Here is a sampling of quotations from Cornell University faculty, students and staff that have appeared recently in the national and international news media:
"The level of debt is already high. If rates go higher it could be the nail in the coffin. There could be greater consumer and small- and medium-size business loan defaults. This could be a contributing factor to a bear market in stocks."
-- Avner Arbel, professor of hotel administration, discussing rising consumer debt in the Boston Sunday Herald, March 2.
"Science is always more unsolved questions, and its great advantage is you can prove something is true or something is false. You can't do that about human affairs -- most human things can be right from one point of view and wrong from another. It is the most wonderful feeling when you come to a real answer. This is it, and this is correct! In science, you know you know."-- Hans Bethe, professor emeritus of physics, in a profile distributed by the Associated Press that appeared in, among other newspapers, the Los Angeles Times on March 2.
"We can get through the day marginally, perhaps not even aware of how much more alert we could be. But at some point, the sleep debt gets so heavy that there may be a crash."-- James B. Maas, professor of psychology, on the effects of sleep deprivation in the March 1997 issue of Consumer Reports.
"We essentially have broken a fundamental limit in materials science and, for the first time, demonstrated that a universal substrate on which a crystal of any material can be grown is possible."-- Yu-Hwa Lo, associate professor of electrical engineering, in The New York Times, March 28, describing a breakthrough in semiconductor research.
"Given the 50-to-100-year time scale now being suggested, why the air of wartime urgency that seems to drive the fusion reactor program?"-- James A. Krumhansl, professor emeritus of the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics, in The New York Times, April 4, on the question of financing future fusion energy research.