Thank you, Harold. And welcome back to Cornell everyone! They say college reunions are where you go to meet people who used to be the same age as you. But Cornellians age more gracefully than other people, and it would be hard to imagine a more engaged, energetic or enthusiastic group. I think it may be something in the air -- or in the water -- or in whatever they serve under those tents -- that accounts for the special spirit and vitality of Cornellians.

I was reminded of the special Cornell spirit a few weeks ago, when NPR re-broadcast the Prairie Home Companion Show that Garrison Keillor did here in Bailey Hall two years ago. If you heard the show, you probably were nodding in recognition when Keillor described Ithaca -- the nation's most enlightened city -- as a land of passionate recyclers, a place where you could live all your life and never run out of choices in granola, and where you can live well into your seventies and still be trying to find yourself.

No wonder Bill and Hillary are thinking about vacationing in the Finger Lakes this summer! I can already see them enrolling in several Cornell Adult University courses to make it an education vacation. Hillary might enjoy Nature in the Finger Lakes, led by Dick Fischer, so that she can learn to distinguish New York from Arkansas. I can already see Bill getting into the golf clinic in a major way -- with our own Robert Trent Jones course to do his homework on. And both halves of the first couple might be interested in From Memory to Memoir -- A Writing Workshop -- in case they find themselves without other post-White House plans.

Cornell is a remarkable place -- even in the summer -- and after four years here, I've come to appreciate why it is one of a handful of great universities in the world. It combines intellectual excellence and a public service mission -- not as two separate endeavors within a larger whole, as at some institutions I have known -- but in a single entity with its own distinctive character and unique flavor. That is not always a seamless combination -- It spawns intense and creative tension, but it leads, not to monotony or homogeneity, but to vigor, independence and originality -- which is the essence of Cornell.

Those of you from the oldest classes may remember the escapades of Hugh Troy, son of a professor of the dairy industry, who enlivened the campus from 1922 to 1927. An unrepentant prankster, Troy once borrowed a waste basket made from a rhinoceros foot and marched it across campus with the aid of accomplices and ropes, making a set of rhinoceros tracks that stopped at the edge of the ice on Beebe Lake. As Morris Bishop told it, the next day a professor of zoology identified the tracks as being made by a rhinoceros -- and half the campus, including Hugh Troy's father, gave up drinking campus water, which at the time came from Beebe Lake. And the spirit of Hugh Troy lived on in the large pumpkin that appeared suddenly and mysteriously atop McGraw Tower about 18 months ago.

But Cornell's highly original spirit is not confined to pranks -- even imaginative ones. Originality -- and a certain quirkiness -- animate the intellectual work of faculty and students, often with profound results. I think of the late Richard Feynman, who as a boy earned a reputation in his neighborhood as the boy who fixes radios by thinking, who worked with Hans Bethe at Los Alamos and at Cornell, who won the Nobel Prize for his original contributions to quantum theory, and who, toward the end of his life, demonstrated that faulty O-rings had led to the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster by dipping samples of the rings into his glass of ice water at federal hearings on the case. I think of Mitchell Feigenbaum, another physicist with Cornell connections, perhaps best known for his work on chaos theory. During a period of intense concentration -- in the spring of 1976 -- Feigenbaum worked for two months virtually without pause. As James Gleick describes it in his book, Chaos, [Feigenbaum's] functional day was 22 hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. . . .in the end a doctor called it off. He prescribed a modest regimen of Valium and an enforced vacation. But by then Feigenbaum had created a universal theory. Such is the iconoclastic, amiably eccentric, and remarkably inventive spirit of Cornell.

That spirit -- and the results it has produced -- have given Cornell another remarkable year in a long history of great years. We have become one of the few great, global universities, and having you back in such large numbers, and with such enthusiasm, is a fitting climax to an outstanding year.

We started with major leaps in our national ratings -- from #14 to #6 on U.S. News and World Report's list of the best undergraduate universities, and from #18 to #8 on Business Week's list of the nation's best business schools.

In fact, all of our graduate and professional programs ranked very high this year, and faculty members and students garnered an impressive number of distinguished awards -- including Presidential Early Career Awards, Sloan Foundation Research Fellowships, and a Guggenheim for the faculty, along with several new memberships in the national academies, and Marshalls, Goldwaters, a Truman, a Churchill, and many other distinguished awards for our students.

Our athletic teams have done very well. The womens softball team rolled over opponent after opponent this spring on its way to a 41-9 season that included an Ivy League championship. Wrestling won a share of the Ivy championship. Women's cross-country won the Heptagonal Championship in New York City and two weeks later finished second in the NCAA Regional Championship in Kansas. Women's lacrosse went to the ECAC championship tournament, Men's lacrosse finished second in the Ivy League and had a winning record in spite of a tough schedule.

