Biography|Russell J. Weiner — White Hall, Where a Government Major Left Cornell in 1990

People meet Russell J. Weiner as the marketer who remade Domino's pizza and then ran the company.

The first public building that put a degree in his pocket is older than the brand he later rebuilt.

White Hall sits on Cornell's Arts Quad in Ithaca, a mid-nineteenth-century stone block that still houses the Department of Government.

Weiner took a Bachelor of Arts in government from the College of Arts and Sciences here in 1990.

Cornell uses the word government for what other campuses call political science.

The undergraduate office is still on this floor plan: White Hall 210.

A native of the Bronx, he did not come to Ithaca to learn advertising.

Company biographies written after he reached Domino's keep the degree exact and do not upgrade it into a business school credential.

The marketing training came later, at night, at New York University's Stern School of Business, finished in 2001 while he already held a full-time job.

What this building did was leave him with a government major and no obvious next office.

A Cornell department profile later recorded that he turned down law school after graduation and started as an administrative assistant at an advertising agency instead.

That detour is the hinge.

From the agency he moved through brand work at Philip Morris and then a decade at PepsiCo, ending as vice president of marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America's cola business.

Domino's hired him from that Pepsi desk in September 2008.

Stand on the Arts Quad and White Hall is the stone hall facing the lawn, with the department's rooms stacked above the entrance.

The photograph here was taken in 2009 and shows the same facade a visitor still finds.

Photo: Notyourbroom, 2009, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons