Members of the Faculty Senate, meeting in the new North Campus Community Commons building for their first meeting of the academic year last week, were greeted by the president and provost and briefed about the next phase of the undergraduate residential initiative -- West Campus.
President Hunter Rawlings opened the Oct. 10 meeting by noting the timely completion of the freshman-oriented, North Campus phase of the residential initiative and the positive reception the new complex has received from students, parents, faculty and staff. He indicated that with West Campus planning well under way, based on a house system for upper-class students, the administration would be "turning its attention and focus now to faculty hiring, retention and compensation."
Rawlings said that while this is the first year of implementation of a six-year program for improving faculty compensation, "I'm happy to say we've already made some significant progress in comparison with other institutions, and we will continue to do so."
He cautioned, however, that the weak economy definitely will affect the university's financial picture, in terms of state-government support, fund-raising and endowment growth. "We are seeing now an erosion of financial support across the board," Rawlings said. "We are going to have to look closely at cost-savings in order to balance the budget, given the overall picture."
Provost Biddy Martin told senators that she is working with the deans on fine-tuning and balancing academic priorities. "We are working on the ever-challenging effort to find the right balance between sustaining and enhancing our core disciplines and our strategic enabling areas in physical science and life sciences," Martin said.
J. Robert Cooke, dean of the faculty, briefed senators and asked for their future support on one of his priorities for the year, a proposal for faculty to use distributed learning technology to extend the university's land grant mission to serve high school students. Under the proposal, faculty members would develop material already covered in a course for Cornell students, that could be given at no cost to high schools for use in their advanced placement courses or other appropriate courses.
Cooke said that not only would such a program aid college-bound high school students and extend the university's land grant mission but, over time, would enhance the university's reputation and help attract high-caliber students.
The bulk of the senate's discussion, led by Isaac Kramnick, vice provost for undergraduate education, focused on West Campus. Kramnick told senators that the plan calls for replacing the class halls with four new houses, renovating the Gothics into the fifth house and replacing Noyes Community Center with a new Community/Recreation Center.
Each of the five houses will be named for a deceased, legendary Cornell faculty member. "This is symbolically very important, because it signals the important role that faculty members will play in the life of students living in the houses," Kramnick said.
Each house will have a live-in house professor who is a senior faculty member, a live-in administrative director and a number of faculty affiliates involved in academic and social house programming. Each house will be home to 350 students and will have its own dining room, library and academic and social facilities. In addition, each house will be governed by a student-led council.
Kramnick said the first new house is expected to open in 2004, with a new one opening every 18 months thereafter, with completion of the entire initiative by 2010.
Four faculty members serving on the West Campus Council -- Ann-Margaret Esnard, assistant professor of city and regional planning; Cindy Hazan, associate professor of human development; Ross Brann, the M.R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies; and Nick Salvatore, professor of American Studies -- helped Kramnick answer questions from senators.
They assured senators that the house system would be unique to Cornell, not modeled after any particular university model.
"What makes the system unique at Cornell is that it is a choice," Kramnick said. "At other institutions, such as Harvard and Yale, all students are required to live in a house at some point. Here we give students a choice."
They noted that in each house, all seven colleges will be represented, and there will be no theme houses. "We will be looking at the particular faculty, staff and students in the house at any one time to determine the personality of the house," Brann said.
Kramnick said the idea is to involve hundreds of faculty members. "This will involve changing not only the student culture but the faculty culture," he acknowledged.
But when questioned about the added workload for faculty, he said he expects roughly 30 faculty members at any given time to be involved in each house, for a total of 150, or one-tenth of faculty members. Further, he explained, different faculty members are at different stages of their careers, and for some such participation "may not feel like a 'load.'"
"They are not all doing the same things and spending the same number of hours. Faculty members go through different stages of their life cycle here and at any time I expect we can find 150 faculty members who will not consider it part of their 'load' to have a free dinner and discussion with upper-class students in their house."
At that, the room erupted into laughter.
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