We have had a huge year in private support. In April, we passed the $300-million mark for cash gifts for the first time ever, and the fiscal year still has another two-plus weeks to go. I want to thank these reunion classes for the substantial role you have played in our success. You've set a new record for donors and for dollars raised. I find it remarkable that 10,818 members of these reunion classes have made a gift or paid dues this year. Together you've contributed $56 million to Cornell -- the highest dollar total in the history of Cornell reunions. That is another mark of Cornell's distinctiveness: the intense loyalty and commitment it produces.

The Scholarship Challenge Campaign is on track for successful completion. We have raised $116 million toward a $150-million goal. If we raise the full amount by December 31, we can claim a $50 million challenge, and so add a full $200 million to Cornell's scholarship support -- ensuring that Cornell will continue to be available to talented students regardless of their financial means -- as Ezra Cornell intended when he formulated the Cornell Idea..

I am especially proud of the Class of 1999, which set a new record for a Senior Class Campaign, with 52.3 percent of the class participating. Class leaders held more phonathons and ate more pizza than we would have thought possible, and they raised over $117,000 in gifts, challenge dollars and dues for the class treasury -- $100,000 of which will be used to endow a Class of 1999 Scholarship. That is a good sign for Cornell's future.

Our status as a great global university has helped us in recruiting both faculty and students to Cornell. We have hired several outstanding senior faculty members from other top American universities. In addition, Lee Teitelbaum, the Alfred C. Emery Professor of Law at the University of Utah College of Law and an expert in family law, will join us in July as dean of the Law School. Patsy Brannon, a Cornell Ph.D. and formerly chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Maryland, is on board as our new dean of Human Ecology. and Polley McClure, formerly vice president for information technology and communication and professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, is our new vice president for information technologies. At a time when competition for excellent faculty is fierce among top-ranked institutions and raiding has become a way of life, Cornell has been able to entice first-rate scholars here from other top universities, in large part because of the inventive atmosphere we offer.

Potential students also know that Cornell is one of THE places to go. Applications to Cornell were up this year -- to nearly 20,000 -- with 11 percent more folders sent to committee, and the quality of the applicants was extremely high. Our mean SAT scores are now 1359 -- 8 points higher than last year. We admitted a smaller percentage of our applicants (down 6 percent). and more of those we admitted took us up on our offer -- pushing the yield rate up nearly 3 percent. We are especially pleased with the strong yield among our top prospects -- Presidential Research Scholars, Meinig National Scholars, and Cornell Tradition Fellows. We will have 86 new Cornell Presidential Research Scholars at Cornell next fall, compared to 53 last year and 52 the year before, which was the program's very first year. These students represent some of the very top high school students in the nation, and they have been sold on Cornell because of the opportunity to do research with a faculty mentor during their entire four years on campus.

These students and faculty members -- like many of you -- chose Cornell not only because of its excellent reputation or because of quantifiable quality measures I've just described. They come because the distinctive character of this campus makes it unique among the nation's major research universities. You can go elsewhere for an excellent liberal arts education You can go elsewhere for professional training. But nowhere else will you find so many opportunities and such high quality programs arrayed as they are at Cornell.

We are a major research university, with an impressive record of winning outside support in intense competition with researchers and programs elsewhere -- and here, as elsewhere, our inventiveness has stood us in good stead. This spring, for example, the National Science Foundation renewed its funding for the Cornell Electron Storage Ring -- the synchrotron -- providing $88 million over the next five years, plus another $16.5 millon for CHESS, the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source. In renewing its support, NSF noted that the Cornell facility had led to more research papers for less money than any other high energy physics facility in the country. The agency's funding for CESR represents about 3 percent of the total dollars spent on the national particle physics program, but experiments at CESR have accounted for about 18 percent of the papers on experimental particle physics published in the last three years.

We are also an excellent place for undergraduate education -- not in spite of the research that goes on here, but because of it. A substantial number of our students graduate from the university having already carried out significant research or scholarship or having produced original creative work under the guidance of a faculty mentor. For example, Dave Roberts, Class of '99 and one of our Marshall Scholars, conducted research at Cornell and at research facilities both here and abroad that resulted in scientific papers on topics ranging from the resurfacing of Venus to the dynamics of wars. He worked especially closely with two faculty members during his time here -- one in physics and one in geological sciences. And although Dave is an exceptional student, his achievements are representative of what many Cornell students accomplish during their time on campus.

