It is wonderful to have so many here for this annual joint meeting of the Cornell University Council and the Cornell Board of Trustees. As Elizabeth and I have come to know many of you better over the past year, we've realized that you are Cornell's secret weapon -- a major reason for the University's strength.
The late Indira Gandhi, India's first female prime minister, once said, "My grandfather told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition."
All of you are definitely members of the first group. I want to thank you for your hard work -- and to give you credit for much of the success Cornell has enjoyed again this year.
We completed the Cornell Campaign last January with a record $1.507 billion, which has positioned us strongly for the future. Harold Tanner has just reminded us of the magnitude of that accomplishment, but let me state one more time what the Campaign has done for Cornell. Some 27 percent of the current endowment is a direct result of the Campaign. The Campaign has increased our endowment per student by 99 percent. Perhaps most significantly, the Campaign was a broadly based effort involving 2,300 volunteers and 96,000 donors. Many of you here have contributed in both these roles.
Despite the incredible effort and the sacrifices that the Campaign required of each of you, you have continued to be generous and devoted supporters of Cornell. Just last night, in fact, Austin Kiplinger, former Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Presidential Councillor, life member of the Council, and one of the Co-Chairs of the Campaign Advisory Council, presented Cornell with a check for $1 million to support the Lincoln Hall renovation project. Kip, as some of you will remember, was instrumental in Cornell's effort several years ago to build the Center for Theatre Arts. As Chair of the Advisory Committee on the Performing Arts, he traveled from coast to coast to enlist support in what proved to be a long and difficult, but ultimately successful, Campaign. Through it all, he never gave up hope, and he never let us forget how important the performing arts are to the life of Cornell.
Kip, no one has been more steadfast in their support of the performing arts at Cornell than you have been; no one has done more to invigorate the cultural life of the campus. We are indebted to you for this most recent gift -- both because of its magnitude and because of the catalytic effect we hope it will have on others as we work to provide adequate facilities for music at Cornell. Kip, will you please stand so that we can recognize you and thank you again for your gift?
If you think back to one year ago and what has changed most dramatically since then, you have to begin with people. We've made several significant appointments during the year:
Amid all those changes, there is a reassuring continuity, especially in the good news Cornell has received in the past few weeks. Cornell's Materials Science Center, for example, received a $17.75 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue its work. The Cornell grant is the largest of 13 awarded by the National Science Foundation to support university research and training in materials science.
We joined with several other major research universities to establish a second Internet. The new Internet II will help us avoid some of the "traffic jams" that now impede the flow of information on-line. It will also provide for faster transmission of data and offer videoconferencing and the potential for other new applications. We expect Internet II to be ready within the next three years and to help keep us in the forefront of teaching and research.
Most exciting of all, within the last few weeks we doubled the number of Nobel Laureates on the Cornell faculty. Two of our current faculty members, David Lee and Robert Richardson, -- and their former graduate student Douglas Osheroff, who is now a faculty member at Stanford -- were honored with the 1996 Nobel Prize in physics. They join faculty members Roald Hoffmann, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981, and Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967.
Professors Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were recognized for their discovery that a helium isotope, helium-3, can be made superfluid -- that is, that it can flow without resistance -- at a temperature about two thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. In its superfluid state, helium-3 exhibits unique properties that cannot be understood in terms of classical physics. Their finding has opened up a wealth of new theoretical and experimental work in low-temperature physics.
I've had an opportunity to talk with Professors Lee and Richardson a bit since they received the fateful phone calls from Sweden, and I've been impressed by how genuinely pleased they are that a former student has shared equally in the prize. The work on helium-3 was a team effort in the very best sense, with a talented graduate student working along side outstanding faculty members and together accomplishing Nobel-quality work. It confirms once again that excellent teaching and excellent research go together. Professors Lee and Richardson continue to inspire students on campus, with their wit, wisdom, and willingness to get to know students both in and out of class.
