Thank you, Harold, and welcome, everyone. I am also a fan of America's foremost dugout philosopher, and seeing this auditorium filled to capacity -- and beyond capacity -- this morning, I am reminded of another Yogi-ism, which he expressed upon being invited to a popular restaurant where he had not previously eaten.
"Nobody goes there anymore," Yogi exclaimed. "It's too crowded."
This room is not only crowded with Cornellians; it is also filled to overflowing with Cornell spirit, and this morning it is my pleasure to thank you for your hard work on Cornell's behalf, and to give you a context for your continuing efforts -- and ours.
Volatile securities markets notwithstanding, last year was a great year for Cornell. We hit almost as many home runs, metaphorically speaking, as McGwire and Sosa -- and this year is beginning well, with an unprecedented level of scholarly activity on the campus and Cornell discoveries featured again and again in the national news.
Our Nabokov Festival last month, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Nabokov's arrival at Cornell and the beginning of his most productive and creative decade, attracted international attention from Nabokovians and the media alike.
Also last month, a team of astronomers led by Joseph Burns, Cornell professor of astronomy and the Irving Porter Church Professor of Engineering, solved the mystery of how Jupiter's rings are formed -- using data from the Galileo spacecraft. We announced the findings, in cooperation with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, CA, at a cross-country press conference using distance learning facilities in the ILR Conference Center.
If you are from Chicago, or Brooklyn, or Long Island, you have probably heard Cornell entomologist Richard Hoebeke talking about the Asian longhorn beetle that is threatening trees in those areas and seems likely to spread. If you are a cattle rancher -- or someone who just enjoys a hamburger or a steak -- you have probably read with relief that Cornell microbiologist James B. Russell and his students have discovered an easy way to reduce the chances of beef being contaminated by E. coli, the bacteria responsible for more than 20,000 infections and 200 deaths each year in the United States. A simple change in cattle diet -- from grain to hay and grass -- in the days immediately before slaughter seems to do the trick.
If you read the Oct. 19 issue of BusinessWeek, you undoubtedly picked up more good news about Cornell. In January of last year, students in the Johnson School began a "10 x 2000" campaign -- aimed at moving the school onto BusinessWeek's "top ten" list by the year 2000. With Dean Swieringa's leadership, we've made it with two years to spare -- moving from 18th place last year to 8th place in the most recent ranking of the nation's best B-schools. The Johnson School's increased stature coincides with its move into Sage Hall, its new, high-tech home, which more than 1,000 alumni, friends, faculty, students and staff helped us rededicate earlier this month.
Even U.S. News & World Report is catching on to Cornell's true quality. Cornell jumped from #14 to #6 in the latest U.S. News & World Report college rankings. It would be a mistake to rely too heavily on this ranking -- although each year, some prospective college students and their parents do just that. But Cornell's newly elevated status does put us where we have been all along in academic reputation, and that is very good news.
In a year when the Carnegie Commission's Boyer Report has strongly chastised research universities for neglecting their undergraduates, Cornell has demonstrated that it is a great place for undergraduate education. The authors of the cattle-feeding study, for example, included Menas Kizoulis, a Cornell senior majoring in biological sciences who worked in Prof. Russell's laboratory last summer as a Hughes Scholar. The Hughes Scholars Program, funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, has helped some 500 Cornell undergraduates participate in research over the past several years. The institute recently announced that it will award Cornell $2.2 million over the next four years to continue and expand the Hughes Scholar Program and the Cornell Institute for High School Biology Teachers. This most recent grant brings HHMI's support of these Cornell programs to $6 million; Cornell has received more funds from this grants program than any other research university in the nation. The Hughes Scholars Program is a superb example of using Cornell's expertise in research to enhance undergraduate opportunities.
Cornell astronomers-- including those in the Galileo mission that solved the mystery of Jupiter's rings -- also routinely include undergraduates on their space research teams. Undergraduates are currently working on the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) mission, the Athena Project to build the next generation Mars lander and rover, and the Comet Nucleus Tour Mission.
