Every community, every social network of reasonable size has clusters. While not strictly inevitable, it’s pretty certain that such denser pockets will arise given the chance just given the way people tend to make connections and networks tend to form even if there are no environmental conditions encouraging them. Given such factors however, such clustering is bound to be even more evident.

One of the interesting facets of Cornell University’s structure, then, is the way it is designed, institutionally and otherwise, to promote such clustering. This goes beyond the simple fact that Cornell’s divided into different schools, although that certainly has a lot to do with it. These divisions are exacerbated however, by the physical, institutional, and other design of the University. Not only is each college a distinct entity, with its own administration and curriculum, each college is remarkably autonomous, admitting students, awarding diplomas, setting policy, largely independently. Add to that the physical layout of campus and the way different departments’ classes are map on to it, and you get even deeper divisions. Certainly there are bridges, students whose roommates study something completely different, faculty with joint appointments, classes with students from several schools, etc. but the extent to which Cornell is designed to cluster is remarkable for such a relatively small (both in terms of population and geography) social sphere.

The bridges between schools, while far more numerous than those between say Cornell and Ithaca College, are nevertheless infrequent enough to give Cornell its distinctive, paradoxical feel of simultaneous immensity and smallness, a place where you know everyone or no one depending on how far you stray from your respective cluster. Cornell’s tendency to cluster also feeds into many of the bureaucratic nightmares is known for. Policy, like other innovations, does not migrate across clusters well, leading to all sorts of trouble. A perfect example of this is distribution requirements. An Arts and Sciences class sponsored by the Society for the Humanities is pretty clearly a humanities class, right? Not according to the School of Agriculture and Life Sciences, where a student would have to specifically petition to make it meet the “humanities” distribution requirement. While an oversight like this is not solely due to cluster effects, in a more interconnected school than Cornell these sorts of things would be more likely to be corrected: information from one school would more easily diffuse to others.