CU listed as No. 6 'most connected'

By Bill Steele

Cornell has been ranked No. 6 on The Princeton Review's list of America's 25 Most Connected Campuses.

The Princeton Review solicited data from 357 top colleges and universities around the country, asking them 20 questions, including such things as the ratio of computers to students, whether a campuswide network is in place, whether the school has a wireless network, whether students can register for classes online and whether the school streams video or audio of courses online, whether the school had a computer ethics policy and if it offered classes in such topics as computer security, robotics or video gaming.

According to forbes.com, Cornell was marked "Yes" on all of the 20 questions except three: Are students required to own a computer? Does tuition include a computer? and Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups? The answer posted for Cornell for the last question is, of course, incorrect.

"Of course we have Usenet; we've had it for years," said Jim Lombardi, assistant vice president for information technology, who supplied the answers. "We were going through 50 or 60 answers from the previous year and inadvertently failed to correct a mistake that was several years old."

"We're delighted to be number six," said Tommy Bruce, Cornell vice president for communications and media relations. "Next time, we'll be ranked even higher -- and we knew that already."

The complete list and methodology are reported by forbes.com at http://www.forbes.com/2004/10/20/04conncampusland.html.

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