Syracuse University exists partly because Ezra Cornell was once cheated of his wages
Syracuse wanted Cornell University, and Andrew Dickson White pushed hard for the city. But Ezra Cornell had once been cheated of his wages as a young carpenter there, so he put his university in Ithaca instead. Syracuse got its own university in 1870, open from the start to women and Black students.
Its roots lie in Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, founded by Methodists in 1831 in Lima, New York, which grew into Genesee College after 1850. When a new railroad bypassed Lima, trustees sought a better site just as Syracuse, ninety miles east, was hunting for a university. Methodist ministers even backed Cornell's land-grant bill in return for a $25,000 donation to Genesee, but Lima won an injunction blocking the move. New York sidestepped it by chartering a separate Syracuse University on March 24, 1870, backed by a $400,000 Methodist endowment and $100,000 from the city.
Classes began in September 1871 in rented rooms downtown, before Judge George Comstock's gift of 50 acres of hillside farmland gave it a campus. Bishop Jesse T. Peck declared admission equal for all, and in the liberal arts college men and women enrolled in roughly equal numbers through the 19th century, though some leaders, including chancellor Erastus Otis Haven, resisted. Early firsts included one of the country's earliest architecture programs in 1873 and the nation's first Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1874.
Chancellor James Roscoe Day and John Dustin Archbold, Rockefeller's right-hand man at Standard Oil, drove the next era. Archbold gave almost $6 million and paid for eight buildings including Archbold Stadium, and by 1917 enrolment had climbed past 4,000. Andrew Carnegie offered $150,000 for a library in 1905 on condition that the university match it, which it did in little more than a month.
After the Second World War the G.I. Bill swelled enrolment; in 1946 it admitted 9,464 freshmen, almost four times the previous intake, and branch campuses later became Binghamton University and Utica University. By the late 1950s it ranked twelfth nationally for sponsored research. Nonsectarian since 1920, it now has 13 schools and colleges, holds R1 research status, fields teams in 20 sports, mostly in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and counts Joe Biden and 36 Olympic medalists among its alumni and affiliates.
Source: Syracuse University
