Thank-you, Chairman Meinig, for your warm introduction and for the outstanding job you are doing as chairman of Cornell’s Board of Trustees. As many of you know, Pete Meinig hails from Oklahoma, the Sooner State. A “Sooner” -- originally someone who had come to Oklahoma before it was officially opened -- had become by the 1920s, a term to describe “an energetic individual who travels ahead of the human procession.” Judging by his Cornell travels of the past few months, I would say Pete warrants the “Sooner” epithet. We are very fortunate to have his leadership and commitment at this pivotal time in our history.

I also want to thank Jeff Estabrook for his leadership of the Cornell University Council – and for that slide show. We have had seven and a half very exciting years together, and I am grateful to the Cornell University Council and the members of the Board of Trustees for your commitment to Cornell and for your personal support throughout that time. It has meant a great deal to Elizabeth and me. This weekend is a stellar example of your dedication. Thanks not only to Jeff Estabrook, but also to Ken Nagin and the Annual Meeting Planning Committee, we have an intensive weekend of intellectual engagement ahead of us.

The author Henry James once noted, “It’s a complex fate, being an American.” It is an even more complex fate to be a Cornellian, as we have seen with special clarity during the past year.

If ever there was a time for Cornell and Cornellians to take on the essential work of the university and of the larger world, it is now, when much of what we took for granted in the past decade has been put into jeopardy. The tragedy of September 11 last year precipitated a crisis in confidence at the state, national and international levels. Reading the front page of the newspaper has now become a shocking education: nuclear weapons in North Korea; terrorist attacks in Bali, Russia and the Philippines; worsening tensions between Palestinians and Israelis, with mounting loss of life; the prospect of war with Iraq; fraud in corporate America coupled with a major decline in the stock market. State budgets in serious deficit, with appropriations slated for significant reduction after next week’s elections.

All of this news has threatened American idealism and self-confidence. These are not superficial difficulties or isolated occurrences. They are major perturbations of life as we knew it, and they have profound implications -- financial, political, and ethical -- for universities and for the larger world.

The events of the past year are all the more unnerving because they have struck in such quick succession following a period of “irrational exuberance” that began with the end of the Cold War. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, beginning in about 1990, we entered a decade of American triumphalism. The stock market surged. Dot-coms took off. Venture capital flowed. We were wealthy, complacent and subject to sanctimony. Now many of us are not nearly as wealthy, and we can’t afford to be either sanctimonious or complacent.

Yet, against this background of anxiety, Cornell has remained confident in the cogency of its contributions. Cornellians have not lost their convictions, nor are they giving in to bad news. We have responded to the issues facing the campus, the nation and the world with serious engagement on the part of faculty and students, including teach-ins, seminars, and other fora for education and informed debate, one of which many of you attended yesterday afternoon.

I want to commend the faculty -- especially those in Near Eastern Studies -- who have gone beyond the demands of their scholarship and classroom teaching to help the Cornell campus consider complex and potentially divisive issues in a reasoned and responsible way. These faculty members deserve our thanks for promoting critical dialogue and providing exemplary arguments about controversial and volatile situations. This is precisely the role humanists and social scientists can play in a first-rate university: to sharpen perceptions, deepen debate, bring evidence to bear on questions of great significance.

We have demonstrated this year, not only a willingness to confront international issues, but also to engage in innovative and constructive new partnerships. I want to commend Dean Antonio Gotto and his colleagues from both the Weill-Cornell Medical College and Cornell-Ithaca for creating a new venture for health and education in Qatar. During the past seven years, Qatar has become one of the most progressive countries on the Arabian Peninsula. As you may have read in last week’s editions of The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, both men and women in Qatar have the right to obtain an education, to drive vehicles, to associate in public, and to participate in political life. In short, Qatar has been able to maintain its Islamic roots while accommodating the realities of the modern world.

Cornell is contributing to that process through the development of Weill-Cornell-Qatar, which enrolled its first coeducational class of pre-medical students this fall. From all reports, this first cohort of students is well prepared and representative of the Gulf region as a whole. Many of them will become members of the first class of medical students at Weill-Cornell-Qatar in 2004.

