Soundbites

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 minute Marriott, Hilton, Disney and the other big names came in, they brought a whole new image and way of doing business."

--Malcolm A. Noden, senior lecturer at the School of Hotel Administration, in an article on how the time-share industry has grown, becoming more respectable as well as more profitable, in The New York Times, Jan. 29.

"We need to have a uniform immigration policy and we can't have state court judges running around deciding for themselves what the immigration status of an individual should be."

--Stephen Yale-Loehr, visiting scholar in the Law School, offering his opinion on the Elian Gonzalez case on ABCnews.com, Jan. 12.

"We've always known that music is great for kids but now research shows that music should be an essential part of early childhood. It's fun, creative, and it's a proven way to develop areas of the brain for later academic tasks such as reading and math."

--Elizabeth Stilwell, director of the Early Childhood Center in human development, discussing the benefits of music for children, in the January 2000 issue of Popular Science.

"There's no systematic way that we as a society have developed to deal with the reality of most couples having three jobs -- two at work and one at home -- and most single parents having two jobs, one at work and one at home. Employers should recognize that most workers will become parents and that they are parents of young children only a small part of their whole work careers. We need to develop flexibilities that permit them to succeed both at work and at home, without having to make these hard choices."

--Phyllis Moen, professor of human development, discussing the problems faced by working parents when their usual child-care arrangements fall through due to caregivers' absence, snow days, school vacations or sickness, in an article in the Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 12.

"Even with very optimistic earnings forecasts for the next 12 years, we still have a very expensive market. People now prefer stocks to bonds more than at any time since we started tracking. We think that people at some point will say stocks are overpriced."

--Charles Lee, the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and professor of accounting and finance, in an article on determining the worth of stocks, in The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 11. The article refers to a valuation model developed by Lee, Johnson School assistant professor of finance Bhaskaran Swaminathan and a colleague at another university that suggests the Dow Jones industrial average is currently 30 percent above its intrinsic value.

"Eighty hours a week? Say that again. Are you sure that number is correct? I would be very, very worried about that. Eighty hours a week is total organizational irresponsibility. [It] runs against the grain of the military's commitment to families."

--Samuel Bacharach, the J. McKelvey-A. Grant Professor of Organizational Behavior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and director of the Institute of Workplace Studies, when told about a Pentagon survey which showed that Marine Corps recruiters typically work 75 to 80 hours per week. Bacharach was quoted in a Knight-Ridder News Service story published in the Dec. 17 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Marine Corps officials in Washington said they have not studied the effects the long hours have on recruiters or their families. But Bacharach, who just completed a five-year study on work stress, said they should start.