How long does it take a university president to walk from Day Hall to North Campus? Hunter Rawlings, who visited Cornell's newest complex nearly every day last week, does the walk in a cool 10 minutes, and he hopes to set the pace for scores of Cornell faculty who will teach, dine and interact with students there this year.
Rawlings was at the Community Commons on Tuesday, Aug. 21, to deliver thank yous at the official dedication of the new North Campus Residential Initiative. And on Friday, Aug. 24 -- moving-in day for first-year students -- he lunched at the Commons' North Star eatery, talked informally with incoming students and their families and had a good time wielding a giant scissors to cut the red ribbon for the official opening of Mews and Court Halls.
The two new residence halls and the Commons, completed "within hours" of the students' arrival, the president joked, are at the center of the reconfiguration of North Campus as a living-and-learning center for first-year students. They complement the dining and living facilities already in place on North Campus, adding 558 beds and dining seating for 625 people.
"We are here to celebrate the opening of this new village, constructed in a record 16 months," the president told the crowd of students and their families Aug. 24 on the "belvedere"-- the bridged courtyard that links the east and west wings of Mews Hall. "Never before in Cornell's history have we been able to house all freshmen together and create an environment so conducive to learning."
He called the residential plan "a real achievement. An amorphous part of campus is now a magnificent assemblage of buildings that relate to each other." And he predicted that the initiative, once finished, "will indeed have a transforming effect on the freshman experience for decades to come." All that remains to be completed, for now, is the landscaping.
The North Campus initiative is a key part of Rawlings' vision for Cornell "to provide the best undergraduate education of any research university in the United States." Faculty involvement is central to the plan's success, and plenty of faculty were in evidence at the opening events, as the president promised students: "You'll have the opportunity to get to know faculty members as human beings who live the life of the mind, and you'll get to sample that life."
"The ultimate test," said Rawlings, "will be how well the initiative works academically, how often faculty and students meet together on this site." He noted that the new North Star dining facility in the Community Commons building has private dining areas with flexible space that faculty members can reserve to meet with their students for, say, dinner and an evening discussion. (The dining facilities, with offerings that range from pizza and pasta to vegetarian to strictly kosher, are inclusive of everyone's dietary needs.) And the two new residence halls, Mews and Court, have special rooms on the first floor where freshman writing seminars will take place in the mornings and evenings. In addition, faculty-in-residence will live in the halls with their families, and nonresident faculty fellows will lend their time and energy to such group activities with students as walks along woodland trails and forays to plays, lectures and concerts.
In thanking those who worked on the massive North Campus initiative, Rawlings singled out project leaders Jean Reese, in Student and Academic Services, and John Kiefer, in Planning, Design and Construction, for their "professionalism and aplomb." The next project on the list for overhaul, West Campus, also will be shepherded by Reese and Kiefer, Rawlings announced. He drew laughs when he said the assignment was a fitting reward for handling the North Campus project "with such perfection."
Others thanked by Rawlings for their centrality to the initiative's success included Susan Murphy, vice president for student and academic services; LeNorman Strong, assistant vice president for student and academic services; Peter Karp, university architect; Welliver-McGuire Inc. construction company; Alan Chimacoff and the Hillier Group, the designers of Mews and Court halls; and Charles Dagit and the Dagit-Saylor architectural firm, the designers of the Community Commons.
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