Professor Richardson is off at an American Physical Society meeting in College Park, MD, but Professor Lee, I think, is here this morning -- if he was able to make it over from his 8 o'clock class in freshman physics -- and I'd like to introduce him to this group. Please stand, Professor Lee, so that we can recognize you for your outstanding achievements.
What I truly appreciate is Professor Lee's and Professor Richardson's willingness, following the announcement of their Nobel Prizes, to participate actively in a number of public events that highlighted the need for support of research. They both took time from their academic schedules to go to Washington, D.C. to meet with the National Science Board, to speak to the National Press Club, and to do a number of hastily arranged interviews. On all these occasions, Professors Lee and Richardson spoke eloquently about the need for public understanding and support of basic research. In today's world, it is vitally important for faculty members to be involved in increasing the public's understanding and appreciation of what we do in the academy.
All those things are signs that Cornell continues to be one of the very top research universities in the nation and the world. But it is never safe to take your position for granted. Even with the Campaign, and the extraordinary success it achieved; even with the significant new research funding we've gained and the investment in the future we are making through the second Internet; even with new Nobel Prizes to our credit and a host of strong new appointments to leadership positions, we confront a period of rapid and profound change in higher education.
A defining element, although not the only factor, in the current period of rapid change is resource constraint, which will be with us for at least the next several years. Competition for federal research funds is increasing, and awards tend to be smaller than they once were. Our total research expenditures in 1995-96 were down approximately 3 percent, and the only area of growth was the physical sciences. The new NSF grant for the Materials Science Center that I mentioned earlier is a case in point: Although it was the largest of the 13 grants NSF made in the field, and although Cornell won it in competition with 139 other universities, it, in fact, represents a 25 percent decrease in the level of support we had previously received from NSF.
Another reason that resources are constrained is that we are approaching the limit of how high we can raise tuition. Last year's increase in endowed undergraduate tuition -- 4.5 percent -- was the lowest since 1965-66, but it still raised tuition in the endowed colleges to $20,900 per year. That is a lot of money, and more than many families can afford. Nearly half of the new freshmen are receiving grant assistance from Cornell, and we continue to meet the full demonstrated need of all our students. As tuition increases, financial aid becomes an increasingly expensive proposition for Cornell.
The tight budget situation is not a secret. It is not something we're ashamed of. We will be working during the day to help you understand the financial realities we and other universities face.
But the changes impinging on higher education go beyond budgetary constraints. Higher education is, quite literally, in the midst of a paradigm shift. The old strategy of "growing" our way to excellence, which universities have employed with success at least since World War II, is no longer viable. We must be quick, lean, and agile -- ready to seize new opportunities and discard ways of doing things that have become obsolete. We must become much less resistant to change than we have been in the past. Along with the nation's other major universities, we are probing many of our time-tested ways of doing things. It makes for what one might euphemistically call "interesting times."
One year into a new Administration, saddened by the loss of Ron Lynch and Deane Malott, to whom we all paid tribute earlier this morning, and faced with "interesting times," it may be well to look at some of the ideals and accomplishments that make us Cornellians and that distinguish Cornell from the other great research universities of the world.
We are, first and foremost, a university with a great faculty and a great student body. As Professors Lee and Richardson have demonstrated so convincingly with their Nobel Prize, the cultivation of the intellect is a major part of the character of Cornell. It defines who we are -- a community of individuals whose members are devoted to the life of the mind -- and it guides us in the choices we must make.
We do have some choices ahead of us. In a time of constraint, we cannot do everything. Yet few of us would want to settle for comfortable mediocrity or stagnation. We want Cornell to continue to be a place where students and faculty members, working together, can aspire to win Nobel Prizes, and where people, no matter what their intellectual interests, live and breathe ideas.
Cornell must compete effectively to sustain its position of excellence in American higher education, even as the familiar paradigm shifts. To thrive in the current era of rapid and profound change we need to coordinate the many facets of this great University. We need to draw people closer together by bringing about greater cooperation, greater coordination, and better communication. We need to be more efficient, but also more effective. Achieving these things will help us move toward a new paradigm of higher education: better coordinated, more synergistic, and dedicated, as its primary reason for being, to cultivating the intellect and promoting the life of the mind.
