Rawlings then came to Cornell University. He was its tenth president, serving from 1995 until 2003. At Cornell, he was good at asking people for money. Rawlings started several new positions and programs to support undergraduate education. Cornell built of several new dormitories and centralized the location of freshmen dormitories on campus (initially protested by Al Sharpton and others due to alleged racial implications). Rawlings promoted stronger undergraduate admission standards. Rawlings began initiatives in certain areas of science and engineering that he considered important to the future (such as bioinformatics, computational biology, computer and information sciences, genomics, and materials science), and began plans for Weill Hall, a large new life sciences building. He encouraged cooperation between the humanities and social sciences. He also worked on an agreement to start a branch of Cornell's medical school in Qatar.