Cornell’s Plan to Merge Hotel School Gets an Icy Reception

They call themselves “hotelies”: students and alumni of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, the world’s oldest undergraduate program devoted to the hospitality industry and, many say, the best.  So perhaps it was no surprise that alumni and students reacted with something akin to a tirade on the hotel rating site TripAdvisor, when Cornell’s board of trustees recently voted to establish a new College of Business. The idea, university officials say, is to fold the hotel school, along with two other business schools, into the new college, strengthening the individual programs in the process.