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Since its founding in 1865, Cornell University has displayed its willingness to depart from conventional ideas. Cornell was the first major American university to be both nonsectarian and coeducational and the first to declare its advocacy of the elective idea, thus offering students a real choice of studies. Never bound by a traditional curriculum, the university has adhered to founder Ezra Cornell's goal to make Cornell "an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
Close and continuous involvement with East Asia is merely one manifestation of this commitment to innovation. Between 1900 and 1949, for example, some 30,000 Chinese students came to the United States to study. 3,500 (12%) of these students studied at Cornell. Included among these early Chinese Cornellians were such notable individuals as Hu Shih ‘14, the famous Chinese philosopher, who later served as Ambassador to the United States, and Y.R. Chao ‘14, the "dean" of Chinese linguistics. From 1867 to 1902, Cornell accepted more Japanese students than all but four other American institutions, just one fewer than Stanford and noticeably more than Harvard, Columbia, or Princeton. Yatabe Ryokichi, Cornell's first Japanese graduate, became the first curator of the Tokyo Botanic Garden, and was later appointed principal of the Upper Normal School, Tokyo Imperial University. Kuroda Nagaatsu, former chamberlain in the Japanese Imperial Palace, was also a Cornellian.
As early as the 1920's, Cornell's agricultural college joined in a cooperative program with the University of Nanjing, bringing numerous Chinese students and faculty to Cornell and sending American students abroad to study Chinese agriculture. Nobel Prize winner Pearl Buck studied peasant rural sociology. Another noted Cornellian, Charles Wason, donated his treasured personal library books on China to Cornell in 1918. Since then, the Wason Collection has become one of the nation's finest Western language libraries devoted to East Asia.
Willard Straight, famous chronicler of the Far East, graduated from Cornell in 1901. His papers are also housed at Cornell and remain one of the most heavily used collections for the study of Far Eastern history. Jacob Gould Schurman became Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to China after serving 28 years as Cornell's third president. On this tradition of close involvement with China and Japan, the program has continued to grow.
Specialized courses on Asia have been offered at Cornell since 1879, when the first Chinese language course was taught. But the scholarly study of the Far East at Cornell expanded considerably immediately after World War II, when several academic appointments were made in East Asian language, history, and culture. In 1950, Knight Biggerstaff, Professor Emeritus of Chinese History, founded the China Program with five associated faculty. Harold Shadick, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Literature, directed the China Program for the first 17 years of its existence. In 1956 Cornell organized the language teaching program centered in Taipei, which later became the core of the InterUniversity Program for Chinese Language Study. In 1960 the United States Office of Education designated Cornell an East Asian Language and Area Center, and a decade of general expansion in Chinese studies began.
In 1960 Japanese language instruction was added to the regular university curriculum. The small core of Japanese studies expanded throughout the 1960's.
During the 1970's, Cornell continued to expand its program in Chinese studies, with an extensive language program and courses of instruction in all major disciplines related to China. Japanese studies, however, witnessed the greatest growth during this period; six new positions were added in the fields of history, literature, religion, political science, and linguistics. In 1972 the number of East Asia faculty had grown to 17, and in recognition of the growing importance of Japanese studies, the China Program formally changed its name to the China-Japan Program. We became the East Asia Program in 1988 to acknowledge Korea and the increasing commitment to Korean studies in the university curriculum. By the turn of the twenty-first century new initiatives in the School of Law, Agricultural and Life Sciences, Human Development, Industrial and Labor Relations, and the Johnson School of Management, all added to the existing strengths in traditional disciplines for the study of East Asia, brought new prominence to this global region at Cornell. In the traditional disciplines, as well, there was new attention to East Asia. The surge of Korean studies in the late 1980s was followed in 2006 by the highly innovative undergraduate major, China and Asia-Pacific Studies (CAPS), the first program requiring students to spend two semesters off campus, one at Cornell in Washington, DC, and one at Peking University, Beijing. The curriculum of this program also featured unprecedented collaboration across three departments: Government, History, and Asian Studies.
Since its inception, the East Asia Program, through grants and gifts, has worked with dozens of faculty members across campus to help support the study of China, Japan, and Korea; providing fellowships, assistantships, and travel grants to students; contributing to the Wason Collection on East Asia in the Kroch Library; to East Asian language teaching; and to faculty research, in addition to publishing the Cornell East Asia Series of scholarly monographs, hosting visiting scholars from Asia and Europe, and promoting outreach to the region.