Who’s the greatest fictional Cornellian in the history of TV and film? That burning question will be answered this month (March 2023), as Big Red history expert Corey Earle ’07 conducts a bespoke March Madness tournament.
Run through Twitter polling, the contest pits 64 Cornell “alumni” against each other in four divisions: characters from comedy/romance and drama, each split into movies and television.
“I love seeing Cornell in pop culture,” says Earle, the longtime instructor of a wildly popular course on the University’s history, who has more than 5,000 Twitter followers. “I’ve trained several generations of students to, whenever they see a Cornell reference, email me or tweet at me. So I’ve become a collector of fictional Cornellians.”
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Margaret Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Emerita Professor of the History of Science in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Darryl Seligman, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow.
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Earle (left) with Ed Helms during the actor’s Convocation visit. Earle is holding Andy Bernard’s faux diploma from the set of “The Office,” which he received as a birthday gift from his brother, University Archivist Evan Earle ’02, MS ’14.