We've established five priorities for the coming year as a way to focus our efforts:
I won't go into them all in equal detail; some are fairly self-explanatory. I've yet to meet anyone on campus who is opposed to improving faculty and staff compensation, for example -- and with good reason: Vice President Ron Ehrenberg presented a report to the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees last month showing that in both the endowed and statutory colleges, faculty salaries have slipped relative to our peer institutions. We have been successful in keeping salaries for assistant and young associate professors competitive, but there are substantial gaps at the full-professor level. The result has been lowered morale, especially in the statutory colleges where faculty have received no pay raise in four out of the past six years. Staff in the statutory colleges have faced a similar situation, with no raises in 1991, 1992, or 1995, and only a lump-sum payment to non-exempt staff members this year. If this situation goes uncorrected, we risk a run on our best faculty and staff. We are, therefore, committed to improving faculty and staff compensation selectively to retain the best and brightest.
On the statutory side, where our colleges have endured years of budget cuts, there is substantial support for defining Cornell's role in New York State more clearly. Cornell is, after all, the state's most research-intensive university. It is the only university in New York State that comprises both state-assisted and privately endowed colleges. It is the only one with a Cooperative Extension arm that reaches to every county and every borough in the City of New York. It is home to several national research facilities and centers -- on campus and as far away as Arecibo, Puerto Rico. It includes, in addition to a strong program in arts and sciences, highly respected professional schools. Given those strengths, which are unmatched by any other institution in the state, I think this is the time for Cornell to play a leadership role in higher education in New York State.
New York badly needs our leadership: there is currently no state plan for higher education, no consensus on the role public and private universities should play in helping the state overcome its economic and social problems, and little or no coordination among SUNY, CUNY, and the independent colleges and universities. From recent meetings with SUNY board members, the acting chancellor and SUNY presidents, I have gained a strong impression that the time is ripe for developing a coordinated plan for higher education in New York, with Cornell in a lead position. We need it if Cornell is to fulfill its role as New York's land-grant university, and if the state is to shake its malaise.
Restructuring our administrative services is an agenda item where we are already moving forward with Project 2000, about which you will be hearing more during the day. Project 2000 -- or as Senior Vice President Fred Rogers likes to call it "P-2-K" -- is not about saving money, although we do hope that we will realize savings from it. It is about changing administrative practices to create faster, better and less duplicative systems. These systems will help us standardize practices across the University, eliminate unnecessary work, make information available to people who need it, and reduce the number of people who need to sign off on a project in order for it to get done.
We are also beginning a thorough examination of our admissions process, which I know is of interest to many of you. Under the leadership of Don Saleh, our Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, we are working with college Deans and Directors of Admissions to redesign our current structure while preserving its strengths. We want to make sure that college Deans and faculty are still involved in setting selection criteria. We want to make sure that faculty are involved in the selection process. We want to make sure that the recruitment priorities of the colleges and those established by our regional staff are in harmony. We want to retain the involvement of alumni in our recruitment efforts. We have the country's largest and strongest network of alumni supporting our admissions efforts. This is definitely a strength that we will preserve. Our goal is to build a new organization that will preserve what is best in our current system while becoming smaller, more efficient, and more effective.
Another major agenda item for the current academic year -- and one on which we are already moving forward -- is to coordinate and reorder our academic programs. You remember Woodrow Wilson's famous comment that it is easier to move a graveyard than change the curriculum -- and he knew of what he spoke; changing the curriculum has not gotten easier over the years. Typically universities have accommodated new knowledge and the interests of new faculty members by adding more courses -- but very rarely have they been willing to cut anything out.
This is not just a Cornell problem. It is a problem that is widely shared among America's research universities. One university, which shall remain nameless, was thrown into crisis when it was discovered that the history department had used up all course numbers between 100 and 999. Did that mean they could never offer another course? Upon investigation, it turned out that some of the courses on the books had not been taught in decades, but then the question arose: "If we take them off, does that mean that we'll never be able to teach those courses again?" In an era of very slow growth and even contraction, the problems of course proliferation and program duplication are ones we have to address.
