by
Cornell University
As prepared for presentation
Oct. 19, 2001
Welcome, everyone, to the 2001-2002 joint meeting of the Cornell University Council and the Cornell Board of Trustees. Each year I speak on this occasion about the state of our university and about our achievements and our aspirations. Francis Bacon once said that a wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. That has again been true for Cornell this year: we have achieved a striking set of goals and opened up numerous new opportunities.
But I would like to begin today not by listing the landmarks of the past year, but rather with a reflection upon those attributes of Cornell that we generally take for granted and, in fact, often submerge beneath our interest in the latest developments and the most recent news. Following the events of Sept. 11, a number of us on campus have begun to reflect much more deeply about the fundamental nature of this university and the academic community we work in every day. Whereas in the past, we have offered lengthy lists of grants and gifts, faculty appointments and scholarly awards - letting the data speak for themselves in unabashed superlatives - this year, there is a need to put our accomplishments in a broader context and to view them through the lens of the enduring values espoused by Cornellians since the founding of our university 136 years ago. It was G.K. Chesterton, the British essayist, who said that the way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. So it is with the values that undergird Cornell.
I do not have to rehearse for this group Cornell's distinctive contribution to American higher education - and to American life: from the first, we have opened our doors to the world - to men and women, rich and poor; to individuals of talent from all social circumstances, all races and religious traditions, all corners of the globe. We have invited these individuals to join our community in the free and open pursuit of knowledge.
When Ezra Cornell founded our university, he said, memorably and unequivocally, "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
We remain an open academic community within a free democracy. Like our country, we prize our diversity, and we learn from our differences. Our institutional commitment to openness and diversity is the reason why so many individuals from every corner of the United States and every country in the world come to learn and to live together at Cornell. We have in the past taken this tradition for granted. But in October 2001, we should not take any of it for granted.
Ours is not a communitarian nirvana, where all is harmony and good cheer. We are instead a campus of free and creative thinkers - a collection of individualists who regularly express strong beliefs and act upon them with commitment and vigor.
You will remember Carl Becker's description of the famous professor of history, "passionate defender of majority rule, who, foreseeing that he would be outvoted in the faculty on the question of the location of Risley Hall, declared that he felt so strongly on the subject that he thought he ought to have two votes." Or the professor of agriculture who reluctantly agreed to serve as dean on the condition that he be relieved of that "irksome task" by a specific date - and who, on the agreed-upon date, with no successor in place, simply cleared out his desk in the dean's office and left.
These stories have become our "urban" myths, but they illustrate an enduring truth: there is within this campus a healthy tension between the individual and the community that gives us our unique character and that is the source of Cornell's uncommon strength. Even our founders - proud rebels against the educational establishment of their day - maintained a healthy tension between them in their aspirations for our university, with Ezra Cornell urging, for example, the creation a Cornell shoe factory, where students might learn manual labor, while Andrew Dickson White, quietly aghast at the idea, advocated more intellectual, though no less radical, goals. Yet the university that White and Cornell created together was -- and is -- more distinctive and more enduring that what either founder might have created alone.
"[T]he essential quality of a great university derives from the corporate activities of. . . a community of otherwise-thinking men [and women,]" Carl Becker wrote. "By virtue of divergence as well as of community of interests, by the sharp impress of their minds and temperaments and eccentricities upon each other and upon their pupils, there is created a continuing tradition of ideas and attitudes and habitual responses that has a life of its own. It is this continuing tradition that gives to a university its corporate character or personality, that intangible but living and dynamic influence which is the richest and most durable gift any university can confer upon those who come to it for instruction and guidance." Let us not take this tradition for granted in October 2001.
What I have observed with great interest during the past five weeks, and what has forcefully and frequently impressed itself upon my mind, is that we are a community of iconoclasts, but we are a community nonetheless. And underlying the candor with which we express our opinions and the critical spirit in which we carry out our research and scholarship is a remarkable commitment to academic freedom and the responsibilities it entails.
What freedom of speech is to American democracy, academic freedom is to this university. Our commitment to academic freedom - and the responsibilities that go with it - means that we:
This is the way in which we can best advance the national interest and support the values on which this nation was built.
It was in that spirit that some 13,000 Cornellians - students, faculty members, staff members, local alumni and their families - gathered on the Arts Quad on Sept. 14 for a Memorial Convocation. It was a memorable event for all of us, and it created a national impression: a picture of the huge crowd filling the Arts Quad formed the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education the following week. As we honored those who had been lost, we also reaffirmed the strength of this open, diverse, iconoclastic community - and our determination to continue our work with a renewed sense of purpose and resolve.
