I want to thank the Employee Assembly for sponsoring this session and for setting such a collegial and constructive tone for discussions of employee concerns. The Employee Assembly has generated many good ideas for improving our campus community and for recognizing and rewarding the contributions of Cornell's employees - from the Frontline Feedback sessions with Mary Opperman that were conducted across campus last year with nearly 500 staff members, to the Dedicated Service Awards, which recognize outstanding Cornell employees. We look to the Employee Assembly to give voice to issues that are important to staff, even when that means having to give the administration a bit of a push, and we consider its work on behalf of staff critical in helping us shape our policies and plans as we strive to be an employer of choice.

The talent and commitment of Cornell's employees have helped give us a great year - and a great deal of momentum as we look ahead to 2001. I always like to highlight some of our accomplishments as a university. The fact is that for every accomplishment, there were staff making it happen. One of the realities of Cornell is that it is large and decentralized, and "the staff" work in many, many different areas. It seems to me that it is important to note their role in our achievements and to remind ourselves that, without the staff, Cornell simply could not run. So whether it is recognizing the outstanding accomplishments of a particular department or lab, or acknowledging all of the day-to-day operations that seem to occur effortlessly but in reality take huge amounts of effort, you as staff can celebrate each and every accolade Cornell receives.

Cornell is a great university, and it is becoming greater. All of you can be proud of the role you have played in the University's success. I am grateful to you for helping us recruit outstanding students to Cornell. Last year, we had more than 20,000 applicants for places in the Class of 2004, and our yield was higher than ever. Whether you helped process those applications - or helped prospective students and their parents set up a campus visit - or simply directed a lost campus visitor to a specific building or a place to eat - you played an important role in ensuring that the best students decided to attend Cornell. Preliminary indications are that we are off to a very good start on the admissions cycle currently underway.

We are winning major grants, contracts and other recognitions, not only in the sciences but also in the liberal arts. This fall, for example, the National Science Foundation renewed funding for the Cornell Center for Materials Research, providing $19.9 million over five years - a renewal that required both first-rate science and a tremendous amount of staff support. And Time Magazine and the Princeton Review selected Cornell as "college of the year" based on its strength in the liberal arts - specifically the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. The Knight Institute, which is a national model for teaching writing at the college level, was begun in 1986. It now involves 3,800 students and 100 tenured faculty members from a variety of academic departments. And it depends on administrative managers, administrative assistants, and other staff members both within the Institute and in academic departments across the university to make sure the pieces of this large and successful program fit together smoothly.

Another indication of Cornell's momentum is in the area of campus facilities. We celebrated the completion of the Lincoln Hall Renaissance during Trustee-Council Weekend this year, and we are looking forward to beginning work on Duffield Hall on the Engineering Quad, possibly by early next year. And on the horizon is a new bioscience technology building to accommodate our efforts in genomics. It is especially gratifying to see the new village taking shape on North Campus. We are looking forward to completing the project in time for next year's freshman class. The Marketplace Eatery in the Robert Purcell Community Center is already getting rave reviews, and I hope many of you will take advantage of the new staff meal plan, developed by Campus Life, Cornell Dining, Human Resources and the Employee Assembly, to see what the buzz is all about.

I want to make special mention of the Lake Source Cooling Project, an idea invented and implemented by Cornell staff members that has revolutionized Cornell's approach to cooling the campus. LSC, as you know, uses a naturally occurring renewable resource - Cayuga Lake - as a source of cooling instead of depending on energy generated by the burning of fossil fuel. The new facility was completed on time, and since it became fully operational in July, it has been working even better than we anticipated. We had hoped for an 80 percent reduction in electricity use, but the actual reduction has been even better - about 87 percent. Through Lake Source Cooling, we're saving about 20 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. Those savings are a significant environmental plus in terms of reductions in emissions from regional power plants that would have made the electricity. And they have been gained with no discernible effect on the lake. In fact, the project has been so successful that it is drawing people to Ithaca from other communities in the U.S. and Canada to see how it works. I want to thank the many Cornell staff members who worked on LSC over the past six-and-a-half years. With typical Cornell ingenuity, they devised a cutting-edge project, defended it from its critics, and demonstrated that once again Cornell is a university ahead of the curve.

I realize, of course, that we still have substantial issues to address - including making sure that we compensate staff and faculty appropriately. Last summer Provost Biddy Martin and I announced a 6-year plan to enhance faculty compensation in both the statutory and endowed units. Our intention is to bring compensation levels for faculty to a strongly competitive position compared to our peers. The salary improvement program has been well received. It is requiring a considerable amount of extra effort, but it is eminently achievable, starting next year.

Now it is essential to develop a good plan for staff compensation. For the past several years, we have made staff compensation a priority. There has been substantial improvement already. On the endowed side we have added to the SIP pools in each of the last three years in order to improve salaries, with both average increases and overall pool amounts far outpacing inflation. On the state side we have advocated, and will continue to advocate, a more reliable, more substantial increase program for both staff and faculty. The state has produced some much needed pay increases in the last few years, and we are working closely with top state officials to send the strong messages that this and more is needed in the future.