On the Ithaca campus, Dean Kent Fuchs, who came to Cornell last summer from Purdue University, is providing strong leadership to the College of Engineering while building interdisciplinary and cross-college involvement. Such efforts will be increasingly important as we complete Duffield Hall to provide a new home for the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF), the nanobiotechnology program and related research and teaching. Cornell is the national leader in nanoscience, and we have recently made remarkably strong senior appointments, across a range of fields, that confirm our leadership.

Paul McEuen, a professor of physics who last year came to Cornell from the University of California at Berkeley, is one of those new appointments. He and his colleagues at Cornell’s Center for Materials Research made news last summer by creating the ultimate in a miniature transistor -- a transistor in which electrons flow through a single atom. There are still major technical problems to overcome before such a transistor can be used for electrical applications, but the achievement represents a major advance in work at the nanoscale. I should also point out that it was Professor McEuen who recently recognized and revealed a serious case of research fraud at Bell Laboratories, thus rendering a significant service to science as a whole.

The university-wide Faculty of Computing and Information Science -- the FCIS -- under the leadership of Dean Robert Constable is another unit forging strong links to the College of Engineering and many other parts of Cornell. We can be proud of the boldness of Cornell’s vision in creating an administrative structure to take full advantage of computing as a component in many different disciplines.

As the FCIS mission statement notes, “The Faculty of Computing and Information Science is founded on the recognition that the ideas and technology of computing and information science are relevant to every academic discipline. We are united in the need to bring together a core of faculty in this field from across the traditional colleges who will collectively advance Cornell’s programs of teaching and research in computing and information.”

The vision of the FCIS has already led to significant results. Last year at this meeting I mentioned Paul Ginsparg, Ph.D. ’81, who had recently returned to Cornell as full professor in the FCIS. Professor Ginsparg, who also has an appointment in physics, is perhaps best known for changing the way physicists throughout the world exchange information. While at Los Alamos National Laboratory, he created a virtual space on the Internet where physicists could consider, augment and rebut each other’s ideas. The system, known as “arXiv.org,” moved with him to Cornell and now operates on a server maintained by the Cornell Library. Professor Ginsparg’s work with arXiv is an example of creative thinking that has changed the nature of disseminating scientific knowledge. We were delighted earlier this fall when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recognized Professor Ginsparg as one of its 2002 fellows, an honor designed to encourage innovation, which carries with it a “no-strings-attached” grant of $500,000 over five years.

Another faculty member in the news this year has been Stephen Ceci, the Helen L. Carr Professor of Developmental Psychology in the College of Human Ecology. Professor Ceci is the co-recipient of the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Applications of Psychology, one of four significant national honors he has received this year. His research deals with two major topics: the competence of child witnesses, and the “bioecology of cognitive development,” which encompasses all aspects of the way intelligence develops in children. Professor Ceci’s research group includes several undergraduate students, as well as doctoral students and post-doctoral associates, and his work is noteworthy in the extent to which it contributes to research, teaching and public policy.

Faculty members in the life sciences have also received significant recognition this year. Ron Hoy, the Merksamer Professor in Cornell’s Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, received a $1-million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to develop two new teaching programs for undergraduates – programs that will find application at Cornell and nationwide. Professor Hoy’s project will teach what he calls the “genetic dissection of behavior” -- through experiments that use the fruit fly to understand the genetic basis of aggression, social behavior, and other actions that are also observed in more complex animals. The second project, called “Biomimetics: Mother Nature Wears Engineering Boots,” looks at the ways that biological systems have “solved” interesting problems through evolutionary adaptations and then applies those insights to creating products for human use. The grant recognizes the commitment of Cornell faculty members like Professor Hoy not only to first-rate research but also to exemplary teaching.

Another hotbed of biological research, teaching and outreach is the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. As Pete Meinig mentioned, the new building for the Laboratory of Ornithology is nearing completion at Sapsucker Woods. I hope you will follow Pete’s advice and get out to the Lab while you are on campus this weekend. The new building was carefully designed to meet the Laboratory of Ornithology’s growing needs for space while being sensitive to the uniqueness of its natural surroundings. It promises to add to Cornell’s already distinguished reputation as a world center for “interpreting and conserving the earth’s biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science focused on birds.”