Our approach is not unlike that of ancient Athens, and it has yielded similarly positive results. As Pericles said to his fellow Athenians in his famous oration honoring those who had fallen in the first year of the Peloponnesian War: "We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit from our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens. . ."
In this same way we invite the world to Cornell, and people come from every continent to study with our superb faculty, to do research in our laboratories and library, and to gain the benefits of a Cornell education.
Pericles summarized his depiction of Athenian attributes with these words: "In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas; while I doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian."
It would be difficult to find a better description of Cornellians' character, a remarkable blend of theory and practice, thought and action. Let us not take this for granted, but, instead, let us emphatically recommit Cornell to the values that underlie our character.
Cornell's core values form the foundation for the North Campus Residential Initiative, which has created for our freshman class a strong, new community rooted in Cornell ideals. The transformation of North Campus, with its new residence halls and the Community Commons, is as much philosophical as it is physical, and it is furthering the Cornell tradition of freedom with responsibility by introducing our new students to Cornell's fundamental values as they bond together as a class.
Our new freshmen are as diverse and academically able as any class that has ever matriculated at Cornell. They are "otherwise-thinking" individuals in the finest Cornell tradition, who in the creative tension of daily living and learning are also becoming members of a community. The result has been an engagement with the intellectual life of this campus to an extent never before realized by entering students and a very high level of discourse and debate, with the active involvement of Cornell faculty members, eight of whom live on North Campus as faculty-in-residence, and another 82 of whom are involved in programs there.
At many American colleges, students graduate less individualistic - and less interesting - than when they arrive as freshmen. An insidious acculturation process sets in during four years on campus that encourages conformity to campus norms, so that identifying alumni by their schools brings to mind particular types of individuals those institutions are likely to produce.
Most of us would be hard-pressed to define a narrow Cornell type. On our campus - where iconoclasm is the campus norm - we expect our students to think for themselves beginning with the freshman year. We now have a way to encourage such thinking as part of each freshman's introduction to Cornell.
Last summer, at the urging of Provost Biddy Martin, we sent every entering freshman a special Cornell edition of Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel. We accompanied the book with a study guide prepared by senior faculty members in our John S. Knight Writing Institute. And we gave the new students their first homework assignment: Come to Cornell prepared to discuss the book with each other and with faculty members and returning students during Orientation Week.
This was a controversial project, which generated some good, old-fashioned skepticism across the campus - from deans, to faculty members, to the students themselves. They challenged the basic premise of the undertaking: How could Cornell, with such a strong tradition of freedom with responsibility, require students to read a book? How could we select a single book for a campus community as diverse as ours? How - if we were serious about our intellectual endeavors - could we choose a book that had earned a place on the national best-seller list and that was notable for its absence of footnotes?
Yet the project has been a roaring success, serving to highlight the multifaceted nature of our university while stimulating a very high-level of debate across disciplines and colleges. A large fraction of our otherwise-thinking campus community -- including not only students but also more than 200 volunteer faculty members - weighed in with their own perspectives on the uneven development of human civilizations, the fundamental question that Diamond, in his wide-ranging analysis, seeks to answer.
The North Campus project and the common reading experiment were pioneering first steps in joining living and learning in the lives of Cornell students. We intend to build on their success as we turn to the next phase of the residential initiative on West Campus. The objective of the West Campus Residential Initiative is "to offer upper-level students an actively engaged community of their own - one that will foster personal discovery and growth, and nurture scholarship and creativity in an environment of collegiality, civility, and responsible stewardship."
Plans for West Campus have evolved through a consultative process under the intellectual leadership of Professor Isaac Kramnick, our new vice provost for undergraduate education, and involving a broadly based team of faculty, staff and students. Like virtually every initiative at Cornell, the planning for West Campus has involved healthy tension among competing ideas. But the result is a coherent vision of residential life for upper-level students, which fits perfectly into Cornell's tradition of freedom with responsibility.
The West Campus initiative is based on a "house system" that emphasizes informal interaction with faculty members, opportunities for personal and intellectual growth, self-governance, social and cultural programming, privacy and independence. A Cornell faculty member will reside in each house as a house professor or dean. A staff person will serve as assistant dean, and graduate students will act as mentors. An elected house council, chaired by the house professor and composed primarily of resident students, will govern the house and develop social, intellectual, athletic and cultural programs and activities.
Each new West Campus house will be named for a legendary member of the university faculty, as a way to link it to Cornell's roots and traditions, but the ethos of each house will be determined by its current residents. Isaac Kramnick has emphasized that those legendary faculty members must also be dead - to prevent unseemly competition among our current contenders. (I, for one, would like to see Carl Becker's name at the top of any list.)
