President praises CU spirit and commitment to academic freedom

By Jacquie Powers

Cornell President Hunter Rawlings, reflecting on the role of the university in the aftermath of the tragic events of Sept. 11, last week said members of the campus community can best help the nation move forward by affirming their commitment to academic freedom and the core values of the university.

President Hunter Rawlings and Harold Tanner, chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees, listen to remarks by Jeffrey Estabrook, chair of the Cornell University Council, before Rawlings' State of the University address in the Alice Statler Auditorium of Statler Hall, Oct. 19. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

"This year there is a need to put our accomplishments in a broader context and to view them through the lens of the enduring values espoused by Cornellians since the founding of this university 136 years ago," Rawlings said in his annual State of the University message on Oct. 19.

Addressing members of the Cornell Board of Trustees and the Cornell University Council gathered in the Alice Statler Auditorium for their joint annual meeting, Rawlings said: "What I have observed with great interest during the past five weeks, and what has forcefully and frequently impressed itself upon my mind, is that we are a community of iconoclasts, but we are a community nonetheless. Underlying the candor with which we express our opinions and the critical spirit in which we carry out our research and scholarship is a remarkable commitment to academic freedom and the responsibilities it entails. ... This is the way in which we can best advance the national interest and support the values on which this nation was built."

Rawlings described Cornell as a diverse, iconoclastic community and the character of Cornellians as "a remarkable blend of theory and practice, thought and action. Let us not take this for granted, but, instead, let us emphatically recommit Cornell to the values that underlie our character."

He noted that Cornell's core values are the foundation for the North Campus Residential Initiative, "which has created for our freshman class a strong, new community rooted in Cornell ideals. The transformation of North Campus, with its new residence halls and the Community Commons, is as much philosophical as it is physical, and it is furthering the Cornell tradition of freedom with responsibility by introducing our new students to Cornell's fundamental values as they bond together as a class."

He pointed to Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, which all incoming freshmen were required to read over the summer. Some 4,000 attended a faculty-panel discussion of the book in Barton Hall, followed by small discussion groups facilitated by faculty and upper-class students.

Among the audience for Rawlings' Oct. 19 address, are, from right, Vice Provost Walter Cohen, Provost Biddy Martin, Rosa and President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes, and the emeritus chair of the board of trustees, Stephen Weiss. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

"This was a controversial project, which generated some good, old-fashioned skepticism across the campus -- from deans, to faculty members, to the students themselves," Rawlings said. "They challenged the basic premise of the undertaking: How could Cornell, with such a strong tradition of freedom with responsibility, require students to read a book?

"Yet the project has been a roaring success, serving to highlight the multifaceted nature of our university while stimulating a very high level of debate across disciplines and colleges."

Rawlings called the North Campus initiative and the common reading project "pioneering first steps in joining living and learning in the lives of Cornell students." He promised to build on those successes with the transformation of West Campus, where upper-level students will have the option of living in one of five residential houses.

The house system will emphasize "informal interaction with faculty members, opportunities for personal and intellectual growth, self-governance, social and cultural programming, privacy and independence," Rawlings 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.

Rawlings said that with the priority of the undergraduate experience firmly grounded in Cornell's culture, the administration is turning its attention toward faculty excellence and support.

"Last July we implemented increases in faculty compensation, which are helping us reach a competitive position for recruiting and retaining distinguished faculty members. These salary improvements for faculty will continue for five more years at an accelerated pace, but our commitment to faculty excellence is already bringing results. We have made many strong, new appointments this year."

He pointed to the appointment of Paul Ginsparg, who received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1981, as a professor of physics and member of the Faculty of Computing and Information.

"Professor Ginsparg is an otherwise-thinking faculty member in the true Cornell mode," Rawlings said. In 1991, while at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Ginsparg tapped into the Internet to create a virtual space where physicists could post their ideas and preliminary findings.

"His e-print archive has given physicists a way to engage each other in the same kind of productive and contentious dialogue that we have long enjoyed at Cornell, and it has opened the conversation to those in other nations, in the early stages of their careers, and even to undergraduates," Rawlings said.

Also looking to the future, Rawlings noted that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Cornell to build the central engine for the National Science Digital Library, an online resource that will make high-quality source materials in science available to students via the World Wide Web. "The $1.56 million NSF grant highlights Cornell's leadership in bringing together computer scientists and librarians to develop new models for scholarly communication," Rawlings said, "and it reaffirms what has been true for Cornell and the nation since their beginnings: the more open we are, the stronger we are."

He said the NSF also has selected Cornell as the home of another national center in the broad area of nanoscience -- the Center for Nanoscale Systems in Information Technology. "This new Cornell center, in which NSF will invest $11.6 million over the next five years, will further solidify Cornell's position as No. 1 in nanoscience among all universities in the nation and the world," Rawlings said.

He told trustees and council members that, as part of the university's commitment to building the strongest possible intellectual community, he and Provost Biddy Martin have begun a series of yearlong seminars to examine critical questions in the humanities and social sciences.

"These have become even more significant in light of recent world events," Rawlings said. One seminar explores "Race and Ethnicity in the Study of America" with faculty members from a number of humanities departments. The second seminar, Rawlings said, which comprises social science faculty members, is examining "inequality" in the United States and abroad -- "a topic that is especially important, given the current world situation, where large disparities in wealth have created anger, frustration and ongoing tension," he said.

"Two months into the academic year, these seminars are enabling scholarly discourse across departmental and college lines, and enlarging scholarly viewpoints."

Rawlings touched on the tight financial times ahead, and said the administration is examining university budgets carefully, preparing to "take the steps necessary to maintain our academic excellence within the constraints of the financial realities we face."

In closing, he noted that six years ago he set the task of bridging the many chasms that then divided the Cornell community. "Our gorges provided the metaphor for our efforts, but our challenges were both physical and metaphysical. Now, six years later, we have many new spans in place. They are solidly built on the ground of North Campus, where our new freshmen are enjoying a more cohesive academic life, and they will soon take shape on West Campus. They are taking root on the fertile soil of the Engineering Quad, where Duffield Hall will stand, bringing together researchers from across the campus for studies on the fertile verge of several interconnecting disciplines. And they are coming together -- slowly and tentatively, but with a spirit of shared enterprise -- in the quiet study of the A.D. White House, where distinguished humanists and social scientists from across the university are engaged in common exploration of issues that hold great significance for this campus and for the world.

"We have not yet completed our composing of Cornell. There remains much to do in making our separate and disparate parts contribute to a harmonious whole while retaining their own strong and sure tones. ... [But] with the indomitable Cornell spirit, we will continue to educate the citizens not only of this country, but of every country that believes in the transforming power of critical thought."