Cornell to reinstall Lincoln bust, will place it in the heart of our Ithaca campus | The College Fix
A bust of President Abraham Lincoln that was quietly removed from a Cornell University library during the summer of 2021 after a concern was lodged will once again grace the halls of a library at the Ivy League school.
Elaine Westbrooks, the Carl A. Kroch university librarian at Cornell, said in a statement Thursday the bust of America s 16th president is slated to soon be placed where it originally debuted the school s Uris Library when it opened in 1891.
Over the summer, I directed the cleaning and return to public exhibition of a bust of Abraham Lincoln, a valuable item in the Cornell Library s vast permanent collection, she said in a written statement provided to The College Fix. The bust will soon return to its original room in Uris in the heart of our Ithaca campus.
Good for Cornell and good for Ms. Westbrooks. Let’s hope it’s symbolic.
Uris is a beautiful library. There are these little carrels tucked into the bookshelves, reached by spiral staircases, that line the inside sort-of atrium, where one can sit and pretend to study. I used to sit there and pretend to study. There’s a lovely stone bench outside the library on which is carved: “To those who shall sit here mourning, to those who shall sit here rejoicing: Sympathy and greeting. So have we done in our time.” As I recall, anyway. I wrote about that bench as a cub pundit at the Cornell Daily Sun. This is just a little moment of rejoicing.