Now that the priority of the undergraduate experience has become a part of Cornell's culture, we are turning our efforts toward faculty excellence and support. Last July we implemented increases in faculty compensation, which are helping us reach a competitive position for recruiting and retaining distinguished faculty members. These salary improvements for faculty will continue for five more years, but our commitment to faculty excellence is already bringing results. We have made many strong, new appointments this year.
We are especially pleased with the appointment of Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. '81, as a full professor of physics and member of the Faculty of Computing and Information - the FCI. As some of you may know, from articles that have appeared in The New York Times, Science, Physics Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere, Professor Ginsparg is an otherwise-thinking faculty member in the true Cornell mode. In 1991, while at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Professor Ginsparg tapped into the power of the Internet to create a virtual space where physicists could post their ideas and their preliminary findings for others to consider, augment and rebut. His e-print archive has given physicists a way to engage each other in the same kind of productive and contentious dialogue that we have long enjoyed at Cornell, and it has opened the conversation to those in other nations, in the early stages of their careers -- and even to undergraduates -- who previously had little opportunity to contribute to the research discoveries in physics.
And while Professor Ginsparg's e-print archive, which has moved with him to Cornell, continues to be of great interest to physicists, it is also of great interest to the Cornell University Library, which spends $12 million a year on the acquisition of print and electronic materials. Sarah Thomas, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, is working closely with Professor Ginsparg and the FCI to develop a new model for scholarly communication employing electronic media and repositories like the archive - a model that would offer the quality control and prestige traditionally associated with print media, while also improving its usefulness to authors and searchers, preserving its content and exploring its applicability to other scholarly fields.
In late-breaking news, which appeared in yesterday's Cornell Chronicle, the National Science Foundation has selected Cornell to build the central engine for the National Science Digital Library, an on-line resource that will make high-quality source materials in science available to students via the World Wide Web. The $1.56-million NSF grant highlights Cornell's leadership in bringing together computer scientists and librarians to develop new models for scholarly communication, and it reaffirms what has been true for Cornell and the nation since their beginnings: the more open we are, the stronger we are. Let us not take this openness for granted, but instead let us emphatically recommit Cornell to it and publicly celebrate it.
Yet there is also a downside to the global reach of the modern research university. As disciplines have become more specialized and professional associations more dispersed, faculty members at research universities, including our own, have become citizens of the world in their disciplines, often with a concomitant weakening of their sense of belonging to a campus community. And that is a major loss.
As Frank Rhodes has noted in his new book, The Creation of the Future, "In the case of universities, loss of community is not a mere misfortune; it is a catastrophe, for it undermines the very foundation on which the universities were established: the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge is best undertaken by scholars, living and working, not in isolation, but in the yeasty and challenging atmosphere of community. Knowledge is constrained if disciplines and narrow subspecialties lack the challenge of open discourse and debate to test their assumptions and amplify their conclusions."
For the past several years, we have been reclaiming our identity as a campus community while also attracting faculty members who are distinguished leaders in their field. As an example, our new, university-wide Faculty of Computing and Information, of which Professor Ginsparg is a key member, is drawing together Cornell's strengths in these disciplines that reach across virtually all departments and colleges, and we are fortunate to have the intellectual leadership of the Dean Robert Constable in asserting the FCI's broad and unifying role.
Cornell is also reasserting the priority of the campus in two other strategic enabling research areas: genomics, an interdisciplinary approach to studying the function of genes, which promises to bring enormous benefits to humankind in curing disease, raising the yield and quality of food crops, improving livestock and aiding the environment; and nanotechnology and advanced materials, which are enabling us to create structures and understand matter on the scale of individual atoms and to develop new kinds of materials, such as advanced semiconductors. These broad, interdisciplinary fields are drawing together the power of our intellectual community while also encouraging its individual members to do their best work.
To position Cornell for leadership in genomics and the new life sciences, we have recruited 20 distinguished new faculty members over the past two-and-a-half years. Several of these appointments are in the College of Veterinary Medicine, but they span several departments and colleges at Cornell. Our most recent genomics appointment is Andrew Clark, a professor at Penn State who is considered the nation's top researcher in the field of evolutionary genomics. As we move into Phase II of the Genomics Initiative, we plan to recruit many additional faculty members to Cornell to work in this broad interdisciplinary area that is at the forefront of one of the greatest scientific revolutions of our time.
Just a few weeks ago, the National Science Foundation selected Cornell as the home of yet another national center in the broad area of nanoscience -- the Center for Nanoscale Systems in Information Technology. This new Cornell center, in which NSF will invest $11.6 million over the next five years, will further solidify Cornell's position as No. 1 in nanoscience among all universities in the nation and the world. We expect the new Nanoscale Systems Center to have a direct impact on future high-performance electronics, information storage, communications and sensor technologies, which are all fields with considerable potential for economic impact. And we expect it to have a major positive impact on interdisciplinary relationships on our campus as well.
