Op-Ed
Reaching Beyond Student Leaders
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Last semester, I wrote a series of articles to ask the Cornell community to pay attention to students with uninsured families. After that, I received a lot of emails. Many people expressed sympathy towards me because they thought I was personally afflicted with this problem. While I thank them for their kindness, the truth is that my wife is also a teaching assistant at Cornell, and by working in the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research as a consultant, she is richer than me though we are both poor students.
Life is really a struggle for many students with families. They really face a choice between buying food and seeing the doctor. The problem, however, tends to go unnoticed simply because many students with families really struggle with poverty or other difficulties and do not have the energy to be involved in campus politics and fully express their concerns.
Recently, through my investigation of this problem and others, I have become more and more aware of the need for the Board of Trustees and the Administration to interact with students who are neither in elected positions nor leaders of campus organizations. The Board and Administration usually have more access to student leaders. Student leaders are assets of Cornell, but certain types of students may be more likely to become student leaders, creating a self-selecting pool of students to participate in campus politics and debate. If we do not create opportunities for the Board and the Administration to meet students who are not leaders, we may only hear the voices of certain types of students at Cornell.
Last semester, one graduate student told me that her life was significantly worsened because Maplewood, Cornell’s graduate residence, turned its only studying area into an office space. So she needed to walk between campus and Maplewood every night, sometimes in the snow, which I considered not safe for a single woman. I expressed my concern to Kent Hubbell, dean of students. Hubbell told me it would not be difficult to find another place for that office and that he would turn the space back into a study area if the student would explain the problem to him directly. I was very excited and called her about the good news.
“Oh that is good!” she said. “By the way, who is Kent Hubbell? Is he our residential assistant?”
I then realized that people who work as hard as she does may have no idea of who the student representatives and administrators are, or even what the Board of Trustees is. As a future scholar, the student I spoke with spends most of her time in the lab and library. Her lifestyle represents most graduate students. I also personally know many undergraduate students who are the same way. They have their personal needs. However, as they are less likely to be involved in campus organizations, their voices are less likely to be heard unless they are approached directly.
Therefore, the voices of part of the student body are amplified and the voices of the other parts of the student body may go unheard. In turn, when we decide various priorities to improve students’ lives, the importance of some initiatives may be exaggerated while some others may be underestimated.
Take one example: I firmly believe the value of career service and alumni mentoring are underestimated at Cornell. This is because that most students the Board comes in contact with are well-connected to alumni. This is natural: students who have access to the Board of Trustees are already connected to some of the most successful alumni — Board members. However, I can say from my observations that many students are not well-connected to alumni. As I learned from the Alicia S. Torrey ’83, the director of the alumni-mentoring program, last year, we only had 842 alumni mentors out of 244,200 living alumni, making the program focus mostly on minority students.
It is interesting that the major constraint is not from the alumni side. More alumni would participate in the program if we advertised the program heavily. The constraint is from staff support: according to Provost Biddy Martin and Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Michele Moody-Adams, we need four to six more staff members to manage this program if we want to let every student have access to alumni mentors. I personally do not think it is a big cost, considering that a good mentor can support, encourage and inspire students during their Cornell experience.
I am working on a proposal to let the Board and the Administration connect more broadly among the student body. In the January trustee meeting, I proposed that the Board should have dinners with student leaders as well as randomly selected students. With the help of several offices, I manage to send dinner invitations for the March Board of Trustees meeting to some students who I do not even know.
There are may be some concerns that if you invite random students to the dinner or some other events, some may know little about what is going on this campus. I do not think it is a problem at all. Everyone cares about something around them. The reason that they do not follow certain “hot topics” at Cornell may simply be because these topics are not as important as they claim to be. Then the next question is: what do they care about? Which places they think Cornell should improve? A more straightforward question is: “What problems do you face as a student?” If we think every student is an atom of Cornell, then any initiative to improve the life of one student will help to improve the lives of others.
If you have better ideas on how to make the Board and the Administration reach more broadly to the student body, please write to me. As a student representative, I will try my best to speak for students in front of the Board, but I believe it is more important for me to advocate a mechanism for every student to speak for themselves. As students of a world-class university, you are all able to make a difference by offering your thoughts on how to improve Cornell.
Mao Ye is a student-elected trustee. He can be contacted at my87@cornell.edu. Trustee Viewpoint appears alternate Wednesdays.