To give still more examples, Cornell's food science student team won the 1998 Institute of Food Technologists' national food product competition last June -- for the third time in four years. And for the second year in a row, our engineering students designed, built and raced the winning Formula SAE car in an international competition, prevailing over competitors from 90 other top engineering schools in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Great Britain.
These undergraduates have found outstanding opportunities for research, scholarship and creative work at Cornell, and they have a lot of company among their classmates. A recent NSF study confirmed that Cornell is a superb place to prepare for a career in science and engineering research. We ranked third in the nation as a source of undergraduates who went on to earn Ph.D.'s in science or engineering. We ranked second in the nation in graduating women who eventually earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering, and we ranked number one in terms of graduates who earned doctoral degrees in biology and agriculture.
Cornell does a superb job of teaching undergraduates, not in spite of the research that goes on here, but because of it. The Presidential Research Scholars Program, a $5.45 million effort now in its second year, has brought to Cornell 102 of the nation's top high school students by offering them the opportunity to carry out paid, part-time research with a faculty mentor throughout their four years on campus. The freshmen and sophomores in the program are already engaged in cutting edge research, and we still have two years to go until the program reaches its critical mass, with Presidential Research Scholars in all four Cornell undergraduate classes.
Our excellence in research and scholarship gives a special character to our teaching -- and opens opportunities for our students -- that makes a Cornell education distinctive. Research and scholarship are what give us a competitive edge in attracting the best and brightest students to the university. They make us a community of inquiry, where students and faculty members alike engage in the discovery process and enjoy the intellectual give and take that comes from playing with ideas.
But, as good as we are in undergraduate education, we aim to become even better -- in fact, the best research university for undergraduate education in this country. We will do what no major research university and no liberal arts college in the nation has attempted before. We will combine our great strengths in undergraduate teaching and undergraduate research. We will offer a residential program for undergraduates that emphasizes community building and intellectual engagement with our world-class faculty members and with the world of ideas. And, I want to emphasize, we will do this while maintaining the university's long-standing commitment to making a Cornell education affordable to the nation's brightest students, regardless of their financial means.
This will entail a major allocation of resources. I will recommend to the Board of Trustees that we devote at least $400 million over the next ten years to transforming undergraduate education. Half of that investment will be for the creation of new scholarship endowments; the remainder will be for enhancing the living and learning environment for undergraduates.
Our effort comprises three powerful initiatives:
First, we are making major programmatic and architectural changes on North Campus, which will become, by 2001, the home of all our freshmen.
Second, we are now well into a major re-thinking of residential life on West Campus that will link living and learning -- and emphasize strong faculty participation.
Third, I am delighted to report that today we officially launch a historic scholarship campaign that will keep Cornell affordable to the very best students in the nation, regardless of their financial circumstances.
I applaud faculty efforts to re-examine and rethink the undergraduate curriculum that are currently underway in several broad areas at Cornell. With these efforts, with the three initiatives I just mentioned, and with the investment of more than $400 million, Cornell will offer a unique undergraduate experience:
In short, we will offer a distinctive undergraduate experience available nowhere else.
We already have a faculty of world-class researchers and scholars and programs, across multiple colleges, that are unrivaled in their breadth and their depth. Carl Becker in his book, The Founders and the Founding, observed, "Mr. Cornell desired to found an institution in which any person could study any subject. Mr. White wished to found a center of learning where mature scholars and men of the world, emancipated from the clerical tradition and inspired by the scientific idea, could pursue their studies uninhibited by the cluttered routine or the petty preoccupations of the conventional cloistered academic life."
The university that resulted from their complementary visions encompassed the traditional and the novel, the liberal and the practical, the development of the private self and the fulfillment of public obligation. And so it remains today. Students can go elsewhere for an excellent liberal arts education. They can go elsewhere for professional studies. But nowhere else will they find the elements of undergraduate life arrayed as they are at Cornell. No other research university can match Cornell in the strength of both its professional programs and its liberal arts offerings centered in the College of Arts and Sciences. Cornell remains the only research university in the country to unite the mission of a highly selective, privately endowed institution with that of a state-assisted land-grant university serving all citizens.
