Thank-you, Harold, and welcome, everyone, to Reunion 2001.

It is good to see that even after last night's celebrations -- and all the activities of this morning you're still going strong.

They say that class reunions are where you meet people who used to be the same age as you. But whether you are a young alumnus or a member of one of the older classes, you have developed effective strategies for maintaining your vigor and good health.

As someone in the Class of '91 told me last night, "I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol."

Then there was the gentleman from the Class of 1926 -- celebrating his 75th Cornell reunion -- who said, "I intend to live forever - so far, so good."

I am looking forward to meeting more of you later this morning -- when we move to the Trillium for the President's All-Alumni Reception -- and increasing my store of these scientifically tested, and obviously effective, techniques.

You have brought a tremendous amount of energy to Cornell this weekend, and we are delighted to have you back on campus for the best Big Red Reunion Weekend yet.

Like you, Cornell has a great deal of energy, and tremendous momentum, right now as we advance in all of our missions: teaching, research, and outreach.

We continue to advance our position as the best research university for undergraduate education in the nation.

Last month, Cornell engineering undergraduates swept the competition in the annual International Formula SAE Collegiate Design Competition, considered the premier student design competition in the world.

Competing against students from more than 100 universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Korea and Japan, Cornell's team won the overall competition by a wide margin.

This is the sixth time since 1988 that a Cornell team has captured the overall title, and students are uniformly enthusiastic about the experience -- saying it is the best way to learn engineering at Cornell because it requires high technical skill and great deal of teamwork.

And it is not just students in science and other technical fields who take advantage of these kinds of opportunities.

Seven undergraduates recently received Henry and Nancy Horton Bartels Undergraduate Action Research Fellowships to pursue public policy research in collaboration with local governments, community groups and human service organizations.

Their projects range from exploring the interaction between Asian immigrants and social service agencies in Ithaca to developing evaluation tools for inner city youth programs.

And the word is getting out that Cornell is an excellent place to obtain an undergraduate education.

We received more than 21,500 applications for the Class of 2005 -- 6.5 percent more than last year and 7.9 percent more than two years ago with extraordinary quality and diversity in the applicant pool.

We admitted only about a quarter of the applicants this year, down from more than a third five years ago, and we accepted 660 fewer students overall.

That is a dramatic step, which indicates Cornell's growing selectivity.

We expect that Cornell will be even more attractive to the nation's best students as we move forward with the Residential Initiative, which links living and learning in the undergraduate experience and encourages students to view themselves as part of our academic community.

Although those of you with class headquarters on North Campus may find it hard to believe, our new residence halls -- Court and Mews Halls -- and the community commons will be ready when the Class of 2005 arrives in August -- allowing us to house all freshman on North Campus and to make the residence halls part of the learning experience at Cornell.

To set the tone for the rest of their Cornell experience, all members of the Class of 2005 are receiving copies of Jared Diamond's best-selling book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, along with a list of study questions, to guide their summer reading.

And they will be meeting in small groups with faculty members, continuing Cornell students, and others to discuss the book during Orientation Week.

I found the book provocative and insightful, and I am looking forward to discussing it with students in my group.

If the Class of 2005 is anything like the students in the Classics course I taught during the spring semester, I know we are in for a lively and productive session.

We are in the planning stages of an equally dramatic transformation of West Campus to take place over the next five to eight years.

We expect to create on West Campus five new living-learning houses for sophomores and upperclass students who live on campus -- with strong involvement from faculty members and graduate students.

The project will join living and learning in the lives of our students as never before,

And it will enable us to build on the sense of community and intellectual engagement that students develop during the freshman year.

We are also improving academic facilities for undergraduates.

Following the success of the Lincoln Hall Renaissance, which has improved our music programs tremendously and which has been a special priority of the Class of '56,

we have just completed a design competition for Milstein Hall, which will be the new home of our top-ranked undergraduate architecture program.

The new $25 million facility will be designed by Steven Holl Architects of New York -- the winner of the competition -- and it promises to be a stunning addition to our campus as well as a functional one.

And we really are moving forward with the long overdue renovations to Bailey -- so that by next reunion, you should be able to enjoy this address from comfortable seats.

At Cornell, athletics is an important part of our commitment to excellence, as we uphold the Ivy League ideal of the scholar-athlete.

We have recruited very talented student athletes in recent years, and that effort is paying off in our competitiveness in intercollegiate play.

This spring, for example, the women's softball team claimed the Ivy championship, ending its season with a 36-18 record, its fifth straight 30-win season.

The women's lacrosse team made it to its first-ever NCAA tournament.

The women's polo team won the national championship this year.

And for you who remember the fieldhouse by another name --or no name at all -- I am pleased to say that it is now "Bartels Hall."

We officially dedicated the fieldhouse in honor of the Bartels Family last month to recognize their support for Cornell athletics and the $15-million challenge they have provided to the current athletics campaign.

Our investment in research -- particularly in the strategic enabling research areas of genomics, advanced materials, and computing and information science is bringing results.

We have attracted to Cornell some of the world leaders in these fields and have won state, federal and private support to help us maintain world-class facilities and programs.

We are a national center for nanobiotechnology, established with a 5-year, $20 million grant from NSF and the State of New York.

Our Center for Materials Research is moving forward with $20 million from NSF.

And after reunion, we expect to begin work in earnest for Duffield Hall, a $62.3-million facility on the Engineering Quad that will greatly increase our capabilities for research and teaching in nanotechnology, nanobiotechnology, advanced materials and related fields.

Cornell recently received $2.8 million from the New York Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research -- NYSTAR -- for its Alliance for Nanomedical Technologies, which will use industrial backing to research and develop microscale optical detection devices.

And Governor Pataki has announced that our proposed genomics technologies research center will be designated as a "Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STAR) Center. The new center will specialize in plant proteomics and metabolomics, or the study of plant protein composition and plant metabolism for agricultural and medical purposes,

And it will augment a $2.6 million grant we recently received from NYSTAR for plant genomics research and faculty development.

Cornell is a great private university with a public mission that extends globally, and this year we extended our international presence in a major way.

As many of you read on the front page of the New York Times this spring, Cornell and a private foundation organized by the Emir of Qatar have established the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar.

The new medical college will offer a complete medical education in Qatar leading to a Cornell University M.D. degree, based on the same admission standards and curriculum as the New York campus.

We expect the first pre-medical program class for the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar to enter in fall 2002. Medical students will begin in fall 2004, and the first Cornell degrees will be awarded in spring 2008.

The Qatar initiative is an example of educational diplomacy at its best, and we look forward to developing this venture.

But the greatness of Cornell is more than the sum of its individually excellent parts.

What matters in the end is the "feel" of the place -- the tangible and intangible elements that make our university distinctive -- and that have drawn you back in such numbers this weekend.

Those distinctive elements remain very close to what they were when you were students here -- whether it was 5 years or 75 years ago.

Alumna Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author who is currently an A.D. White Professor at Cornell, has written an essay on "The Site of Memory," and in it she notes:

"You know they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is like that: remembering where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place."

I am delighted that on this glorious reunion weekend, you are remembering where you were -- what the hill and the gorges and the light were like -- and that you've found the route back to the original place -- where it all began.

We are grateful to you all.