Students Elected to New S.A. Positions

By | April 25, 2006

The Student Assembly elected its new executive board last night in Goldwin Smith Hall. Kwame Thomison ’07 was elected President, Mark Coombs ’08 was elected Executive Vice President and Elan Greenberg ’07 was elected Vice President of Internal Operations.

In addition, Sarah Boxer ’07 was elected Vice President of Finance and C.J. Slicklen ’09 was elected Vice President of Public Relations.

“I’m excited to get started working next year and am excited to have the assembly do great things,” Thomison said. “Next year I’d like to have public course evaluations and a legal music service.”

Thomison’s rise to president was a contentious one, according to an anonymous source.

According to the source, Coombs and Boxer were the initial candidates for president, but after two to three hours of deliberation, Thomison, who University Voice originally hoped would become Vice President of Finance, “totally defected” from University Voice and accepted a nomination as president.

The anonymous source said that University Voice would not be upset if they had known Thomison was going to accept the presidential nomination, but, according to the source, University Voice was “blown away by Thomison’s betrayal.”

The source cited his grave concerns about the assembly being able to come together peacefully next year.

Boxer said that she “looks forward to embracing her new position” and hopes to help club sports funding.

Candidates need 13 votes to be elected to the Student Assembly board; neither of the tickets this year – Clean Slate or University Voice – had at least 13 constituents, which is one reason why this year’s election process lasted over seven hours, according to the source.

The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly also elected their leadership for next year yesterday. Janet Vertesi was unanimously elected president of the assembly; Michael Walsh was unanimously elected vice president; Arnaub Chatterjee was unanimously elected secretary. Walsh will also work as the chair of communication for the GPSA.

“Next year I will increase communication between the GPSA and grad students, the SA and the administration,” Walsh said of his new position.

According to Walsh, the this year’s GPSA leadership board plans to have more involvement with GPSA activities and campus life in general.

Archived article by Jessica DiNapoli
Sun Staff Writer

LaFeber Gives Last Lecture

By April 26, 2006

NEW YORK – “Welcome to Bailey on Broadway,” quipped Andrew H. Tisch ’71 as he introduced Prof. Walter LaFeber, history, to a crowd of almost 3,000 Cornell alumni who convened on New York City’s Beacon Theatre last night to hear the professor’s final public lecture prior to his retirement later this spring. The event, billed as “A Special Evening With Cornell’s Walter LaFeber: A Half-Century of Friends, Foreign Policy and Great Losers,” celebrated the foreign policy expert’s 47-year career on The Hill.
Calling LaFeber a “legend in his own time,” Interim President Hunter R. Rawlings III made the evening’s opening remarks, adding that “scholarship and teaching are what Cornell is about, and it is rare to find both in a single teacher.”
LaFeber, the Andrew H. and James S. Tisch Distinguished University Professor, began his talk by thanking his wife, Sandy, as well as former Cornell presidents Dale Corson, Frank H.T. Rhodes, Rawlings and Jeffrey S. Lehman ’77 for their contributions to Cornell. Both Rawlings and Lehman were in attendance.
He continued to thank many colleagues and alumni, adding that “Cornell alumni in a variety of ways are truly extraordinary people.”
Speaking in his trademark fashion – without prepared notes – LaFeber continued his talk by teaching generations of Cornellians about Wilsonianism and by tracing motivations behind 20th century foreign policy and the expansion of democracy.
Beginning his lesson in Revolutionary times, he joked that “the generation of the United States that knew most about democracy and how well it traveled were the founders. This was the one generation in American history when the intellectuals and politicians were the same people.”
He continued by discussing Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams and pointed out that throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, the people in power who cared deeply about the United States were not sure that democracy traveled well. LaFeber said that this ideology changed with President Woodrow Wilson.
“When Wilson came to office in 1913, he said, ‘It would be a great irony of my presidency if I had to concern myself with foreign policy,’ because he was more interested in carrying out progressive reform at home. But of course, irony struck,” he said.
He explained that Wilson had to handle the Mexican, Chinese and Russian Revolutions, along with World War I, during his tenure as president. LaFeber concluded his remarks by mentioning the disillusionment of young American liberals, who felt that Wilson did not understand compromise and did not make the world safe for democracy as he had demanded when he spoke to Congress prior to entering WWI.
The event was initially scheduled for New York City’s Museum of Natural History but was quickly moved to a larger space to accommodate the overwhelming demand from alumni, friends and former students to attend.
After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, LaFeber came to Cornell in 1959 and joined the history department. In addition to teaching, he has authored several award-winning books that have made him a giant in the field of foreign policy, including The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898; The Clash: U.S.-Japan Relations Throughout History and Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America.
Archived article by Erica TemelSun Columnist
Seminar Promises Intelligent Design Discussion

By April 26, 2006

Prof. Allen MacNeill, biology, will be offering a course about Intelligent Design, entitled “Evolution and Design: Is there a Purpose in Nature?”. The course will be offered seminar-style over the summer of 2006, through the ecology and evolutionary biology, history and science and technology studies departments as well as the biology and society program.
The syllabus requires texts from authors both for and against intelligent design and includes optional texts, one of which is by Charles Darwin.
MacNeill first came up with the theme for the seminar when brainstorming with Prof. Will Provine, ecology and evironmental biology, for topics for this summer’s seminar class. MacNeill says that the idea was inspired by the Kitzmiller v. Dover case, in which the Dover Area School District in Dover, Pa. was sued for requiring the teaching of intelligent design in high school science classes.
“Given the Dover case, [Provine and I] thought it’d be interesting to teach [this year’s seminar] on Intelligent Design,” MacNeill said.
MacNeill labels himself a “very vehement critic” of intelligent design but hopes to inspire debate and controversy in his classroom.
“I’m hoping I get people from both sides so that the discussion will be animated. The worst thing you can have is a dull seminar, which is what you have when people have the same belief or don’t believe in anything,” he said.
As part of the attempt to present both sides of the issue, MacNeill has also invited Hannah Maxson ’07, president of the Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness club, to help with the class. Questions from the students about books by Intelligent Design proponents will be fielded by Maxson. The class is currently capped at eighteen to keep it discussion-based, not a lecture, says MacNeill.
It appears that this is not MacNeill’s first delve into the topic of Intelligent Design. MacNeill is also on the IDEA list-serve, keeps consistent email correspondence with the club, holds debates about the issue and has invited the IDEA president to give a lecture in one his classes last year. MacNeill describes his relationship with the IDEA club as an “agreement in a very courteous manner to disagree.”
“I’m glad it’s being offered,” said Maxson. “Intelligent Design needs to be discussed more in academia and not just [as] some ‘frightening political movement’ that needs to be stopped.”
Hannah is currently working with MacNeill to pull together intelligent design articles for the reading list. She’s also been invited to the discussions once the class starts to help “provide a cogent case for Intelligent Design theory.”
IDEA Executive Director Seth Maxson also gives approval, saying that this “is an example of Intelligent Design being accepted as an intriguing scientific theory by the wider academic community.”
Enrollment prospects are also looking up. Seth claims to have already talked with a few students who plan to take the class.
“They all seem very excited,” he said.
Despite said excitement, MacNeill appears to have been met with some skepticism from colleagues. Since announcing what his class will be about, MacNeill has received many questions and comments both from students and professors via his personal blog. “Evolutionary biologists tended to be more negative about the course [than Intelligent Design advocates],” MacNeill said.
MacNeill also said that two colleagues have stated that the course shouldn’t be offered in biology.
“I respectfully disagree,” he said. “Most people in biology have a strong opinion on this, mostly negative. The knee-jerk response is to call the other side ignorant or dishonest; my experience is that that doesn’t address the issue.”
Though MacNeill claims to be “strongly skeptical of Intelligent Design, at the very least”, he says he is not worried about one-sided enrollment.
“What’s exciting for me is people taking strong positions. I hope students who haven’t made up their minds make up their minds on the subject.”
The class will require a detailed research paper in which the student must argue his/her position on the matter.
“Personally I believe if you do that you reject the idea,” he chuckled. “But I find sometimes that that’s not the case.”
MacNeill has no immediate or definite plans to continue this class in the future, claiming that he would like to do other topics such as ethics and the question of free-will. However, there is some room for compromise.
“As long as Intelligent Design is in the news, maybe it makes sense to continue to do this,” MacNeill said.
Archived article by Nadia Chernyak Sun Contributor