The Boyer Report, catalyzing as it has been for many universities, is, for us, only a start -- a place from which we can move forward, responding to its valid criticisms and addressing our own students' concerns. We recognize that an important part of the undergraduate experience at a research university is the interaction between the student and her faculty adviser. This is an area, according to recent surveys, where Cornell needs to improve. There is no single formula for good advising and mentoring, but the relationship between student and faculty mentor must be based on a common goal: to advance the educational and personal growth of the student.
I have appointed Prof. Mary J. Sansalone, one of Cornell's Weiss Presidential Fellows and winner of the national "Teacher of the Year Award" of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, to lead our efforts to improve in this area. Prof. Sansalone, who will officially assume her new post as vice provost in June 1999, is already considering incentives that would encourage faculty members to excel in advising and mentoring as well as in teaching and research.
We need to create a greater faculty presence in the lives of students, which we propose to do -- to a substantial degree -- by revolutionizing our approach to residential life. As a campus where most students come from elsewhere to study full-time, Cornell permits a more focused and intensive academic experience than institutions where most students commute to campus from their family homes and study only part-time. Yet, in the past we could guarantee on-campus housing only to freshmen, and we actively encouraged students to move to fraternities or sororities, co-ops or private housing in the community after their first or second year. Andrew D. White himself had set the stage for such an approach -- based on his own experience in the rowdy dormitories of Hobart and Yale, and for a variety of reasons Cornell still houses less than half of its students in campus facilities.
That is about to change radically. We have already worked out a financing plan to construct $65 million worth of new space on North Campus so that, by 2001, it will look as it does in the model on display in the Statler Hotel. The North Campus plan calls for construction of two new residential complexes, each housing about 280 students and each with apartments for faculty-in-residence and the residence hall director. One of these residences will make a quad with Balch and Dickson Halls. The other will be adjacent to and south of the Low Rise Halls on Helen Newman field, which will be relocated. A dining hall just to the northeast of Helen Newman will provide recreational and community spaces.
Most important, the layout of the new buildings will facilitate interaction among students and foster a stronger sense of community. We already have 13 percent more freshmen on North Campus this fall than we did last year; 58 percent of Cornell's freshmen this year live on North Campus, up from 45 percent last year. An editorial in the Cornell Daily Sun two weeks ago noted that the higher proportion of freshmen on North Campus, combined with increased residential programming by Campus Life, has already produced a noticeable and positive change in the North Campus ethos -- with more cohesion and a better social climate for first-year students. By the year 2001, we will house all freshmen on North Campus so that they can build a sense of identity as a class, and, through faculty mentoring and other initiatives, have a successful freshman experience.
We plan, for example, to offer more of our Freshman Writing Seminars on North Campus in order to weave academic pursuits into the fabric of student life. We will experiment with having the teachers of some of those freshman seminars serve as freshman advisers so that they will see their freshman advisees regularly in class. Freshmen in these seminars will typically have 150 minutes of in-class contact with their faculty advisers each week.
A committee will be studying other ways in which we can encourage personal and academic self-confidence, diversity, intellectual passion and community service through programming in the North Campus residence halls, and it will give us additional recommendations for programming next spring.
Equally significant changes are in store for West Campus. We intend quite literally to transform the experience of Cornell sophomores, juniors, seniors and transfer students who choose to live in university residences. Guided by two recent reports, one on West Campus redevelopment and one on the future of the humanities at Cornell, we aim to create for such students a living-learning experience comparable to those of residential colleges at some of our sister institutions, but with a distinctively Cornell flavor.