Last year, in my Inaugural Address, I talked about the need to bring greater coherence to Cornell's academic programs in order to create more intellectual synergy. Under the leadership of Vice President Ehrenberg, we have already made progress, especially in the social sciences. We have achieved a greater degree of interdepartmental cooperation in searches for faculty members. The Economics Department in the Arts College and the Department of Agricultural, Resource and Managerial Economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, for example, have identified an outstanding candidate to fill the Lee Teng-hui Professorship of World Affairs, and we hope that person will accept.
By next year, we expect to have a University-wide Department of Statistical Sciences that will help to bridge the disciplines and the colleges and restore real substance and meaning to the phrase "academic community" in that important intellectual area. Based administratively in CALS, the department will draw together statistics faculty from four undergraduate colleges so that our resources will be more accessible University-wide. With a single University-wide department, we will be able to increase our course offerings in statistics and reduce redundancies. We will be able to offer an undergraduate major or minor in statistics to students across the University. By moving statistics faculty from the Department of Mathematics and the Statistics Center in Operations Research into Malott Hall (after the Johnson School relocates to Sage), we will bring faculty members with complementary interests physically closer together, simplifying the logistics of offering joint seminars and cooperating on research.
Other areas of progress include the cross-listing of courses so that students in the Arts College, for example, can take economics courses in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and still have them count toward college degree requirements. We are rethinking our undergraduate programs in management and business, which currently are spread across three colleges: the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and the Hotel School. We are also investigating how better to coordinate professional masters' programs in public policy, international and environmental areas.
In my Inaugural Address, I also highlighted the need to take a broad view of our academic strengths and weaknesses in designing new programs and evaluating current ones, and to plan together our future directions. We are acting on that this year by implementing academic program review. Academic program review will ensure that all Cornell's academic programs are evaluated regularly and systematically in order to help us make good academic resource decisions and to ensure University-wide standards of quality. A mechanism for the reviews was proposed last spring by a committee chaired by Dean of the Graduate School Walter Cohen. The Faculty Senate voted in favor of the idea earlier this fall. We will review the first set of programs in this academic year.
As a major new vehicle for increasing intellectual synergy and collaboration on campus, I am pleased to announce this morning the creation of an $8.4 million Academic Initiatives Fund. These new resources coming to Cornell through this fund will finance recruiting, over the next five years, of outstanding new faculty members who can forge creative, cross-disciplinary and intercollegiate alliances in teaching and research. These new resources will enable us, even in a time of tight budgets, to bring to Cornell the very best people -- people who can catalyze new endeavors and bring about collaboration across various fields and colleges. The Academic Initiatives Fund will provide bridging funds for faculty salaries until faculty budget lines become available. It will cover start-up costs associated with laboratories and research for the new faculty members recruited through the fund. It will also offer programmatic funds for Deans in select cases to provide an incentive for them to make an intercollege or interdisciplinary appointment. At a time when Cornell must keep the overall size of the faculty stable, we are tremendously pleased to be able to reinvigorate the University with strategic faculty appointments that will promote greater curricular coherence and more collaborative research.
A final major agenda item for the coming year is to improve the living and learning environment of our students so that they can participate more fully in the intellectual life of Cornell. The chasm separating our students' intellectual lives from their social and personal lives -- the gulf between college and Collegetown -- that I talked of a year ago is still with us. My sense is that for many undergraduates, the intellectual and the social parts of Cornell are still light years apart. We need to close that gap -- by enabling more undergraduates to participate in research and scholarship, by working together as a community to translate the broad principles and goals in the new residential housing policy into programs and initiatives that will meet the needs of our students. In view of the controversy part of this proposal caused last spring, I want to see us move forward this year through civil discourse that respects the many different points of view found on the campus but still has appropriate action as its goal.
This morning I am pleased to announce a major new initiative that will help us tremendously in drawing students more fully into the intellectual community of Cornell. We are establishing at Cornell, with $5.45 million in new resources, the Cornell Research Scholars Program. The program, to be funded over the next five years, will help us attract the most academically gifted students in the country by offering them the opportunity to work one-on-one with a faculty mentor on significant research and to be paid for that work throughout their four years at Cornell. For students who need financial aid, the program will provide up to $2,500 annually in loan reduction. All of these students, whether or not they need financial assistance, will have the opportunity to do paid, part-time research with a faculty member during the school year. They will also be eligible for one summer of paid research. In their senior year, the Research Scholars will work on a senior thesis and also serve as mentors for freshman Research Scholars. We plan to welcome up to 75 Cornell Research Scholars to Cornell next fall and to have a total of 300 students, freshman through senior, in the program at the end of four years.
The Cornell Research Scholars Program will complement the Cornell Tradition Program, which rewards students primarily for their commitment to work and community service, and the Cornell National Scholars Program, which rewards students with outstanding leadership abilities. All three programs will be administered as "The Cornell Commitment"; all three will engage students more fully in the intellectual life of Cornell.
The Cornell Research Scholars Program is significant on one level because it will make Cornell even more attractive than it already is to the most talented students in the country. These are students who invariably have offers from several of the nation's best universities and for whom the opportunity do research with a faculty member from the very beginning of their college career could be a deciding factor in their college choice.
But the impact of the program, we hope, will go beyond those students directly involved. Having an even greater number of truly outstanding students on campus should elevate the intellectual climate of the campus and develop the academic leaders of the future.
Some of you will remember Barnaby Marsh, a member of the Class of 1996, who was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship last year. He and I got to be quite good friends. He was an absolutely top student. He was involved, as an undergraduate, in the kind of research that will be available to Cornell Research Scholars, and as a member of the Undergraduate Research Board, he helped other undergraduates find opportunities to carry out research. Barnaby Marsh not only rose to the intellectual challenge of Cornell; he challenged his professors with insightful questions and interesting observations; and, because excitement about learning is contagious, he helped his classmates discover the satisfactions that come from immersion in the life of the mind.
With the new Cornell Research Scholars program, the impact of people like Barnaby Marsh will be increased 300-fold. And I hope that a generation from now, another Cornell president at another Trustee-Council weekend, may have occasion to celebrate yet another Nobel Prize that recognizes the collaborative efforts of another faculty-student team. But on that day, 20 or 30 years hence, the student member of the team will have had the distinction of having been a Cornell Research Scholar -- an undergraduate student -- at the time the prize-winning discovery was made.
I believe such an achievement is possible because there is a strength of character about Cornell and a creativity in the University's approach to challenge. Those traits enable us even in times of constraint to look toward the future with optimism, to do what is necessary to realize our goals, and to show others the way.
At the end of the first year of the war between Athens and Sparta, the Athenian leader Pericles delivered a funeral oration over the graves of his countrymen who died in battle. In it, he described what he called the special character of Athens, that made her different from other cities:
We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without
pedantry; wealth we employ more for use than for show. . .
In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Greece; while
I doubt if the world can produce a person, 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.
In like manner, Cornell is the quintessentially American school. Our versatility is expressed in our ability to lift ourselves in times of challenge. Ron Lynch embodied those special Cornell traits: he cultivated refinement without extravagance and knowledge without pedantry; he employed wealth more for use than for show. And where he had only himself to depend upon, he was equal to so many emergencies and graced by so happy a versatility.
What I would prefer, said Pericles, is that you should fix your eyes every day on the greatness of Athens as she really is, and should fall in love with her.When you realize her greatness, then reflect that what made her great were [people] with a spirit of adventure, [people] who knew their duty, [people] who were ashamed to fall below a certain standard.
Cornell is blessed with an abundance of those people -- on the faculty, in the student and alumni bodies, on the staff, and most significant for us here this morning on the University Council and the Board of Trustees. Thank you for your devotion.