings, games or other extracurricular activities. He was always holed up in the library and his office, more like a scholar than a student." His doctoral dissertation, "Intersectoral Capital Flows in the Economic Development of Taiwan, 1895-1950," won an award from the American Association of Agricultural Economics as the best academic paper of 1969 in the entire country. Last November, Cornell president Frank Rhodes came to Taiwan to present an "Outstanding Citation" to the first head of state produced by the university.

Cornell University it named after Ezra Cornell, a rags-to-riches businessman of the early 19th century who had to forego schooling as a youngster and who vowed to set up an institution of higher learning in his home state of New York after he succeeded in business. With the help of Andrew D. White, a respected scholar and state senator, he finally raised enough funds and solved the problem of location. In 1868, on the site of a large farm in Ithaca, Cornell University was born.

America in the late l860s, just after the Civil War, was a place where a host of tasks awaited to be done. According to the dream of the founders, Cornell was to be "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study." Those words have lived on in the school's history.

Unlike Harvard, Yale, Princeton and other Ivy League schools, which are privately owned and operated, Cornell is a unique combination of public and private, receiving subsidies from the state government on the one hand and soliciting donations from individuals and foundations on the other.

The state-assisted divisions are the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the College of Human Ecology, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the College of Veterinary Medicine, which closely match the needs of the state. The other divisions, such as arts and sciences, engineering, law, medicine, management and architecture, belong to the private system.

Faculty resources in the two systems are fully comparable, and students can freely choose courses between them. "Even the revenues, except for those specified by the state, are shared by the school as a whole," says Albert E. Kaff, an editor for the Cornell University News Service.

In practice, the two-system structure has had both advantages and disadvantages for the school's development. State subsidies sound fine and dandy, but New York State has suffered from a recession recently, and the government has trimmed its educational budget, cutting revenues. Kaff admits that the university has had to turn to private donations to make up the difference and is not having an easy time of it.

The biggest beneficiaries of the "one university two systems" format are students in the state system. Although tuition for the private divisions is on a par with those of other Ivy League schools, the tuition for the state divisions, which offer the same first-tate quality, is about half. New York students also enjoy special subsidies, so more than half of the 19,000 students in the whole school are from in-state. "Cornell is the youngest of all the Ivy League schools and very well may be the least elitist," says Wu Tzu-ying, an undergraduate in the School of Hotel Administration.

In fact, Cornell's founding aims were not to become a high and mighty institution restricted to only the privileged few. In the late 19th century, when colleges on the East Coast were still debating whether to open their doors to the general public, Cornell already accepted students of all backgrounds--no matter whether they were black or white, rich or poor, male or female, all were treated the same. Cornell accepted its first woman student in 1870, two years after it was founded, and graduated its first black student in 1894, long before Harvard, Yale or Princeton.

Cornell has continued its open-door policy right up to the present, with foreign students from 109 countries around the world and many minority students such as Asian-American, Latino and Native American. It was also the first university in the United States to teach modern Far Eastern languages like Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese.

Born and raised in the U.S. and considering herself to have truly got in touch with her forebears' culture only after coming to Cornell, Cindy Ma, president of the Chinese Students' Association, points out that quite a few Chinese-American students come to Cornell because "they can meet with people of the same background." Pre-med student Henry Liu says that, the same as many Chinese-American children, most of the people he knew before college were Caucasians. It was only after entering Cornell that "I suddenly discovered one day that only one of the people eating at the same table with me was a white American." He says he has gained a lot from the university's ethnic diversity.

Besides its special cultural features, Cornell, the same as other Ivy League schools, has its standout departments academically.

The famous College of Agriculture and Life Sciences has ranked at the top of American universities for decades in agricultural economics, agricultural engineering and related fields. Most of the seed varieties of grain, corn, rice, tomatoes and other crops widely used in American agriculture originated in the labs of Cornell, and the school has made many sterling contributions to the agricultural development of the Third World. Ko Hsiang-tang, president of the Cornell Alumni Association in Taiwan, points out that Cornell guided Chinese agricultural technicians all over China in the 1920s and it maintains long-term and short-term cooperation plans and personnel exchange programs with National Taiwan University, Chung Hsing Uni-versity, the Council for Agriculture and local agricultural laboratories around the R.O.C.

Liu Hsin-chieh, a doctoral candidate in seed cultivation, points out that the main advantage of studying agriculture at Cornell is its long and glorious history, which enables it to attract the best teachers and students. Cornell was one of the first schools in the U.S. to set up a college of agriculture and its dazzling achievements stand for all to see.

Long a leader in traditional agriculture, the college of agriculture has also begun to branch out into genetics and microbiology in recent years, hoping to keep pace with the times and maintain its place at the top.

In addition to agriculture, Cornell is also very strong in science and engineering, where three Nobel prize laureates are found. The department with the most students from Taiwan, around 15 at present, is civil engineering. They call themselves the "Taiwan gang."

The College of Engineering spends more money than any other at the university. According to a survey by the National science Foundation of science and engineering programs at various U.S. colleges, Cornell spent US$268 million on research in the 1988-89 academic year, the second highest in the country. Several of its research facilities, such as the Center for High Energy Synchrotron Studies, the Floyd R. Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies and the Center for Theory and Simulation in Science and Engineering (with a fifthgeneration supercomputer), are one of a kind in the whole world.