The West Campus Committee Report, whose authors include committee chair John D. Ford, the Robert and Elizabeth Staley Dean of Students; Isaac Kramnick, the R.J. Schwartz Professor of Government who was named a Weiss Presidential Fellow last night; and Ross Brann, the Milton R. Konvitz Professor of Judeo-Islamic Studies, articulates a transformative vision of residential life at Cornell in the next century for sophomores and other undergraduates who choose to live on campus. The primary principle for the West Campus transformation is a post-freshman-year living environment that has faculty leadership from all the undergraduate schools and colleges at Cornell. We propose to develop on West Campus several "living-learning houses" through both architectural and programmatic enhancements. These houses (which might be given the names of well-known Cornell professors such as Carl Becker or Alice Cook) would have a high level of faculty leadership and involvement. They would include living quarters for faculty and staff as well as graduate students. Each house would also be "wired" to support the creative use of technology in advancing its educational mission. Recognizing the leadership opportunities that would be available to students living in such houses, the committee also proposed a faculty/student/staff governance structure to encourage student leadership. Yet another function of the living-learning houses would be to help sophomores understand the options available to upper-level students at Cornell, including selection of a major, study abroad and honors or research connections. To tie all West Campus housing, including fraternities, sororities, co-ops and living-learning houses into a West Campus community, we also propose to create "community space," including classrooms, social meeting areas, theater, library, music and recreation/fitness facilities for all West Campus students to use.
The college years offer a rich opportunity for students to explore the world of ideas with their peers and with their teacher-mentors. When implemented, the West Campus initiative, combined with efforts already underway on North Campus, will offer Cornell students a comprehensive undergraduate residential experience, with strong faculty participation. It will literally transform the undergraduate residential experience at Cornell so that living and learning will blend seamlessly in the experience of Cornell undergraduates.
The third element of Cornell's transformation of the undergraduate experience is a major new fund-raising initiative for scholarship support. In terms of high school class rank, SAT scores, the level of accomplishment they bring with them to the university, Cornell's undergraduates are already among the best in the nation. They come from every state and from many foreign countries, and they include students from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds and with widely varying economic resources. The outstanding record of Cornell students in winning distinguished national and international scholarships, especially in recent years, demonstrates the intellectual vitality of Cornell undergraduates. The Cornell Commitment Programs -- the Cornell Tradition, the Cornell Meinig National Scholars, and the Presidential Research Scholars Program -- have demonstrated their value in attracting and motivating outstanding students, and we intend to build upon and extend that success.
We expect the university to become even more attractive to the nation's most talented students. We will spread the word about the distinctiveness of the Cornell experience by marketing our unique strengths through a more coordinated admissions process, and by making sure that Cornell remains affordable to talented students, regardless of their financial means.
Scholarships are essential to the distinctive intellectual experience Cornell provides. We choose students for their ability to achieve, and scholarships make Cornell attractive to students of outstanding potential, no matter what their financial means. Cornell's charter mandated that Cornell "shall receive annually one student from each Assembly district of this state. . .and give them instruction free of any tuition fee." At the time, tuition was $20 a year, and the funds for these "Cornell Tuition Scholarships" came from the endowment of Ezra Cornell. But for those early students, who were selected through competitive exam, the scholarships made a real difference in whether or not they could attend Cornell.
As A.D. White noted, "These scholarships have served their purpose well, greatly uplifted the whole system, while (enabling) the University steadily to raise and improve its own standard of instruction. To give the best and the brightest. . . no matter how poor, just the chance they need -- and not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of policy. . . "
At its meeting last March, the Board of Trustees made Cornell's commitment to need-blind admissions and need-based financial aid a standing part of university policy rather than something to be revisited from year to year. Our determination to maintain Cornell's founding principle of accepting students based on their qualifications and academic promise, not their ability to pay, is reinforced by more than 2,000 undergraduate scholarships that have been created by Cornell alumni, friends, and parents. We recognize, though, that we must address the challenge of keeping Cornell affordable on several levels, and we have developed an assertive 7-point plan that will enable us to maintain need-blind admissions while safeguarding the University's long-term strength. Our effort is a timely one, coming just a few days before the American Council on Education (ACE) is scheduled to launch its nationwide "College Is Possible" campaign, but it builds upon the principle of inclusiveness that has been part of Cornell from the first.