Adding to Cornell’s distinction in biology and related fields is the $500-million New Life Science Initiative, the largest scientific initiative in the history of Cornell. The New Life Sciences Initiative will involve seven colleges, several hundred faculty members and up to 60 departments at Cornell. It will include the construction of a new Life Sciences Technology Building, about which we will have a major announcement later today.

Another example of drawing together Cornell’s intellectual strengths across the campus is our Frankenstein reading project. Mary Shelley’s book, written when she was just 18 years old, has generated a great deal of excitement not only on campus, but also in the Ithaca community. Those of you who tuned in last Sunday morning to NPR’s Weekend Edition may have heard Jon Miller talking about how “Ithaca, NY has gone mad for Frankenstein,” with thousands participating in “a literary event of monstrous proportions.” Frankenstein has captured the imagination of dozens of local reading groups, high school English classes, a local theater company, the Tompkins Public Library (which Miller noted “is at the center of the Frankenstein frenzy”), and local churches, many of which used Frankenstein as the theme of their sermons last week.

On campus, the book has stimulated lively interest in our freshman class. We recently tabulated results from a survey of faculty and staff members who participated in the discussions with the Class of 2006. Ninety-two percent of them agreed that Frankenstein had been a good choice for a book. Eighty-six percent felt that the students were well prepared for the discussions, and 93 percent indicated that they would enjoy leading a small group discussion again next year. The results of our student survey have not yet been tallied, but from conversations I have had with new students, I believe they will give the project high marks as well.

We’re delighted that many of you have also joined the Frankenstein frenzy in preparation for Trustee-Council Weekend. We are looking forward to a high level of intellectual engagement with our favorite monster and the critical -- and surprisingly contemporary -- issues that Mary Shelley raises in her book.

Frankenstein is not just a reading assignment; it is an intellectual project. It requires close reading of a kind that has become rare in our “sound-bite,” cable TV world. It leads us to consider issues ranging from science policy (including cloning and stem cell research) to the role of women in society. And more broadly, it invites us to explore the broad humanistic and ethical themes that are the proper province of a great university.

As the Frankenstein project demonstrates, and as the College of Arts and Sciences continues to insure, Cornell has not fallen into the trap of marginalizing the humanities. They remain central here, and part of their vigor is due to the work of the Cornell Society for the Humanities, which has been a vital force for scholarship and teaching on our campus since 1966. Since its founding, the Society for the Humanities has served as an arena for the analysis of serious ideas across disciplines – an endeavor that is at the heart of the academy. And unlike “think tanks” in the humanities at other universities, the Cornell Society for the Humanities was designed specifically to stimulate interaction between the Society and the university.

Last week, in keeping with its founding mission, the Society sponsored a major conference, with a stellar roster of speakers, to explore “The Idea of the University” – a theme that the Society’s fellows are also engaging from a variety of scholarly perspectives this year. The conference was a way to go beyond the multiplicity of interests that make up the modern research university and to probe its essence.

The university, as Emory’s Bill Chase has noted, “has become a full-time vendor of health care, athletic entertainment, food offerings, job training, remedial improvements, alumni solicitude, psychological counseling and industrial and corporate relations and even classroom learning. In thus becoming more like the commercial world surrounding it, its role as an inspirational entity has been eroded.”

Speakers at the Cornell conference took on the stereotypes of the university put forth by both the right and the left: the university as bureaucratic, transnational corporation; the university as primarily an engine of economic development; the university as cloistered enclave removed from the outside world; the university as critic of culture. They explored the many roles of the university and tried to find the central “idea” of the modern university, as Cardinal John Henry Newman had done for the university in 19th century Britain.

As I participated in the discussions, it occurred to me that the “idea” of the university was captured, not by any one speaker, but by the conference itself. The “idea” of a university is to create a place where critical issues are addressed with much greater depth of analysis and more rigorous thinking than elsewhere. The academy – or to use Jefferson’s term, the “academical village” – should be a place for creative thought, meticulous reasoning, informed dialogue, and considered action.