When Duffield Hall, which is already taking shape on the Engineering Quad, is ready for use in 2003, it will provide the infrastructure for our work in nanotechnology, advanced materials and related fields. We are already a national leader in those scientific domains. I think it is fair to say that the completion of Duffield Hall will make Cornell the leader in nanoscience, clearly one of the most dynamic and significant research areas of the 21st century.
Before the world changed last month - and as part of our commitment to building the strongest possible intellectual community - Provost Biddy Martin and I began a series of seminars to examine critical questions in the humanities and social sciences. These have become even more significant in light of recent world events. One of these yearlong seminars, funded by the Mellon Foundation, is exploring "Race and Ethnicity in the Study of America" with a diverse group of faculty members and postdoctoral associates from a number of humanities departments. The second seminar, comprising social science faculty members and postdocs, is examining "inequality" in the U.S. and abroad - a topic that is especially important, given the current world situation, where large disparities in wealth have created anger, frustration and on-going tension. Two months into the academic year, these seminars are enabling scholarly discourse across departmental and college lines, and enlarging scholarly viewpoints. Our expectation is that they will stimulate creative new ideas for scholarship and teaching at Cornell.
We have been able for several years now to increase our resources steadily and surely. Alumni generosity, endowment performance, and the faculty's ability to win external grants have contributed to consistent growth in income and resources. We have built new buildings and initiated major new programs to increase faculty and staff compensation.
We all know, however, that tight times are coming. The New York State budget is under severe pressure as a result of the tragedy in New York City and the decline in business activity. The economy, which was slowing even before the events of Sept. 11, has lost more momentum despite federal interest rate cuts and other stimulus measures. Unemployment rates are going up, after years of record lows. And the market has come down, after years of unprecedented growth.
Here on campus, we are taking steps to prepare for tight financial times. We are examining our budgets carefully and planning for rigorous analysis of our cost structures. We will take the steps necessary to maintain our academic excellence within the constraints of the financial realities we face. We have to pay particular attention to the contract colleges, where we anticipate serious shortfalls in state support next year.
But Cornell is more than strong enough to surmount the current challenges and those that lie ahead. Six years ago we set ourselves the task of bridging the many chasms that then divided our community - the gulf between living and learning in the lives of our undergraduates; the great divide that separated the upper and lower campuses and the statutory colleges from the endowed. We set about overcoming the insularity of the disciplines, which too often kept faculty colleagues from collaborating effectively across departmental and college lines, and finding instead ways to tap the great potential of our diversity, our breadth and our depth.
Our gorges provided the metaphor for our efforts, but our challenges were both physical and metaphysical. Now, six years later, we have many new spans in place. They are solidly built on the ground of North Campus, where our new freshmen are enjoying a more cohesive and intellectually based academic life, and they will soon take shape on West Campus, completing a fundamental transformation of the undergraduate experience at Cornell. They are taking root on the fertile soil of the Engineering Quad, where Duffield Hall will stand, bringing together researchers from across the campus for studies on the fertile verge of several interconnecting disciplines. And they are coming together - slowly and tentatively, but with a spirit of shared enterprise - in the quiet study of the A D. White House, where distinguished humanists and social scientists from across the university are engaged in common exploration of issues that hold great significance for our campus and our world.
We have not yet completed our composing of Cornell. There remains much to do in making our separate and disparate parts contribute to a harmonious whole while retaining their own strong and sure tones. We remain a university with a great tradition of separate colleges - with a distinctive mixture of applied and fundamental disciplines and of state and private support. We continue to value dissent and to welcome disagreement - not as ends in themselves, but as paths to clearer understanding. We will not take those things for granted.
But, if ever there was a doubt about the underlying congruity of our large and complex university, it was erased by the events of Sept. 11. We have demonstrated this fall that what unites us is far deeper than what divides us.
Our Memorial Convocation on the Arts Quad affirmed the unity of this campus on what counts the most, and the power of the Cornell Idea, which holds, in creative tension, freedom and responsibility. That unity has stayed with us all fall. The values we once might have taken for granted are taken for granted no more. We know who we are and what we believe.
As we come together for this annual Trustee-Council weekend, I want to thank you for your commitment to Cornell and to the freedoms and the fundamental values that have made this such a strong university. We have accomplished much together over these past six years of our composing. We have much important work to do - together.
With the indomitable Cornell spirit, we will continue to educate the citizens not only of this country, but of every country that believes in the transforming power of critical thought.