When the 3,552 members of the Class of 2000 arrived on campus four years ago, so did a semantic debate. What would they call themselves? The Zips? The Double-Os? The Aught-aughts? Such a significant moment--a class represented by a particularly round, profound number--couldn't be left to random designation, could it? One hundred years earlier, there was no discussion. The 555 freshman in the Class of 1900 were quickly given a whimsical nickname--the Naughty-naughts. And such were the expectations from the campus humor magazine. "The name of the incoming class stands for nothing, means nothing, and amounts to nothing," The Widow declared, "so let's have an end to all this excitement."

In the year the Naughty-naughts graduated, German physicist Max Planck expounded the quantum theory, Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, and the Wright Brothers set off for Kitty Hawk. In 1899, the director of the U.S. Patent Office had declared, "Everything that can be invented has been invented." The next year, the world was introduced to the public escalator, the paper clip, and the Kodak Brownie camera. Not yet off the drawing board: the vacuum cleaner, the telephone booth, the thermos, and the neon light. Las Vegas and Hollywood were western outposts boasting a few hundred residents. Times Square was still known as Longacre Square.

The U.S. had just assumed world status with its victory in the Spanish-American War, and the state of Cornell was not unlike the state of the Union--a swaggering upstart hurtling into adulthood. The Class of 1900, like the Class of 2000, was at the cusp of a revolutionary century. With the insight of hindsight, we can see that The Widow was wrong. The Naughty-naughts represent something after all--an opportunity to examine the bookends of a century and gauge the distance between then and now.

STUDENT POPULATION

1900: 2,240. A decade later, Cornell's would rank (briefly) as the second-largest student body in the nation. Women represented one-fifth of enrollment. Self-governed and keeping largely to themselves, they were frequent targets of anti-coedism on campus.

2000: 19,021. A mid-sized university, Cornell has the largest undergraduate enrollment in the Ivy League--13,374 for the 1999-2000 academic year. The senior class is 47.5 percent female, including all but one member of the Class of 2000 council.

FEMALE FACULTY MEMBERS

1900: Three. That's out of 314 faculty members. Lecturers Anna Comstock 1885 (nature study) and Louise Brownell (English) were denied professorial appointments. Martha Van Rensselaer was brought in to run the new Department of Home Economics--amid the steam and water pipes in the basement of Morrill Hall.

2000: 416. That's out of 1,588 faculty members. The start of a new millennium brought the appointment of Carolyn "Biddy" Martin as Cornell's first woman provost.

MAIN CLIMB TO CAMPUS

1900: Buffalo Street. The campus consisted of twenty buildings on 300 acres. The majority of students lived in the "flats" in Ithaca.

2000: Libe Slope. The campus includes 260 buildings on 745 acres. 56 percent of the students live in residence halls on North and West Campus, the bulk of the remainder in Collegetown apartments.

TYPICAL MALE WARDROBE

1900: Dandy. The men wore high-shouldered coats, high-water trousers, a stiff collar, striped knit ties, silk socks, and patent leather shoes. Proper dress was paramount--even, as the story goes, on a hot spring day when a sweating student asked the professor if he might remove his coat during a three-hour exam. The professor expressed his sympathy, admitted that he too suffered in the heat, and gave his answer: "No."

2000: Baggy. Says Sarah Striffler '00: "Everyone who's anyone is in Abercrombie and Fitch: baggy jeans worn at the hips (with as much boxer short showing as possible), shirts with one wide horizontal stripe all the way around, brand name baseball caps, and cool sneakers. Labels are everything. Clothes aren't a uniform. Rather, they express who you are and what group you're in."

STUDENT CARS ON CAMPUS

1900: Two. There were only 4,000 cars sold worldwide. But a pair of the newfangled contraptions--sophomore Claudio Martinez's White Steamer and classmate Samuel Howe's locomobile--joined the parade of electric railway cars, bicycles, and horse-drawn buggies on campus.

2000: 2,500 allowed to park on campus. Number of permit-only parking spots for faculty, staff, and visitors: 8,075. Number of different permits available: forty. Estimated cars sold worldwide: 50 million.

AVERAGE COST OF A WEEKLY MEAL TICKET

1900: $3.50. Most everyone ate at boardinghouses, which were largely the source of social interaction. According to Rym Berry '04, "Not infrequently, your friendships and the little niches you were to fill at the University were determined at your first meal."

2000: $111. That's for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in any of the five all-you-can-eat dining halls. There are also a dozen cafes and sandwich shops, as well as fifty fraternities and sororities offering room and board.

FULL-TIME ATHLETIC COACHES

1900: Two. Only crew's Charles Courtney and track's Jack Moakley were full-timers. But there were evolutionary signs. In 1900, soccer made its first appearance on the Hill, an Ithaca Country Club was created, the Cornell Hockey Association was formed, and the basketball team applied to be recognized as a "regular branch of Cornell athletics."

2000: Fifty-six (including full-time assistants). Cornell fields teams in thirty-six varsity intercollegiate sports, from fencing and lightweight football to golf and women's hockey.

PEOPLE OF COLOR IN THE SENIOR CLASS

1900: One. Nicaraguan Salvador Guillen appears to have been the only non-white member of the Class of 1900. In an age of rampant bigotry, one underclassman withdrew because there were two black men in his class.