The College of Veterinary Medicine was the first in the world to discover that insects can transmit contagious diseases, enabling mankind to control the spread of yellow fever and malaria. It was also the first research institution to carry out the inoculation of animals to control disease.

Beyond strict academics, Cornell also offers an extremely practical program: Its School of Hotel Administration, founded in 1950 as the first in the U.S., grew out of the home economics department in the college of agriculture in response to the growth in the tourist industry. The Statler Inn on campus belongs to the school, providing students with a chance to practice what they learn.

The school stresses a hands-on approach, covering everything involved in a hotel's operation, from the structure of the building and the organziaiton of the personnel right down to the uniforms of waiters and how to make cocktails. Graduate student Liu Hui-hsin says that the school's concept of "you can't be a manager unless you can do it yourself" is a big trial for students from Taiwan who have never done anything but study. Her pet phobia is the kitchen. Just smelling all the spices makes her dizzy, and the other students regularly finish while she is still frantically busy. Once they were supposed to make carrot soup and she hadn't had time to read the recipe, so she just threw in a bunch of salt and pepper the way she usually does when making soup. When the teacher sampled it, he said, "That's not what I was looking for, but it tastes okay anyway," and the class broke up in laughter.

It's a common problem for foreign students: having just arrived in a new environment and come in contact with a new culture, they want to meld and adapt immediately. Liu Hui-hsin says that the university looks after its foreign students very well. But just as at any other topnotch school, no teacher can make concessions to you in your classwork just because you're a foreigner.

Compared to most universities, Cornell exerts an even bigger pressure -- flunking out. The school's policy makes it easy to get in but hard to graduate, so it has a high attrition rate. "A dropout rate of 20 percent between the first and second year of graduate school is common in engineering and agriculture," Liu Hui-hsin says.

Since most students from Taiwan study in those two colleges and since Ithaca is free of the temptations of the big city, many of them simply hole up in the library or the laboratory. "If you call the lab at 11 or 12 at night, you'll usually find whoever you're looking for," they kid each other.

Besides their courseload, students have also been facing another kind of pressure recently--financial. With the state slashing its budget for education, student expenses are climbing, and even though the average growth in tuition over last year has only been 7.5 percent, students in the private system have found the increase especially hard to bear. "Six years ago, the registration fee for one term was just over $4,000. Now it's $8,000," says Lu Yuan-ping, who is studying civil and environmental engineering. This April, students demonstrated against the high tuition, saying it ran counter to the school's founding ideals.

The financial problems are a reality, and the students aren't the only ones troubled. To maintain its reputation, the university must continue to bring in top professors, add facilities and provide scholarships to attract the best students--and all that takes money. "Many professors like Cornell, but their spouses don't want to come here because they can't find work," Albert Kaff says. Given its out-of-the-way location, the university's other steps to attract people acquire even more importance, he adds, so raising tuition is unavoidable.

During the 120 years of Cornell's history, the reign of the Ivy League at the top of American higher education has gradually been broken by the up-and-coming universities of the West Coast. Stanford and Caltech both celebrate their centenaries this year, having made outstanding contributions to the development of the West Coast academic world. As the competition intensifies, can Cornell adhere to its founding ideals of being "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study" and still maintain its standing and reputation as a first-rate university? Can it continue to be "the least elitist Ivy League school"? These are the questions it currently faces.

[Picture Caption]

A hilltop view of the campus with a glimpse of Ithaca in the distance. The buildings in the foreground belong to the College of Arts and Sciences.

President Lee Teng-hui's doctoral dissertation is often checked out by curious students from Taiwan. The picture was taken outside the library of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The College of Agriculture, Cornell's showcase college, has made sterling achievements in the science of seed cultivation.

(Left) Olin Library, seasoned by time, has a typically Ivy League look about it.

A staute of Ezra Cornell, the founder, stands in a square in the College of Arts of Sciences.

Look like a hotel room? Actually, it's the corner of a classroom. The School of Hotel Administration stresses "learning by doing."

(Left) This clocktower, built in 1868, is a university landmark.

With its picture-perfect scenery, Cornell has the reputation of owning the most beautiful campus in America.

Three faculty members won Nobel Prizes in science in 1989 and 1990, giving a big lift to their departments, which are the university's best funded. The picture shows a couple of students in the doctoral program for physics discussing molecular structure.

Cornell Falls is a famous sight on campus.

(Left) Studying in a vintage setting like this is one of life's finer pleasures. Taken in Olin Library.

President Lee Teng-hui's doctoral dissertation is often checked out by curious students from Taiwan. The picture was taken outside the library of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

（Left） Olin Library, seasoned by time, has a typically Ivy League look about it.

The College of Agriculture, Cornell's showcase college, has made sterling achievements in the science of seed cultivation.

A staute of Ezra Cornell, the founder, stands in a square in the College of Arts of Sciences.

（Left） This clocktower, built in 1868, is a university landmark.

Look like a hotel room? Actually, it's the corner of a classroom. The School of Hotel Administration stresses "learning by doing.".

With its picture-perfect scenery, Cornell has the reputation of owning the most beautiful campus in America.

Three faculty members won Nobel Prizes in science in 1989 and 1990, giving a big lift to their departments, which are the university's best funded. The picture shows a couple of students in the doctoral program for physics discussing molecular structure.

（Left） Studying in a vintage setting like this is one of life's finer pleasures. Taken in Olin Library.

Cornell Falls is a famous sight on campus.