Our Alma Mater

Alma mater is an allegorical Latin phrase used to identify a school, college or university that one formerly attended or graduated from.

"Annie Lisle" is an 1857 ballad by Boston, Massachusetts songwriter H. S. Thompson, first published by Moulton & Clark of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and later by Oliver Ditson & Co. It is about the death of a young maiden, by what some have speculated to be tuberculosis. However, the lyric does not explicitly mention tuberculosis, or "consumption" as it was called then. The song might have slipped into obscurity had the tune not been adopted by countless colleges, universities, and high schools worldwide as their respective alma mater songs.

Cornell University is a private Ivy League statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. The university was founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White with the intention of teaching and making contributions in all fields of knowledge from the classics to the sciences and from the theoretical to the applied.