Toni Morrison and Cornell

When she first came to Cornell in 1953 her name was Chloe Wofford, though her friends already called her Toni, a contraction of her middle name Anthony. After earning her master’s degree in English from Cornell in 1955, she returned for two summer classes in 1957. She visited Cornell again in the mid-1960s while working for a publishing company an hour up the road in Syracuse. More notable was a visit she made in 1978 to deliver a lecture and reading titled “A Matter of Fiction.” By then she was the author of three novels and was already being recognized as a major voice in contemporary American literature. She visited again in 1988, reading from her newest novel Beloved to a packed Bailey Hall. Her most triumphant return came ten years later in 1998 when she made her first appearance for the honorary appointment as A. D. White Professor at Large. She visited again in 2000, and while her term as A. D. White Professor officially ended in 2003, she made two more visits in 2009 and 2013. In all, this represents a span of 60 years between her enrollment as a student in the fall of 1953 and her final appearance on campus. So she is a Cornellian in the fullest sense.

Toni Morrison reflected on her Cornell experience more than a decade after graduating, in a letter to her thesis advisor, Professor Robert Elias:

I am going to take another liberty and tell you now what I would never have dared to say, or even dared to know, when I was in Ithaca. Cornell was the first place in my life where I was treated as a human being. That is, nobody patted me on my wooly pate and shoved a watermelon in my hand; nobody went into fits of glee when I strung a simple sentence together; nobody (and this was the important thing) nobody considered my stupidities negro stupidities—and the penalties for slovenliness and ignorance were neither lessened nor exaggerated. I was welcomed there into the human race and, good or ill, I have been there ever since. Now, that, I think, was progress.

–Roger Gilbert, Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell