We are transforming Sage Hall into the new home of the Johnson Graduate School of Management -- a transformation we celebrated on Wednesday by re-laying the Sage Hall cornerstone. When renovations are completed next summer, Sage will look -- on the outside -- remarkably like it did when it was first constructed, with the West Tower and greenhouses along East Avenue that replicate its original ones. On the inside, however, it will be outfitted from top to bottom with the latest technology, including a fully operational trading room, videoconferencing facilities, team project rooms, and other innovations that will establish it as a nationally acclaimed state-of-the-art facility for management education. As the Johnson School's new dean Robert Swieringa has noted, Sage will be a superb facility for management education, but even more important, it will give Cornell the opportunity to define what management education should be and make an indelible imprint on the way organizations are managed around the world.
We are also in the midst of extensive renovations of Tjaden Hall. With this $7.77-million renovation, we are transforming and enlarging the interior space to support the needs of the Department of Art while also preserving one of the campus's historic buildings. The renovated interior will include a new exhibition gallery with excellent lighting, an experimental studio to provide students with the opportunity to work with various media in the fine and performing arts, and improved safety and lighting throughout the building. The renovations, financed largely through the estate of Olive Tjaden Van Sickle, Class of 1925, who passed away last March, also include the restoration of the 30-foot, 20-ton tower that had been destroyed in a storm in the 1950's, so while the inside is being refurbished to accommodate modern-day artists and their work, the exterior will look very much as it did when Olive Tjaden was a student here.
I am pleased to tell you that fund-raising is nearing completion for the renovation of Lincoln Hall. The renovation and expansion of Lincoln will create, at long last, extraordinary new space worthy of our extraordinary music faculty and students. It will provide a major increase in space for the Music Library, including its Listening Lab, a student computer laboratory, a rehearsal room with adjacent music and instrument storage large enough to accommodate 100 musicians and their instruments, and additional practice rooms to accommodate the approximately 1,100 students who at any one time study in the department or participate in one of its ensembles or in extracurricular groups like Cayuga's Waiters and Nothing but Treble. It will also include an expanded electronic composition studio, several classrooms, a gamelon room -- two stories high -- to house Cornell's collection of Javanese classical instruments, and other improvements that will help the department maintain its leadership in performance, composition and musical scholarship.
I appreciate the support many of you have given to transforming Sage Hall, to renovating Tjaden, and to restoring and extending Lincoln Hall. Not only are three of our central academic programs -- in business, art, and music -- gaining opportunities for even greater achievements, but our entire central campus is undergoing a Renaissance. None of this would be possible without your remarkable generosity, which continues to break records even in the first year after the campaign. As Tom Clark reported, 1996-97 brought us $220.2 million in cash gifts, and a total of $270.4 million in new pledges and gifts, a record even better than the year before. More than 48,000 alumni and friends contributed to that effort -- including many of you here today -- and I want to thank you for your commitment to the university.
Last year's seniors were an extraordinary group, not only in their support of Cornell but in the number of prestigious fellowships and scholarships -- including Rhodes, Marshall, and Keasbey awards -- they earned. I expect this high achievement to continue because our students continue to be among the most academically able in the world. I mean that quite literally: some 270 students, or 9 percent of the Class of 2001, are international students. Eighty percent of our freshmen scored over 600 on the verbal SAT; they did even better on the math SAT, with 89 percent scoring above 600. And 82 percent of students from schools that report class rank were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. All these figures represent improvements over last year.
Among that group of outstanding new students are Cornell's first Presidential Research Scholars, who were selected from among the nation's very top high school students under the $5.45-million, five-year initiative I announced at this meeting last year. The Presidential Research Scholars have been attracted to Cornell by the opportunity to work one-on-one with a faculty mentor on paid, part-time research during all four years at Cornell. There are 53 Presidential Research Scholars in the Class of 2001, and we expect them to become mentors for successive classes of entering research scholars, so that student-to-student mentoring as well as faculty-student mentoring can be an important part of the program.
This year, too, we welcomed the first class of Park Leadership Fellows to the Johnson School. The Park Leadership Fellows Program was established with a $5.9 million gift from the Park Foundation as a way to attract exceptional MBA students to Cornell and to help them develop their potential as leaders of American business through theoretical and practical studies. We expect the Park Leadership Fellowships to become as highly prized and sought-after as any such MBA fellowships in the nation. Our first 26 fellows are all outstanding students with strong academic records. Many have started and run their own small businesses or had substantial responsibility in a major corporation. All turned down at least one other Top-20 business school in order to come to Cornell. Their presence on campus is adding a new dimension to campus intellectual life, from which all of us will benefit.
There is a great deal more progress to report this year. I realize, of course, that it is always dangerous to claim too much too soon. I've always liked the story about the young man who left home to make his fortune in the world. After a few weeks he e-mailed a message to his family saying: "Found job as management trainee. Feather in my cap."
Some months passed and again he e-mailed his family: "Promoted to supervisor. Feather in my cap."
Time went by, and things seemed to be going well, so he sent another e-mail to the family: "Landed job as district manager. Feather in my cap."
Then one day, the family received an urgent e-mail message from him: "Out of work. Out of money. Please send bus fare home."
To which his father responded: "Use feathers. Fly home."
Nonetheless, Cornell has made rapid progress on each of the five programmatic priorities I outlined to you at our meeting last October. The first priority has been to coordinate and reorder our academic programs in order to focus on areas of greatest opportunity and strength for Cornell. With the Provost's $8.4-million Academic Initiatives Fund, which I announced at this meeting last year, Cornell has already made several key appointments. Last night, some of you heard Prof. Persi Diaconis give a public lecture that officially launched our new university-wide Department of Statistical Sciences. Prof. Diaconis is one of the most creative thinkers in his field, and the synergy he has created among statisticians across the campus since coming here from Harvard with his wife, biostatistician Susan Holmes, has been instrumental in forming the new, university-wide department. The new department should greatly improve the opportunities available to students and also encourage greater communication and collaboration among statistical scientists on campus.
Encouraged by the success we have had in coordinating the teaching of statistics on campus, we have taken an important first step toward developing a broader cross-college department of sociology that would include sociologists from Arts & Sciences, Human Ecology, and ILR. Such a department would spawn improvements in the undergraduate program in Arts & Sciences and raise the stature of sociology at Cornell in national rankings. We expect to make substantial progress toward creating such a department this year.
The Academic Initiatives Fund also enabled us to recruit Prof. Sol Gruner from Princeton to serve as the new director of the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS). This is a distinguished appointment for Cornell, one of the most important we have made in several years. CHESS is the nation's only university-operated X-ray source for the study of materials and macromolecular structure, and it is a key to Cornell's future in both materials science and molecular and cell biology. Prof. Gruner was a CHESS collaborator while he was at Princeton. His understanding of the instrumentation at CHESS and his expertise in biology, physics and materials science will help keep CHESS at the forefront of these fields. His insights will also be essential in pursuing "strategic enabling research" critical to Cornell.
"Strategic enabling research" is a concept developed by the Research Futures Task Force under the leadership of Vice President for Research and Advanced Studies Norm Scott and Dean of Engineering John Hopcroft. The Task Force's report, which deals only with the physical sciences and engineering, and their potential synergies with the biological sciences, sets up an interesting taxonomy: It recognizes that Cornell, as a major research university, must continue to create an environment supportive of excellent basic research by hiring and supporting superb faculty and encouraging them to make strategic choices about what intellectual problems to pursue. This is the approach that Cornell has traditionally taken, and over the years it has produced impressive results.
In its taxonomy, the Research Futures Task Force also recognized that there are broad interdisciplinary areas such as the environment, energy, health, and earth systems science that are of national importance, where interdisciplinary efforts should arise from the scientific work of the faculty.
At the same time, however, the report recognizes that there are a handful of "strategic enabling areas" in which Cornell must be world class in order to remain a top-ranked institution. Such scientific areas provide extraordinary opportunities for research achievement in their own right, and they are fundamental to the progress of work in a great many other fields. They are areas likely to figure prominently in the most far-reaching human achievements of the next 30- to 40 years. They promise to underlie a great variety of technological advances in everything from communications to medicine, with the potential of altering human life as fundamentally and as completely as the development of the computer or the introduction of antibiotics a half-century ago. They are also areas where Cornell already has an enormous base of faculty expertise and resources spread across many departments and all the colleges of the university.
One of the strategic enabling areas suggested by the Task Force is the field of advanced materials. Building on its solid base of research on equilibrium phase transitions in matter, which has been a strong research theme at Cornell for at least 60 years and which has led to many international awards -- including three Nobel Prizes
-- for members of our faculty, the materials research field is now poised for rapid progress in understanding non-equilibrium states of matter and, with them, some of nature's most important materials. The important general concepts for materials research quite probably are still awaiting discovery, but theoreticians armed with powerful computer simulation techniques and experimentalists using advanced analytical equipment can make rapid progress by working in partnership -- simulating very complex processes thousands of times to focus on the important initial conditions and rates of environmental change, on the one hand, and studying the structure and composition of newly invented matter, on the other, down to the final arrangement of each atom. Such advanced materials are important for rapid progress in micro- and nanometer devices in electronics, for improvements in data storage capacity, for advanced drug delivery, and for many other applications.
Cornell already has an extremely strong foundation on which to foster excellence in materials research. These include highly rated departments and world-class facilities, including the Materials Science Center, the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), and the Biotechnology Center and other locations on campus where biomaterials research is being carried out. We are especially strong in one of the most exciting areas of materials research -- nanotechnology -- where we have a unique national facility, the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility (CNF). You might have seen the recent publicity on our "nanoguitar." The guitar is 10 micrometers long
-- about the size of a single cell -- with six strings, each about 50 nanometers, or 100 atoms, wide. It is one of the world's smallest silicon mechanical devices, and it was crafted by Dustin Carr, a Ph.D. student, working with Professor Harold Craighead, to illustrate a new technology for bringing microelectromechanical devices -- or MEMs -- to a new, even smaller scale.
We are now poised for even greater achievements in the field of advanced materials. Thanks to a leadership gift from David Duffield, founder, chairman and CEO of PeopleSoft, and major, catalytic gifts from "Bill" and Jim Baum, who have been enthusiastic advocates for developing Cornell's strengths in nanotechnology, we are moving ahead with plans to construct Duffield Hall, a center for research and teaching in advanced materials, on the central campus. Duffield Hall is more than a building and more than a fund-raising project. It represents a tremendous opportunity for Cornell to become a national and international leader in a critical and far-reaching scientific and technological area.
Information sciences is a second strategic enabling area proposed by the Research Futures Task Force. Information science is already altering daily life -- from the way we collect, analyze and store information, to the way we spend our leisure time, to the way we communicate with our college-age children, which has become easier thanks to e-mail -- at least as far as the logistics are concerned. Information science is also having profound impact on the core functions of universities -- both teaching and research -- across virtually every academic discipline, and it promises to free us, through distance learning, from the constraints of time and place.
Broadly speaking, the information sciences are concerned with the representation and transformation of information. They study not only computers processing digital data, but also a great variety of other information-processing systems, from organisms to the global economy. They are also essential in creating and managing information repositories such as those containing the vast amount of gene sequencing information produced by research on the human genome. In a very real sense, how much -- or how little -- we learn from projects like the human genome study will depend to a substantial degree on advances in information storage, retrieval and management. Here, as in advanced materials, there is abundant opportunity for both theoretical and applied work.
Cornell already has exceptional resources in information sciences that span several departments. Cornell created one of the first and best computer science departments in the country. It is a major center for research on reliable network communications, with strength in both theory and practice, and we have positioned ourselves to be a major player in the Next Generation Internet, now being shaped by the Clinton Administration. Investments in information science will strengthen it as a major field of scientific inquiry in its own right and will provide infrastructure support for many other areas of research.
The Research Futures Report is a first-rate piece of work that will be discussed widely on campus this fall. We are considering which strategic enabling areas are likely to prove most beneficial to Cornell, and we anticipate that this approach to setting research priorities will be extended to other disciplines, such as the biological sciences, over the next few years.
We have already taken decisive action to support one of the task force's other recommendations, concerning graduate student recruitment. A few weeks ago, I announced the establishment of 80 new graduate fellowships, primarily in the sciences, to bring our total number of graduate fellowships in these areas to 100 in the 1998-99 academic year. Funding for the new fellowships comes from redirected resources in the Graduate School, which will also maintain its current level of support for fellowships in the humanities and basic social sciences. This initiative should help Cornell succeed in the highly competitive arena of graduate recruitment, where the decline of federal funding for research is starting to have a significant impact upon the number of students in the sciences applying to graduate schools. Our support of graduate students in the humanities already ranks us at the top; with this new program, we will rank near the top in the sciences as well.
A second priority I announced last year is enhancing Cornell's role in New York State -- something we have addressed on three fronts this year. The first is through the Coalition of New York State Chancellors and Presidents, which I convened last winter in New York City. This group, which includes both public and private universities, was formed to represent higher education's interests to state government and to the public and to obviate "internecine strife." Starting from the principle that New York State cannot succeed economically or socially without universities playing a major role, members of the coalition were able to create a common agenda that helped to restore funding for higher education in the state budget this year.
A second way we are defining our role as the land-grant university of New York State is through distance learning, where we are positioning ourselves to be a national leader in this new means of educational delivery. It is fair to say that Cornell is doing more in distance learning than any other institution in the Ivy League. This semester, for example, Dean Sutphin, associate dean in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is teaching in a "global classroom" that links faculty and students at five universities worldwide in a course on human sustainability, agriculture and the environment. Former ILR Dean David Lipsky heads our new Office of Distance Learning, whose mission is to facilitate and coordinate the use of distance learning throughout Cornell. ILR has been a pioneer in distance learning at Cornell, and when the newly expanded ILR building opens in January, it will be equipped with two state-of-the-art distance-learning amphitheaters to expand the school's leadership in this field.
We have also joined with New York City attorney and Cornell alumnus Ted Kheel to create a new foundation in New York City -- Cornell/Foundation House Experiments in Distance Learning, Inc. or EDL -- which will enable us to test new technology, benchmark best practices, and conduct cutting-edge experiments in distance learning. EDL is already using the old Drexel Burnham building at 55 Broad Street -- in the heart of the financial district -- for distance learning. Next summer, it will be moving into the new Foundation House building under construction on East 64th Street near 5th Avenue, which promises to be a venue that will impress the most demanding distance-learning clients. With our Extension Center on 34th Street, which includes offices for ILR Extension and Cornell Cooperative Extension; the Medical College on the Upper East Side; and the 55 Broad Street and East 64th Street facilities, Cornell is poised to become a major player in New York City in the near future.
We see distance learning as a way to fulfill our land-grant mission by bringing the knowledge generated on campus to the people of New York and beyond -- putting to rest the idea of Cornell as a "centrally isolated" campus, and giving us a high profile throughout the state, and especially in New York City, where many of our off-campus distance-learning efforts are based. Distance learning also represents a tremendous new market for us -- and an area where public demand and rapidly advancing technology offer good prospects for programmatic and financial success.
A third initiative is the formation this year of Columbia-Cornell Care, a new corporation that has already signed up 1,800 physicians from the Cornell Medical College, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and other sites to offer managed care in the greater New York City area. Leading Columbia-Cornell Care is Dr. Bruce Spivey, who assumed his post as Columbia-Cornell Care CEO on October 1. Among many other achievements, Dr. Spivey established one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the U.S.: Northwestern Health Care Network. In the process he overcame the historical tensions among four institutions which had attempted, unsuccessfully, to work together for 30 years. We are now on the verge of a four-way partnership that will bring together the clinical faculty of two world-class medical colleges -- Cornell's and Columbia's -- with two world-class hospitals, New York and Columbia Presbyterian. This partnership will enable us to create a new management service organization (MSO) for single signatory managed care contracting and marketing oversight, which will be the premiere program for managed care in New York, offering both the highest quality of patient care and an efficient delivery system.
Improving faculty and staff compensation is a third item on my list of priorities, and it is also one on which we've made substantial progress since last year. Faculty and professional staff in the statutory colleges will be receiving salary increases as a result of an agreement worked out with New York State. The state has given us a pool for base salary increases that totals 11 percent over the next 18 months, in addition to a one-time cash lump sum payment of $1,250 and retroactive payments for eligible faculty and staff. As with past salary increase programs, a significant portion of the pools will be based on merit and not distributed across the board. Nonetheless the new program represents a significant improvement for statutory college faculty and professional staff after several years without a salary increase.
We also have in place a multi-year program to raise faculty compensation on the endowed side to a much more competitive level. This year, we increased salaries 5 percent, and we are committed to four more years of similar increases in order to attract and retain a first-rate research and teaching faculty. We are also pleased to have a new four-year agreement with Local 2300 of the United Auto Workers, which represents 1,050 service and maintenance workers at Cornell. The agreement, which was ratified by the union's membership on Aug. 8, required give and take on both sides, but both bargaining teams worked creatively to achieve a settlement in which both sides can take pride.
A fourth priority, again a multi-year one, is to restructure our administrative services through Project 2000 and other initiatives in order to improve the quality of work and to reduce duplication, bureaucratic processes and paperwork. In Project 2000, the emphasis is on rewarding people who are willing to think imaginatively in meeting University objectives; on developing and maintaining policies and programs that support creative, flexible staff members; on developing interfaces with central data warehouses, so that accounting, payroll, personnel and other information can be obtained easily and used effectively by individual departments and colleges; and on developing and maintaining a user-friendly environment for our many constituencies, one which underscores the importance of teamwork, trust, and open communication.
We are also reorganizing our admissions and financial aid programs to develop the largest and best pool of applicants for all of the university while making it as easy as possible for bright students to find the right place at Cornell. Accordingly, the university is phasing in over two years a new structure for admissions and financial aid that will stress strong coordination among the colleges -- while retaining each college's role in defining the characteristics of its students -- and that will also emphasize the recruitment of students we would most like to have at Cornell. The new system will better serve both the university and the individual schools and colleges, enable us to do better enrollment management, and entail less cost.
University Librarian Sarah Thomas, who came to Cornell from the Library of Congress just over a year ago, is moving ahead with reorganization of the Cornell Library -- now divided into 19 individual libraries -- into a better coordinated system, involving two library clusters: "Humanities and Social Sciences" and "Sciences." Her goal is to sustain what has traditionally been excellent in the Cornell Libraries while pursuing innovation made possible -- or necessary -- by new technologies, the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of research and globalization. By using resources effectively, strategically and in a coordinated fashion, her plan will bring us closer to realizing the concept of the digital library -- which she has described as "a seamless network of information resources accessible to the Cornell community at the desktop -- in the classroom, dorm room, office, library, extension site, or home -- twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week," while also enhancing the library's other services to the university.
The final priority I set last year was to improve the living and learning environment on campus; we are about to take a major step in fulfilling this goal as well. Last week I issued a new plan of action on residential housing designed primarily to give our freshmen a strong, unified introduction to academic life at Cornell, and to enable them to establish their identity as a class. I believe the plan will resolve some of our most controversial residential housing issues, including the divisions between North Campus and West Campus and the role of the program houses, while also introducing new students to the breadth of the intellectual environment at Cornell and enabling them to experience the full diversity of the freshman class. The plan preserves, to the extent feasible, the freedom of choice that has been and continues to be important to students at Cornell. However, it represents a major change from our current practices.
I will present to the Board of Trustees tomorrow the following plan of action: All freshmen will, as soon as possible, be housed on North Campus. West Campus and Collegetown will be reserved for sophomores, juniors, seniors and a few graduate students. Housing all freshmen on North Campus will allow Cornell to improve the effectiveness of programming for the entire freshman class; will provide an opportunity for each freshman class to develop its own sense of identity; and will enable the class to take full advantage of its diversity, which is religious, cultural, geographic, socioeconomic, academic and extracurricular as well as racial and ethnic. Programming on North Campus will emphasize the introduction of freshmen to academic life at Cornell, particularly through faculty mentoring. Programming opportunities include expansion of the faculty-in-residence and faculty fellows programs, freshman writing seminars taught on North Campus, and advising and lecturing in residence halls. I will recommend to the Board of Trustees that Cornell construct new residential space on North Campus to make it possible to house all freshmen there while also accommodating all sophomores and transfer students who so desire in attractive, high-quality university housing.
We will improve the living and learning environment on West Campus by making it architecturally and programmatically attractive to upperclass students. Changes will include increasing the number of single rooms, ensuring more privacy and quiet study space for residents, providing kitchen facilities that would allow more independent meal preparation, and increasing the availability of common living areas. We will enable students to select blocks of rooms together, and we will provide quality programming designed to meet the interests and needs of upperclass students, such as programs based on the residential college model used effectively at a number of other universities.
Program houses on North Campus will continue to have freshman residents so long as freshmen constitute between a quarter and a half of their residents. North Campus program houses will participate in programming that provides a broad introduction to Cornell for their new members. Program houses that stay on or move to West Campus will not have freshman residents, but freshmen may affiliate with them.
I am committed to the full implementation of the Fraternity and Sorority System Strategic Plan developed by fraternity and sorority members together with alumni, faculty and staff and released in January 1997. The plan states that the Greek system at Cornell exists "to cultivate the intellectual, social, and ethical development of our members in an environment of freedom with responsibility," and it calls for major changes in the Greek houses and in the way they relate to the academic community. These changes include having a faculty fellow associated with each chapter, co-sponsoring events with other student groups, and encouraging the development of appropriate social behavior and actions that are respectful of the individual, the Greek system and the Cornell community. I believe that implementation of this plan will greatly increase the value of fraternities and sororities to their members and to the university. I am committed to implementing the plan in its entirety, including careful monitoring of the progress each house makes in fulfilling its goals.
We expect to implement this residential housing initiative between now and the year 2001, when the new residential housing space should become available. Over the next three years, we will phase in those parts of the plan that do not require the completion of new residential housing space. We will closely monitor the effects of these changes and use our findings to reevaluate our residential housing policies and programs.
As you can see from even this summary of initiatives begun in the last year, we are making swift progress in meeting our goals. Cornell is one of the great research universities in the world, and it is becoming even stronger by defining and then fulfilling a vision for the 21st century. Our animating theme is to unify the individual strengths at Cornell into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
We are a unique institution, combining private and public colleges, a wide variety of academic programs, an unusual blend of theory and practice, and a remarkably diverse student body from all over the world. Yet, as Strategic Planning Task Force No. 1 pointed out some years ago, ". . . Cornell's structure and institutional culture have often emphasized the separateness of its parts at the expense of shared goals." (Strategic Planning Task Force No. 1, "Educating the Leaders of Tomorrow," May 1994, p. 3)
We aim to change that culture in order to realize the benefits of better integrating our resources. We are pursuing that goal in many domains: reorganizing Admissions and the University Library; drawing together research teams from different colleges to attack complex intellectual problems; combining social science faculty from across the campus in order to create stronger, more accessible majors; developing new university-wide data systems that will allow all of our employees to share information quickly and accurately; housing our freshman class together on North Campus in order to promote integration and a common class identity, and linking Cornell in Ithaca to the Medical College and our extension programs in New York City. We aim, in other words, to find strength in diversity, not by accentuating our differences, but by emphasizing what unites us.
What unites us is the belief that all of us -- whatever our background, our college, our fraternity or program house -- share certain principles fundamental to a great academic community. Among these are:
These fundamental ideas define Cornell's unique character -- a character we are committed to preserving and enhancing through the initiatives I have described today.
Cornell President Livingston Farrand, in a book published by the "Cornell Daily Sun" to commemorate its 50th anniversary, wrote: "There can be no doubt at all of the material growth and the creation of an educational monument of surpassing beauty and impressiveness on the unrivalled site which the Founder made available. The great task for us and for those who come after us is to see to it that the Cornell of the future shall have a spirit, a quality and a character worthy of its opportunity."
Each of you, by your example and your active engagement, strengthens both the quality and the character of Cornell. We draw inspiration from your commitment.