An institution that is excelling in research, education, public service -- even in athletics -- was described to an impressed and appreciative Reunion weekend audience June 9 when Cornell President Hunter Rawlings delivered the State of the University address in Bailey Hall.
"We have attracted to Cornell some of the world leaders in these fields [the strategic enabling research areas of genomics, advanced materials, and computing and information science] and have won state, federal and private support to help us maintain world-class facilities and programs," Rawlings said.
The word is getting out "that Cornell is an excellent place to obtain an undergraduate education," the president said, pointing to a 6.5 percent gain in applications (to 21,500) for the Class of 2005, "with extraordinary quality and diversity in the applicant pool."
Not only is the university fulfilling the vision of founder Ezra Cornell and first president Andrew Dickson White, to meld the theoretical and practical to educate students and serve the state, "Cornell is becoming the land grant university to the world," Rawlings proclaimed.
Without slighting sports participants of the male gender, the president pointed out that Cornell women are doing their part to "uphold the Ivy League ideal of the scholar-athlete." He recounted the achievements of the women's softball team (Ivy League champions and the fifth season in a row with 30 or more wins); the women's lacrosse team (winners of the ECAC championship and competing for the first time in the NCAA tournament) and the women's polo team (the national champions). Alumni in the audience applauded both the students' athletic prowess and the generosity of the Bartels family, whose $15 million challenge grant is boosting all athletic programs at the university and whose name is now on the university's field house, Bartels Hall.
Applause also was given, earlier, to faculty, staff and administrators at the urging of Cornell Board of Trustees President Harold Tanner, who introduced Rawlings. And there was warm and sustained applause for President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes and Rosa Rhodes. "Thank you for a quarter century of service," Tanner said to Cornell's ninth president and his wife, who have remained particularly active in university affairs.
And Rawlings' commitment to undergraduate education also has found him back in the classroom, team teaching a Classics 258 semester class on Periclean Athens, an experience that has left him greatly impressed with the quality and academic vigor of the university's undergraduates, he said. "We have students who can argue either side of an issue with anybody," Rawlings said. "They are engaged, they are involved and they do not want to be left out of the debate."
The president called attention to tangible evidence of the university's growth and enhancement, including one construction site that has attracted the attention of many returning alumni. The North Campus Residential Initiative, with its partly completed Court and Mews Halls and the new community commons, is on schedule to greet the arriving Class of 2005 in August. These new, and the existing, facilities will for the first time house all first-year students on North Campus, the president reported, "and offer the finest freshman experience available anywhere."
Another freshman first at Cornell, the required summer reading of a book (Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel), will be followed by small-group discussions on the on the topic during Orientation Week, led by faculty, staff members, upperclassmen and, for some, the president himself. The required reading assignment sparked some debate in the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, Rawlings recalled, but he said, "I found the book provocative and insightful, and I am looking forward to discussing it with students in my group."
Next on the university's construction agenda will be five new living-learning houses for sophomores and upper-class students in what Rawlings called "an equally dramatic transformation of West Campus," with strong involvement of graduate students and faculty members to build on the sense of community and intellectual engagement that students develop during their freshman year.
And, Rawlings pointed out, alumni returning in five years will see a major change in the Engineering Quad with the addition of the $62.3 million Duffield Hall for research and teaching in nanotechnology, nanobiotechnology, advanced materials and related fields. Further proof that "Cornell is a great private university with a public mission that extends globally," Rawlings said, is the recently announced Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar, to be established in that Persian Gulf nation. The new medical college, which will offer a complete medical education leading to a Cornell M.D. degree, based on the same admission standards and curriculum as the New York City campus, "is educational diplomacy at its best," the president said.
He concluded by quoting from "The Site of Memory," an essay by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, M.A. '55, who is a Cornell A.D. White Professor-at-Large. Although engineers have straightened out the Mississippi River, "occasionally the river floods these places," Morrison wrote. "'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be."
Rawlings told his audience he was "delighted that on this glorious Reunion weekend, you are remembering where you were -- what the hills and the gorges and the light were like -- and that you've found the route back to the original place where it all began."
The text of President Rawlings' State of the University Address, as prepared for presentation, is available at http://www.news.cornell.edu/campus/stateofuniv01.html.
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