Cornell University, a private institution, is the land-grant university of the state of New York. A land-grant university is partly endowed by the United States government under the Morrill, or Land-Grant, Act of 1862 (see Land-grant university). Most of Cornell’s schools and colleges are on the main campus in Ithaca. The others are in New York City and Doha, Qatar.
Cornell University was founded in 1865. It was named for its founder, Ezra Cornell, an American businessman and philanthropist. Cornell students come from throughout the United States and from dozens of other countries. In 2014, the university began construction of a new 2-million-square-foot (186,000–square-meter) Cornell NYC Tech campus on New York City’s Roosevelt Island. The campus was to be built in phases. The first buildings opened in 2017.
Cornell’s athletic teams are nicknamed “the Big Red,” a name that originated from the football team’s Big Red Bear mascot in 1916. The university’s website at https://www.cornell.edu/ presents information about the institution.
