Beauties and Beasts.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

My son came up with sub-title, for Cornell is one of those campuses which mixes classical architecture with Victorian horrors with modern wrecking-ball specials. Yet, if the campus is not all sweetness and light architecturally, our two days there were overwhelming and we came away bedazzled.

The campus is very large indeed with 14,300 undergraduates and 7,600 postgraduates, many of the latter there at the time of our visit. Given Cornell’s pre-eminence in hotel management studies it was only fitting that we stay at the Statler Hotel in the center of the 745 acres comprising the core and, befitting the school’s expertise, the experience was perfect. Our visit coincided with the annual alumni reunion, this year for graduation years ending in 2 or 7 and we had the great joy of speaking with many alumni of the class of 1952. One elderly lady confirmed this was her year and when I stated I was born in 1951 she riposted with “I was born in 1930”. Just so special.

Cornell, along with MIT, is one of the very few private land grant universities, the beneficiaries of 1862 legislation which permits them to sell land to fund operation and expansion. Most such schools are large public schools. Cornell dates from 1865 and its goal is to be “…. an institution where any person can find instruction in any study” in the words of founder Ezra Cornell. However it came to be, this school is of such breadth and the campus so large that it is hard to convey its scale, which likely explains the large number of images below. While we did a great deal of walking, I doubt we managed to see more than one third of this glorious campus on our two day visit.

Be warned, there is some awful architecture on display, with the Bill and Melinda Gates Hall computer science building easily the worst (Sorry, Bill!). But all can be forgiven when you look at the breadth of academic choice here and the quality of faculty and the number of prominent alumni. This really is the best of the best.

The list of Cornell faculty and alumni is so extensive that only a few need be named here. They include, on the faculty side, John Cleese, Carl Sagan, Frances Perkins (FDR’s Labor Secretary) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alumni include Sandy Weill, Adolph Coors, Irwin M. Jacobs (Qualcomm), Rajan Tata, Robert Atkins of diet fame, Toni Morrison, Pearl S. Buck, Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann, Christopher Reeve, Richmond Shreve (the Empire State Building designer), and on and on.

Pastoral beauty.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

We have visited many beautiful New England colleges but none comes close to the sheer physical beauty of Colgate, a school for 2,900 undergraduates adjacent to the charming town of Hamilton, New York. Where some schools insist on the latest architect du jour as designer of the newest buildings, Colgate sticks to its classical style and the result is glorious.

A solid endowment sees to it that nothing is cheapened and we were lucky to chance on a guided tour by two enthusiastic sophomores who showed us the ropes on a beautiful New York summer day. The school dates from 1819 and rests on an 575 acre campus an hour out from Syracuse and Ithaca. Student car ownership is permitted which makes access to these larger cities feasible.

Distinguished alumni include journalists Andy Rooney, Gloria Borger and Monica Crowley, John Dean of Watergate fame (oops!), John Cassavetes and Bob Balaban.

A placid setting for a great school.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

One hour due south of Burlington, Vermont, Middlebury College educates 2,500 undergraduates in a placid setting on a beautiful campus. This is a highly rated liberal arts school and, if not the most famous, academically it is one of the best. Chartered in 1800 it was the first college to grant a bachelor’s degree to an African-American, that in 1823. It was also one of the first schools to offer education to women, in 1883. A healthy endowment sees to it that nothing is lacking in the way of amenities, as the pictures below show.

One of the striking features is that most of the buildings on the main campus are constructed from local white and grey granite, regardless of age, making for a cohesive whole. The outliers across Highway 30, which include Admissions, the Art Museum and the very extensive sports facilities, are more mixed.

If there is a standout, it’s the library. Colleges like Dartmouth may boast a greater selection of antiquarian books, but from the perspective of a place to study and a vast choice of contemporary materials, Middlebury is outstanding. Economics and languages are the strong suits here and recent gifts see to it that improvements continue apace.

Middlebury alumni rank 7th nationally of any school, measured by their success, and include John Deere of tractor fame, hedgie Lewis Bacon, James Cromwell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Ron Brown of the Clinton administration and Felix Rohatyn, the man who saved New York.

‘Risdee’ to aficionados.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

RISD is generally ranked as the #1 art school in the US, and is located at the base of the Brown University campus. The school does not confer a degree, its minor requiring studies in history, philosophy, social sciences, English, art history or liberal arts at an accredited college for a degree to be earned. Brown, as it happens, is happy to oblige and offers a dual Brown/RISD degree in exchange for five years at the two institutions.

Whether it’s photography, film, glass, furniture, graphic design, printmaking – you name it – RISD is the place to go.

We focused our brief visit the other day on some of the art on display after a busy day touring Brown. The campus is a bit all-over-the-place with no unifying quad or sense of an architectural whole, but there were lots of fun discoveries to be made. As I would far prefer my son becomes successful and buys art, rather than make art and be economically destitute, our limited visit was just right. I cannot think of a worse way of making a living than as an artist where success is as much serendipity as skill, with a healthy dollop of talent thrown into the mix. There is simply too much competition for the profession of making art to make economic sense and the barriers to entry are near non-existent, meaning too much competition.

The concept of ‘teaching art’ is anathema to me. You can teach technique in certain subjects but you cannot teach talent to the talentless, so I always rather wonder about art schools. Given that techniques can be easily learned from a book or an app (photography being an excellent example) all that remains to be found is talent and that’s a binary equation. You either have it or you do not. It cannot be taught. Think about that next time you see 20 talentless fools, untroubled by original thought, all obediently pointing their cameras at the subject as dictated by their equally talentless ‘instructor’. Or, worse, imitating that supreme bore, Ansel Adams.

RISD alumni include James Franco, David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Sam Posey (!) and many others. In no case was their talent found at school.

A lovely school in a bucolic setting.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Amherst College (the ‘h’ is silent) was founded in 1821 and is a private school with just over 1,800 students and a very low student:faculty ratio. It is not to be confused with nearby U Mass Amherst with almost 20 times the number of students but just six times the number of faculty. The Amherst College endowment is seven times that of U Mass in dollars and seventy times that of U Mass in dollars per student. Draw your own conclusions. When it comes to higher education going where the money is is generally a winning strategy.

Now it is true I am getting more than a bit tired of grey skies and lack of shadows in the snaps accompanying these pieces and, indeed, what little wan sun there was to be had when we arrived this morning promptly managed to disappear on our arrival. I sorely miss Arizona skies.

Famous Amherst alumni include Emily Dickinson, David Foster Wallace, Calvin Coolidge who perfected his non-speaking skills here, Jeffrey Wright, the estimable economist Joseph Stiglitz, Burgess Meredith and the silent comedian Teller, doubtless a fan of Coolidge’s. The list is out of all proportion to Amherst’s small size, which speaks volumes.

For images from a visit to the Mead Art Gallery at Amherst College, click here.