Soundbites

Here is a sampling of quotations from Cornell University faculty, students and staff that have appeared recently in the national and international news media:

"Universities are communities of inquiry where faculty and students alike learn to discover things for themselves, not merely to study the achievements of others, and to extend them to the wider world."

--President Hunter Rawlings, speaking at Cornell's 130th Commencement, quoted in The New York Times, May 25.

"Our best evidence suggests that we should not place too much confidence in a tax increase."

--Don Kenkel, associate professor of policy analysis and management, discussing his study, with Associate Professor Alan Mathios and graduate student Phil Decicca, that found that higher taxes won't cut teen smoking rates, in The Houston Chronicle, May 20.

"There just hasn't been the research to determine whether noise levels like the kind [at El Toro airport] produce health problems. We just don't have the data."

--Gary Evans, professor of design and environmental analysis, discussing research on noise and health in the Los Angeles Times, May 20.

"She focused on the uniqueness of individuals and how they can overcome psychic pain. Ms. Torok was a landmark figure, very important within the world of psychoanalysis, remembered for the manner in which she brought back the importance of individual experience within the limits of the theoretical apparatus of psychoanalysis. She was concerned with the clinical and healing ends of psychoanalysis."

--Nelly Furman, professor of Romance studies, commenting on the work of Maria Torok, a French psychoanalyst, in The New York Times, May 3.

"You get this creative use of the word God now in a scientific context because many of the questions that God was introduced to answer long ago are capable now of being answered in a scientific framework."

--Brian Greene, adjunct professor of physics, discussing the tension between science and religion in a Gannett News Service story in the Tulsa (Okla.)World, May 3.

"There will still be a lot of Bosnias and Kosovos, but the next century will be shaped by capital flows and the conflict between capital and cultures. We're seeing it now in Japan, in Latin America, in Indonesia, where rapid-flowing capital is coming in and making demands on cultures that thought they had insulated themselves."

--Walter LaFeber, the M.U. Noll Professor of American History, discussing the role of the United States in world affairs in the next century, in the Detroit News, April 29.