Talk to Wooster
Fall 2007
Grant H. Cornwell
Teacher, 11th College of Wooster president, husband, sailor, philosopher,
basketball player,
father, professor, cook, scholar
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The ability to listen for differences is one of the leadership qualities Grant Cornwell brings to his new position, and a central defining value of his life. At an early age, he discovered that the points of view that he learned during his summer jobs in northern Minnesota were different from those of his neighbors in New Canaan, Connecticut.
Watching his father, Grant observed how careful listening can result in understanding what a customer needs. He tells the story of his grandfather, George Cornwell, a piano salesman in upstate New York, who hired a young assistant to help him with his business. The assistant, Thomas J.Watson, soon left the piano business to start his own company, International Business Machines, and asked his former boss to join him. “Nah,” said Grandfather Cornwell. “It will never amount to anything.”
But Thomas Watson didn’t forget the Cornwell family, and when his company, IBM, began to blossom, he hired his former boss’s son, Grant Cornwell, Sr., who became the company’s top salesperson for many years. For Grant, Sr., IBM stood for excellence, integrity, respect for others, and the importance of service. Grant was reared on his father’s aphorisms: “Plan your work and work your plan.” “Ninety-nine percent of a job is getting started.” “Persistence overcomes resistance.”
From his mother, Grant gained an early and ongoing love of science. A graduate of Skidmore College, she was working as a research chemist with plans to go to medical school when she met Grant’s father and chose to forego a career in medicine in favor of raising a family. Influenced both by his mother’s encouragement to consider becoming a doctor and his own love of nature, Grant decided to major in biology at his father’s alma mater, St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.
On the first day of orientation, Grant and the other first-year students took part in the college’s time-honored ceremony. They lit candles, sang the alma mater, and held hands to form a circle around the quadrangle. The person holding his left hand was Peg Kelsey. But more about that later.
Grant quickly completed most of the requirements for his biology major but found that science wasn’t answering questions that were deeply important to him: How do humans find meaning? What is our purpose? How do we know what we know? Why do we do the things that we do? Grant plunged into all that a liberal arts education offers—studying Shakespeare, Buddhism, government, and religion. But his favorite subject was philosophy, and soon he had a second major.