We saw the strengths of our “academical village” this fall when graduate students were asked to vote on whether or not they wished to engage in collective bargaining through the Cornell Association of Student Employees/UAW (CASE/UAW). Here is an example of the academy at its passionate best. For weeks before the vote, graduate students -- including students from all over the world -- worked hard to inform themselves about the pros and cons of unionization. Faculty weighed in on the issue, both for and against. The Graduate School provided resources to develop an educational website. There was a lively exchange of letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in the Daily Sun.

Cornell became a laboratory for civic procedure, for civil discussion and debate. Both the pro- and anti-union groups conducted their campaigns with vigor and mutual respect. And when it came time to vote, a remarkable 88.4 percent of the 2,318 eligible to vote cast their ballots. By way of comparison, voter turnout for the 1996 Presidential election, which re-elected Bill Clinton, was a mere 48.9 percent. And in the hotly contested race between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000, turnout was only 51 percent. I guess the only election with a higher voter turnout than Cornell’s may be the one held last month in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein received 100 percent of the vote.

Cornell’s election results, which came out strongly against representation by the UAW, do not mean that everything is perfect on our campus or that there are not issues about which graduate students have a legitimate concern. But they did say very clearly that Cornell is the right place in which to address such matters. On the question of unionization, as on so many others, Cornell did what it does best: it educated all members of the campus, including faculty members and administrators.

Yet another example of the strength of Cornell’s “academical village” is the review of Cornell’s land grant mission that has been underway for the past nine months. Under the leadership of a Presidential Oversight Commission, five Cornell panels have focused on Cornell’s outreach and extension efforts, not only in colleges that receive core funding from the state and federal governments, but also in engineering and across the university, especially in technology transfer and in K-12 education. The panels generated a high level of engagement by faculty, staff and trustees, which will form the basis of recommendations to be presented to the trustees early next year.

Cornell alumni, including all of you here this morning, have contributed to Cornell’s “academical village,” through your active engagement in the work of the university. You have helped us recruit a diverse and academically able group of students to Cornell again this fall. You have turned out in force to participate in Cornell events, on campus and through Cornell Clubs and Alumni Associations around the country and the world.

In addition, you have been remarkably generous. In addition to the generosity that Chairman Meinig has described, I want to mention one especially salient fact: In giving by alumni to their universities last year, Cornell alumni ranked number one in the nation, ahead of every other university. That is a tremendous vote of confidence in Cornell.

Last week, Elizabeth and I had the privilege of attending a Cornell dinner in Washington, D.C. The guest list included eminent Cornellians who span the political and cultural spectrums. They included Pete and Nancy Meinig, Presidential Councillors Austin Kiplinger and Sol Linowitz, Deputy Secretary of Commerce Samuel Bodman, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Martin Ginsburg, and Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense. These individuals, like so many Cornellians, are remarkable public leaders, and they extend the reach of our campus beyond the ivied walls of Cornell.

I had an enlightening conversation with Justice Ginsburg about the separation of church and state, an issue in which I have a personal interest, and about the conundrum now facing our country as we attempt to find the right balance between national security and civil liberties. My conversation with Paul Wolfowitz did not focus on current events, as I had expected. Instead Mr. Wolfowitz wanted to talk about Telluride House, which he felt had provided the formative intellectual experience of his life. The books he had read at Cornell, the faculty and students with whom he had spent hours in discussion and debate had had a deep and lasting influence, and that is what he wanted to tell me about, with passion and gratitude. It is, I must say, striking and impressive that one university can claim Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz among its alumni.

Cornell is a place where ideas are debated in an intense way. It is a place where faculty members, staff, and students are encouraged to express strong opinions, but also to do the hard intellectual work involved in understanding complex issues, and to build the trust required to learn from each other.

One sentiment expressed by Cardinal Newman in 19th century Britain holds still for Cornell early in the 21st:

No book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject, that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation. …The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already.

This is a very good place, and I look forward with great anticipation to remaining a part of it when I retire from the presidency next year. Thank you all.