CU President Emeritus Dale Corson moves his office, but not his focus

By Edward Hershey

Something is different about Cornell this fall.

"Dale Corson's departure from Clark Hall means that for the first time in 56 years, he is without an office on campus," noted H. White Professor of Physics Neil Ashcroft, who recently returned from a sabbatical at Cambridge and now occupies Corson's old office on the sixth floor of Clark.

President Emeritus Dale Corson and Neil Ashcroft, H. White Professor of Physics, stand in front of Clark Hall. Charles Harrington, University Photography

"I really hadn't been going in very much for the past two and a half years, and there's nobody I'd rather have there than Neil Ashcroft," Corson, Cornell's eighth president (1969-1977), said over lunch a few days ago at Kendal at Ithaca, the life-care community he was instrumental in founding. "Of course, it would have been nicer to have been asked, but I understand."

He punctuated the comment with a chuckle. In fact it really was Corson's call, says Frank DiSalvo, the J.A. Newman Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, who succeeded Ashcroft as director of the Cornell Center for Materials Research.

In the months before he left Clark, Corson spent one day a week sorting through books and papers with University Archivist Elaine Engst and Records Manager Eileen Keating. "What they didn't take for the archives and I didn't want to keep for personal reasons, we recycled," he said. "There was a lot of that. It wouldn't have happened had I not had to move out, so that was a real benefit."

Corson's departure from Clark hardly portends inactivity. Valorie Craven, an administrative assistant in the Laboratory of Applied and Solid State Physics, is serving as his campus liaison.

"I've converted one of our bedrooms here into an office," Corson said, "and I've got a new computer. I think I am also finally off every university committee, but I have plenty of correspondence to see to, and there are a couple of projects I want to start. When we closed out my office, several things turned up that I want to write something about."

Then there is the scheduled return to the engineering quad in 2004 of Corson's legendary sundial, safely stored in the Upson Hall machine shop while the new Duffield Hall is built. Experts consider it a masterwork of its kind, but Corson says he has noticed "some very small inaccuracies" that prevent it from keeping absolutely perfect time. "I'm determined to get them fixed, but that would mean taking it apart," he said with a smile, knowing that this is not exactly like replacing the battery in a watch.

One of Corson's other projects will involve organizing and commenting on papers he wrote as a research physicist more than a half-century ago. A colleague, G. Smith Professor of Physics Emeritus Robert Pohl, noticed one lying on his desk in Clark before Corson's departure. It was a commentary in the American Journal of Physics on one of Maxwell's equations.

"Bob came by," Corson said, "noticed it on my desk and said, 'You know, I never really understood that until I read your paper.' Even after all these years, that is the kind of thing that can make someone feel very good. You know they say there are three stages in life, youth, middle age and 'My, you're looking good.'"

Gentle but blunt as ever and in relatively good health at 88, Corson is much the same plain-spoken Kansan who took command at Day Hall after the tense spring of 1969 and helped ease the university out of a period of turbulence before leaving the presidency just a quarter-century ago.

It was part of an extraordinary career that took Corson from Ernest Lawrence's legendary Berkeley laboratory (where he discovered astatine, element 85 in the periodic table), to MIT and the Pentagon during World War II (to help perfect airborne radar and oversee its use), to Los Alamos and then the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico (he organized it), to Cornell (as physics chair, engineering dean and provost).

After his Cornell presidency, Corson was no less productive, serving on 13 major national advisory committees, many as chair. One study Corson chaired in 1982, on balancing the needs of scientific inquiry and national security, is getting new ink in the aftermath of 9/11. "I think they see it as a starting point," he said.