Here is a sampling of quotations from Cornell University faculty, students and staff that have appeared recently in the national and international news media:
"The arts in particular deal with life and death, beauty and ugliness, love and hate, evil and good, the flesh and the transcendence of the flesh, and something beyond this world that comes with many names attached to it, and they deal with these issues in the most immediate, comprehensible, accessible fashion. If that isn't important, what is? What does it say about our society if our government can't spare a small fraction of its budget to recognize and support it?"
-- Franklin W. Robinson, director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, discussing House and Senate actions on funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, in an opinion piece in the Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald-American on July 13.
"If we have these long hours consistently, the workers aren't going to be able to take any comp time. . . . The only limit for most jobs is, after 40 hours a week, you must pay time and a half."
-- Ronald Ehrenberg, the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, discussing the proposed comp-time bill in Congress in the Baltimore Sun on June 8.
"The notion of worker and retiree and family life stages -- all of these things are being blurred. I think in the long run it's good. It provides more options for us all."
-- Phyllis Moen, professor of human development, discussing the realities for late-parenting baby boomers in an article on older parenthood, in the Hartford Courant on June 10.
"The treaty calls for on-site inspection if a country suspects that another country is cheating. . . . No country wants to be inspected, so the more information you have to bear on the problem, the better the situation."
-- Muawia Barazangi, senior scientist in the Department of Geological Sciences, describing a geographic information system developed at Cornell to help United Nations inspectors verify whether 140 nations who signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty are complying, in the Los Angeles Times on June 16.
"Like most other birds, they feed their young regurgitated nectar or insects."
-- Sandy Podulka of the bird education program in the Laboratory of Ornithology, explaining how hummingbirds feed their young, in The New York Times on June 17.
"The concern is that the settlement inevitably will affect plaintiffs in a rather negative way. The deal, let me put it bluntly, leaves almost everyone well off. The attorneys general look good and will become governors and senators. The plaintiffs' lawyers will get their stuff. But there may be some people affected by cigarettes who are left with no relief."
-- James A. Henderson Jr., the Frank B. Ingersoll Professor of Law, discussing the proposed settlement of several states and the tobacco industry, in the Riverside (Calif.) Press Enterprise on June 22.
"[Purple loosestrife is] quite beautiful and people build backyard ponds where they can grow it. Over there [in Europe], the insects are the pests."
-- Bernd Blossey, director of Cornell's Biological Control of Non-Indigenous Plant Species Program, in an article about the success of insect biocontrol of purple loosestrife in the United States, in The New York Times, July 8.