2000: The student body is 27 percent minority (not including foreign students). There are 145 multicultural student organizations registered with the Student Activities Office, including Chinese Bible Study, the American Indian Engineering Society, and Baraka Kwa Wimbo, a black women's a capella group.

COUNTRIES REPRESENTED BY FOREIGN STUDENTS

1900: Fourteen. There were only a handful of foreign students in the Class of 1900, and still their classmates remained internationally impaired. 275-pound Hans Egeberg, a Norwegian, was known as the "Terrible Swede."

2000: 118. The number of foreign students (996) on campus today is larger than the whole senior class a century ago.

MOST COMMON HEALTH HAZARD

1900: Freshman diarrhea. Also known as "Ithaca fever" or "Six Mile Creek colitis," as many as 10 to 15 percent of the first-year students were usually affected by the city's unhygienic water system.

2000: Upper respiratory infections are the most common complaint at Gannett, where nearly 1,500 patients are treated weekly. Preventive care (flu shots, nutritional counseling, sexual health) is a close second, says Sharon Dittman, University Health Services' associate director of community relations. Says Dittman: "Today's students are under considerable pressure to be well so they can perform well."

STUDENT SMOKERS

1900: 80 percent of seniors. According to the 1900 Class Book, ninety-three men and one woman were"addicted to the weed," twelve of them confessing they "pass McGraw daily with My Lady Nicotine." Most undergraduates smoked a pipe or rolled their own.

2000: 25 percent of adult Americans smoke. Collegetown has a tobacco shop and a cigar bar, but campus smoking is restricted.

ALCOHOL CONSUMERS

1900: Few. The temperance movement, which treated drinking as a personal sin and a social plague, was nearing its peak. Three Naughty-naughts were members of the Prohibition Party. The freshmen in 1900 chose to keep their banquet dry.

2000: Many. A Harvard study found that more than two-fifths of college students indulge in binge drinking. According to the Federal Office of Substance Abuse Prevention, college students spent more on alcohol than on soft drinks, coffee, tea, milk, juice, and books combined.

LIFE EXPECTANCY

1900: Forty-seven. The oldest surviving member of the Class of 1900 was Louise Hempstead, one of fourteen Phi Beta Kappas in the class. She died at ninety-nine, on January 11, 1977.

2000: Seventy-six. If a member of the Class of 2000 graduates at twenty-one, he will start living on borrowed time in 2055.

'VOICES OF THE DYING CENTURY'

In 1900, unlike in 2000, the consensus was that the next century would not begin until '01. But when President Jacob Gould Schurman gave Cornell's thirty-second commencement address on June 21, 1900, he spoke of the lessons of a century passed and the hopes for a century to come. Excerpts from his speech:

The sands of the nineteenth century are running out; before another Commencement the twentieth century will have begun and none of us will ever again behold another centennial death and birth of time, which, in the fine metaphor of Plato, is itself a moving image of eternity. I invite you for a short time to listen to the voices of the dying century as out of the depths of everlasting wisdom and the fullness of infinite experience they tell us how we are to live and work and do our duty in the new century we shall so soon inherit.

The first message to you which I seem to hear ringing through the vanished ages is this: Son of man, stand upon thy feet. It is a call to independence. You have no right to drive through life in another man's conveyance. As the pursuit of property is the condition of economic independence, so the quest of truth is the condition of mental independence. It is to our college graduates that the public turn for enlightenment. We fall short both of their expectation and of our own vocation when we become the victims of stagnation and prejudice. Lean not on others; yield not to custom and convenience; look things squarely in the face and see what they really are; and then having gained the truth, stand for it, fight for it, be not disconcerted. Never yield to the sophistry which makes your self a mere thing, your doings mere events, and the history of the race a meaningless illusion. In action, as in thought, play the man; stand upon thy feet. The cultivation of letters and science is a far more worthy and fruitful end than the accumulation of riches. In spite of the cynicism of the market, the world is not ruled by money but by ideas. You, who have gained diplomas today, are called upon to be exponents and champions of ideas--of science, arts, and inventions. And if some of you, if one of you, should prove a great poet or artist, a great scientist or philosopher, it would be ample compensation for the work of all the members of the university from the day of its foundation.

I should like you to remember two or three fixed principles which shine through all the history of mankind. The first is that mere bigness is not greatness. There is no dignity, no nobleness, in mere bulk. The true greatness of a nation depends upon the character of its ethical ideal and the energy with which it pursues it. I count it a peculiar good fortune for the American nation that it was conceived in liberty and intelligence and swaddled in order and justice, and that its early years were watched over by men who saw in such an organization the best hopes of the human race. But the baptism of the fathers does not guarantee the consecration of their children; and the republic can be kept true to its ideals only by the devoted efforts of each succeeding generation. Thus is it the privilege of the quiet scholar, who sees and speaks the truth, to shape from his study the policy of nations and the course of history.

Ladies and gentlemen of the graduating classes, I congratulate you on the honors which have crowned your studies here. I wish you god-speed. I bid you affectionately farewell. This class of 1900 stands at the conflux of centuries. The voices of the past gravely admonish you; the future calls you with joyous hope."

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.