Op-Ed
Skewering Skorton
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The Red Line
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Criticizing President Skorton feels like criticizing a friendly neighbor. His avuncular air of approachability is perhaps a welcome change from Jeffrey Lehman ’77, who mysteriously left Cornell citing “irreconcilable differences” with the Board of Trustees (and was paid over a million dollars his last year, which some suspect was “hush money”). Every so often Skorton’s cheery face looks up at us from his guest column in The Sun, usually dedicated to praising the Cornell community on some point or another. We also get periodic emails from him touching on current events or issues in academia — Virginia Tech, Martin Luther King Day, diversity at Cornell, etc.
These attempts to interface with the Cornell community merit praise, even if much of the communication reads like boilerplate language on a diversity pamphlet. But many of Skorton’s more concrete initiatives are sentimental, more appropriate for a community center than an institution of higher learning.
In an editorial last week, The Sun’s editorial board criticized Skorton’s Martin Luther King Day e-mail, which invited students to bring a bowl of soup to Sage Chapel and listen to community members “working for social change”: “We all love soup, but it’s not entirely clear how some cauldron-sized portions of butternut squash bisque are going to solve the issues Dr. King strove to overcome.” The editorial further criticized Skorton for not addressing racial issues in a more direct and meaningful way. Skorton’s October e-mail on diversity was similar, touting four diversity initiatives. The first, “Breaking Bread,” invites different student organizations to have dinner with each other on the University’s tab, leading to greater understanding and empathy between their members. The other initiatives run ads in The Sun about students’ feelings on inclusion (or lack thereof); collect data about campus climate; and sponsor a “Summer Institute for Diversity and Unity.”
While initiatives such as these have a certain cosmetic effect, one expects more substantial responses to the problems facing a modern research university. As the leader of one of the nation’s wealthiest and most respected such institutions, Skorton has significant resources and clout at his disposal. Any student organization can organize a talk about diversity and ask participants to bring soup; it is only a top-level administrator who can effect structural changes that increase financial aid for underrepresented groups or encourage admissions officers to visit underrepresented areas.
The basic criticism: calls for more far-reaching changes have fallen on deaf ears. Cornell needs dynamic leadership. Another Sun editorial showed that Cornell is among the stingiest of its peers with respect to financial aid: it provides the lowest amount of financial aid in grants, the highest in loans, and only 5.6 percent of its capital campaign is earmarked for financial aid — the lowest in the Ivy League. Skorton promised an announcement about financial aid within the next few days, but as Rob Fishman ’08 pointed out in his column yesterday, changes in financial aid will not have come as a result of student support, but because Cornell’s peer institutions have set the standard higher.
There are other issues that Skorton has not addressed. Despite student complaints and both S.A. and GPSA resolutions last year, the University has still not stopped charging for HIV tests, which used to be free. He has also not touched on the prohibitively exorbitant cost of health insurance for spouses and children of graduate students. As a physician, one would expect Skorton to be sympathetic to these issues.
In his most recent column, Skorton focused on issues that affect the graduate student community, prefacing his comments by saying that graduate and professional students account for the “core characteristic of a great research university.” Yet the latest cave-in of the Big Red (and ugly) Barn serves, to the overwrought intellectualism of graduate students, as a metaphor for the University’s relationship with them. Some of the measures Skorton has taken to address grad student dissatisfaction are real and praiseworthy — creating a graduate career services team and re-zoning certain complexes for graduate housing. But others are less consequential: putting up bulletin boards, setting up discussion lists and vaguely defined activities that would “integrate graduate/professional students and their families across the University.” Most importantly, graduate students need a larger, less cramped space to convene, one that is structurally sound; the Big Red Barn, after all, was never intended as a social center, but as the carriage house for the Cornell president’s home.
Part of any university president’s job will involve some degree of public relations, which explains the conciliatory tone of missives from the President’s Office. But President Skorton has resources that enable him to make important changes. In some areas Skorton has done this: the student code of conduct, Cornell’s divestment from Darfur and its commitment to reducing the University’s environmental impact. But in others that require money and university resources that only the president has at his or her disposal — financial aid, diversity, student health and race relations — he has not. President Skorton is likable, but with a major university and billions of dollars under him, winning the “who would you like to have a drink with” contest isn’t enough.
Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in Linguistics. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com. The Red Line appears alternate Thursdays.