This salary improvement program has resulted in increases in average pay above comparable external markets. Our pay program has also produced average increases well above inflation rates for the past several years. We have improved our standing in local and national markets substantially. In fact, improvements against market standing rose nearly 5 percentage points, on average, over the last three years due to the additional monies we have directed to staff pay, and we are proud of these accomplishments.

Today I am pleased to announce that we have been working on a program that will improve staff salaries even more - over and above what we have already achieved. First, we will continue our multi-year overall pay improvement process for all staff. This means that we plan to maintain above-market pay pools for all types of staff in an effort to improve our pay against the external market.

Second, on top of that, we plan to do even more for staff in our five lowest pay bands, toward whom we feel a special responsibility. Over the next 5 years, we intend to address the issue of a living wage assertively by increasing the pay band minima and by increasing the pay of current staff whose jobs are slotted in bands A through E.In addition to the pay improvement plan, we will establish a childcare scholarship program to assist those with financial need with the cost of childcare. We will work with the downtown Day Care Council to establish the program, with an intended start date of July 2001.

Third, we have targeted areas with key national recruitment and retention needs for salary improvement above the multi-year improvement pool. In certain professions -- for example, in information technology and in development -- there is stiff competition to attract professional staff and an on-going challenge to keep staff from pursuing opportunities elsewhere. We will invest additional funds to address these critical recruitment and retention issues. Over the next five years, we will target special funds for these key areas in the statutory and endowed colleges and in administrative operations.

We will also continue to evaluate and improve our benefits package for all employees - statutory and endowed. We already offer a very fine benefits program - better than many other employers in the region - and we intend to keep it that way. We feel that the new childcare scholarship program will go far in helping meet some real needs in this area.

In addition, the university will partner with the Employee Assembly to establish an emergency fund to help employees who face unforeseen hardships such as fire, theft or other tragedies. This emergency fund is something that the Employee Assembly requested, and we are pleased to help get it started. Cornell will seed the fund with $25,000 and ask the EA to work with OHR to raise additional funds to make it an on-going program.

I have asked Mary Opperman to develop a policy that will allow staff to donate sick and vacation time to their colleagues who face serious illness or injury. Such a donation plan will help those in need in our Cornell community. I know that the human resources community is working with the policy committee of the EA to address issues such as career development and volunteer activities. I look forward to hearing about these new provisions soon.

As those of you have recently reviewed your benefits information for the new year will know, this year we are offering even more choices to better meet the needs of Cornell staff members and their families. For example, there are more health insurance coverage levels designed to meet the needs of individuals and different types of families, and the deadline for submitting paperwork for medical reimbursement accounts has been extended to Dec. 31, to give everyone more time to determine the appropriate amount to contribute to their medical reimbursement account.

Just as we are a great university - not just a good one - we want to be a great employer, not merely a good one. We aim to be the employer-of-choice - locally, regionally and nationally -- and we will do all we can, always with an eye to financial prudency, to achive that goal. We feel very good about this new compensation program and the improvements to benefits and policies. You deserve it. It will be a challenge to identify the resources for this program and to address the complexities of our many funding sources, but our commitment to make sustained salary improvement for staff is one from which we will not waiver.

And in keeping with our commitment to being a great university and a great employer, we will continue to reward excellence in performance. This is, and will continue to be, an institution where quality is recognized and rewarded. We will continue to recognize especially high levels of performance. We ask for a lot from staff and we will continue to do so. Each staff person deserves an annual performance review so that he or she knows what is going well and what can be improved. We expect that staff will continue to learn new skills, take on new challenges and help us serve our students with excellence and commitment. Through performance reviews, we will differentiate among staff in setting salaries and provide pay for performance. These expectations put substantial responsibility on supervisors and department heads to help their employees do their best work, to evaluate them carefully, and to reward performance with individual pay increases that are merit-based.

Cornell is a great university. And the Cornell staff - in the endowed units, the statutory units, and in university-wide posts - are absolutely critical to its greatness. Over and beyond your specific job responsibilities, which you carry out with dedication and skill, you help set the tone of your individual units and the university as a whole. From the way you greet students and their families when they first arrive on campus, to the way you volunteer in large numbers to work at Commencement year after year, you make Cornell a great university. In fact, the Cornell Commencement has a reputation of being one of the best organized and most enjoyable commencements in the nation - and that is due largely to the commitment of volunteers who organize graduates on the Arts Quad, direct traffic, help elderly and disabled guests participate fully in commencement activities, and generally contribute to the sense of ceremony and of celebration that creates a truly memorable day for everyone.

Today, as we near the end of the semester, I want to thank all of you for what you have done and continue to do for Cornell.