There is a third component that makes a Cornell education distinctive: As the land-grant university for the State of New York, we have a commitment to social usefulness -- for applying knowledge for the betterment of the human condition -- that encompasses not just the state, but also the nation and the world. This comes through in Cooperative Extension programs. It comes through in the volunteer activities of our students -- on campus, in the Ithaca community and beyond. And we are extending our reach still further through distance learning. This spring, for example, Prof. George Milkovich, the M.P. Catherwood Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations, taught international human resource management to 95 students: 20 of them were here in Ithaca and the rest were in Shanghai, Caracas, Venezuela, and Ljubljana, a major city in Solvenia. Through interactive video technology, students were linked synchronously across four continents so that they could see each other and their professor, discuss their assignments, and present reports in real time. In addition, our Weill Medical College in New York City is offering Grand Rounds to 4,500 physicians at some 20 of its affiliated hospitals via streaming video -- accessible, via any computer with Internet access, whether in a doctor's office or a hotel room. Ezra Cornell envisioned a university where any person could find instruction in any study. Through distance learning we are expanding that vision to include not just any person, any study, but any place, any time.

Cornell today retains a certain spunk, an iconoclasm, an irreverence for the established way of doing things that has accounted for so much of what the university and its alumni have achieved over the years. Those of you who are from the oldest classes may remember the concern about communist sympathizers that emerged just after the Great Depression. One New York State Senator at the time told the press that Cornell was a center of revolutionary communist activity because two student clubs with communist sympathies were active on campus at the time. President Livingston Farrand took the revelation calmly, pointing out that "twenty-five or thirty students with communistic leanings or convictions . . . in a student body of more than six thousand, does not strike me as creating in any way a serious or unwholesome situation." And he added, "If we had no Communists at Cornell, I would feel it my duty to import a few."

That distinctive Cornell character lives on today in the dragon that emerges from the depths of Rand Hall each year-- to end in a glorious conflagration on the Arts Quad. It lives on in Prof. George Hudlers plant pathology course -- Magical Mushrooms, Mischievous Mold, which has earned Prof. Hudler both a Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching and a feature article in Rolling Stone. It lives on in our music faculty, who have made Cornell a world center for the study of Mozart and for playing his music on period instruments. It lives in the mechanical and aerospace engineering course, in which part of the final exam requires flying paper airplanes in Barton Hall. The list could go on through all the schools and colleges at Cornell.

I don't mean to imply that we have solved all our problems or that we have run out of challenges to address. We face rising costs, at a time when tuition increases are becoming smaller because the public has said enough. We also face level, and in some cases decreasing, support from both the federal and state government. In the statutory colleges, we have suffered from poor state support for several years, and the gridlock in Albany over this year's budget continues. There is disarray within the State University of New York, which affects us as well, and on both the statutory and endowed sides, we need to increase faculty salaries, which are not yet competitive with other top-ranked institutions. Our Weill Medical College in New York City is doing well in terms of admissions and research productivity, but it still faces severe pressures because of the hospital budget. These challenges have added to the urgency of controlling costs -- which we are doing by holding down growth in university staff and by becoming more efficient in carrying out a variety of administrative tasks. They have also increased the importance of private support.

But in spite of the challenges, we are at a high point in our reputation. Universities in Singapore, China and Taiwan, with support from their governments, are eager to join us for collaborations in research and education. Cornell is literally a world treasure -- a university with global reach and reputation.

We expect our attractiveness to outstanding students -- as well as our distinction as a major research university -- to increase dramatically over the next several years because of the investments we are making in strategic research areas that hold unusual promise for both theoretical and applied results. These include advanced materials, information sciences, and genomics.

We are also making a major commitment to improving the undergraduate experience at Cornell. This will entail an investment of some $400 million over the next decade or so. About half of that investment will be for scholarship endowment, as I mentioned earlier, which is essential in keeping the best students at Cornell. The other $200 million or so will be used to improve the living-learning environment on campus. As those of you whose class headquarters are on North Campus have noticed, we are in the midst of a major residential housing initiative there, which will enable us to house all freshmen on North Campus by the fall of 2001. We are also planning to make West Campus more attractive to sophomores and upperclass students by establishing living-learning houses there to connect continuing students more closely with the university's intellectual life.

Cornell is an exciting place to be right now -- both because of what we have already accomplished and because of where we are going from here. Writing in a book put out by the Cornell Daily Sun on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in 1930, President Farrand noted: "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."

You have taken Farrand's challenge to heart. You have left your mark on Cornell's spirit, its quality and its character. And you continue inspire us with your generosity and your interest. On this glorious weekend, it is my pleasure to thank you and to welcome you home.