Op-Ed
On the Horizon
Agree to Disagree
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“I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”
Taken quite literally, the Cornell motto envisions a perfect synthesis between access and higher education: a university where students of any stripe, station or color might encounter a limitless field of knowledge.
Yet in its recent bastardization of the slogan, to the simple, “any person … any study,” the University has compromised the implicit, and far more profound, message of Cornell’s mission statement. As was the case in 1865, and as remains the situation today, such an educational utopia is all but impossible; the truest ambition of Ezra Cornell was not to achieve the unachievable, but to challenge Cornellians to continuously reinvent our soon-to-be alma mater.
“This is the university that recognizes the transformative power of the horizon,” as Jeffrey Lehman, our eleventh president, said moments after resigning the office in June of 2005.
In a sense, Lehman’s resignation was the formative moment in my education here — when Cornell became a place to learn about, and not just at — because it opened my eyes to the politics, business and bureaucracy that inherently accompany university life. Contrary to the amiable, and even tranquil institution we found freshman year, Lehman’s rift with the Board of Trustees suggested deep divisions that ran beneath the congenial surface.
After that seminal moment, I spent my time at The Sun trying to understand and expose the obstacles, differences and divides that perpetuate inequality at Cornell and in America, and which obstruct the University from fulfilling its stated mission.
Today, on both ends of the equation — in harboring any student, and in offering any study — we not only find serious impediments toward realizing these goals, but also see evidence of University policies that work against their completion.
All across America, socioeconomic and racial divides are widening. A recent study authored by the Brookings Institute finds that one-third of all American children will actually experience downward mobility in their lifetimes, and that a majority of middle-class black children will be less well-off than their parents. Between 2000 and 2007, the median income for American families actually fell, from $61,000 to $60,500, yet the top 50 hedge fund managers made a combined $29 billion last year, according to Institutional Investor magazine.
Although Cornell and other elite universities have offered more generous financial aid packages to increase socioeconomic diversity, these institutions more closely resemble billionaire philanthropists than social workers. Last year, just 20 schools raised $7.7 billion, with Stanford collecting $832 million on its own. Princeton spends more than twice as much paying fund managers to invest its endowment as it does on undergraduate financial aid, while Harvard could eliminate tuition for all undergrads, and still see its endowment grow.
At Cornell, the number of low-income students receiving federal Pell Grants has declined 25 percent, even as the number of high school students in the nation who are eligible for the program has increased by 40 percent since 2000. Students receiving financial aid from the University have also fallen steadily in the past few years, from 8,659 in 2005, to 8,132 in 2007. At the same time, the price of a Cornell education rose 5.5 percent from last year’s levels, and over 207 percent since 1987.
Our shortcomings in socioeconomic diversity, according to the University’s most recent Financial Plan, are in part attributable to the “expansion in the number of underrepresented minority students, who have, historically, demonstrated above-average levels of financial need.” Yet as the University Factbook reveals, in 1980, 4.7 percent of the student body was black; today, it is only 5.3 percent. Moreover, there are fewer Hispanic students on campus in 2007 than there were in both 2000 and 1995.
Between jet setting to China, throwing lavish parties at Cipriani 42nd Street and building an on-campus winery, one thing should be clear: Cornell is deeply embedded in but one of the “two Americas” — on the side of this country’s new gilded elite. In class, in race and in ideology, the Ivy League is still far removed from what the average person might call America.
And what of “any study,” the intended curriculum for our great university?
Much like their commercialized hosts, students at elite schools these days are increasingly bent only on making a buck. According to the 2007 Postgraduate Report, over 40 percent of Cornell grads took jobs in finance or consulting last year, while 6 of the 10 employers hiring the most Cornellians were investment banks.
All this comes at a time when colleges and universities are distancing themselves from the traditional tenets of a liberal arts education. Like some of our peer schools, Cornell has abandoned a core curriculum, and in the words of Anthony Kronman, a professor of law at Yale, “betrayed their students” by depriving them of the chance to study fundamental questions like the meaning of life “before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself.”
That’s why the results of a survey across 50 colleges last year, which charted civic knowledge among seniors, should raise a red flag: Cornell ranked dead last. According to the report, Cornell seniors actually lost about 5 percent of civic knowledge over their four years in Ithaca.
“If you don’t gain knowledge at institutions of learning, something is amiss,” said Dr. Gary Scott, one of the authors of the study. “We believe there is something real happening at Cornell that needs to be improved.”
If Lehman’s address was the first chapter in my study of Cornell, then President Skorton’s hypothetical “last” lecture this month was the closing bookend. One of the central themes of Skorton’s address touched on the delicate balance between the powerful and the powerless.
“We must all remember that especially coming from a powerful privileged place, like any research university but especially an Ivy League university, how small changes in life circumstances can render us less than powerful. We must remember our inextricable linkage with those who appear to be powerless but have the same right,” Skorton said.
Looking forward, I can see a Cornell divided — by rich and poor, black and white, avaricious and intellectual, powerful and powerless — where something truly is amiss. Yet with our credo as a lodestar, our vast resources as an engine, and an enduring desire to do better, there may well be hope on the horizon.
Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rfishman@cornellsun.com. Agree to Disagree appeared Wednesdays this semester.