The plan lessens the burden for financial aid funding on the university's operating budget, and it makes more dollars available for student scholarships. It preserves Cornell's commitment to admit promising students regardless of their ability to pay -- without jeopardizing financial support of academic programs or faculty, and without placing undue emphasis on increasing tuition.
As part of that plan, we begin this morning a $200-million campaign for scholarship endowment. We are very fortunate to have Peter Meinig, chairman of the Trustee Executive Committee, and Ronay Menschel, chair of the Committee on Academic Affairs, as leaders of the Scholarship Campaign effort. Pete and Ronay, please stand so that we can recognize you and thank you for the leadership and commitment you are bringing to this effort.
I am pleased to report that we have received a $50 million challenge grant toward our $200 million goal, to encourage us in our efforts and to ensure our success. The challenge grant will provide $1 for every $3 we can raise for the Scholarship Campaign. The challenge is a tremendous opportunity for the university and for all those who believe in Cornell's founding vision that "the best and the brightest. . . no matter how poor" deserve the chance to obtain a Cornell degree.
Today, as we officially begin the Scholarship Campaign, I can already report substantial progress. George D. and Harriet W. Cornell have claimed their place in history and in our hearts through a $10-million leadership gift to support the Scholarship Campaign. George Cornell and the university's founder, Ezra Cornell, share a common ancestor -- and also a passionate commitment to education. George and Harriet Cornell's gift is one the largest scholarship gift ever given to the university, and it is even more valuable to us because it qualifies for a matching grant through the Scholarship Challenge Fund. We applaud the Cornells for their farsighted generosity.
I have a second and equally important announcement this morning: Trustee Allan Tessler notified us a few days ago that he is establishing a $10-million trust -- the Tessler Family Scholarship Fund -- to support the Scholarship Campaign. Allan, who holds both an undergraduate and a law degree from Cornell, serves on the Trustee Investment Committee and the Committee on Alumni Affairs and Development. He is establishing the trust with his wife Frances, Cornell Class of 1959, and their three children, Andrea, Christopher and Karla, who are all Cornellians. The Tesslers have been generous supporters of many other Cornell endeavors, including the Law School, the College of Arts and Sciences, and financial aid. This most recent gift is especially timely, and it ensures a strong start to the Scholarship Campaign. Please join me in giving Allan Tessler a round of applause.
Thanks to the generosity of the Cornells, the Tesslers, and others who heard about the scholarship initiative informally and volunteered their support -- and especially to the enthusiastic leadership and commitment we have received from the Board of Trustees, I am absolutely delighted to announce that as of this morning, we have a total commitment of $70.2 million toward the $150 million we need to complete the campaign. I am confident that with the incentive of the Scholarship Challenge, we will move swiftly to reach our goal.
Other strong universities have recently increased their commitment to student financial aid, but Cornell is going beyond what any of these institutions have proposed. We intend to become the American research university that best serves undergraduates of outstanding promise and ability -- regardless of their economic means. Today we affirm the dual vision of access and excellence that motivated Ezra Cornell and Andrew D. White, while striking out in a bold new direction that will link living and learning within our research university as never before and that will awaken in all our undergraduates an enthusiasm for and a commitment to the life of the mind.
"Twenty years after it opened, Harper's
Weekly said of the university in Ithaca: 'With a grip upon
the best methods of education which is almost beyond the reach
of an institution weighted down by traditions. . . Cornell University
stands in the vantage-ground, if not at the head, of American
educational institutions'" (Frederick Rudolph, Curriculum,
p. 127). As we move toward a new century and a new millennium
Cornell again stands in the vantage-ground. With the $400 million
of new resources we are committing to the undergraduate experience
within our great research university, and, with your continued
help and support, Cornell again stands ready to lead the way.