To the Editor:

Re: “A Long Way Come, A Long Way to Go: Race Remains an Issue at Cornell 40 Years Later,” News, April 16.

In this article, the author commented: “... 40 years later, the more things change the more they stay the same.”

Really? What about all those Cornell students and faculty members of Asian descent, minorities all, about whom the author, somehow, failed to report? Are they just “chopped livah”?

Cornell’s Annual Update: Progress Toward Diversity and Inclusion at “Table 22, Undergraduate Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity Status” shows that the the number of undergrads of Asian descent grew from 594 out of 12,110 undergraduates or 4.9 percent in 1980 to 2,191 out of 13,510 or 16.2 percent in 2007. During the same period, reported white enrollment fell from 9,410 to 6,716. The entire report is available to download at http://www.cornell.edu/diversity/history/publications.cfm.

Moreover, when the author wrote: “As of May 2008, the number of black faculty increased from 39 [in 1997-8] to 53, Hispanic faculty from 25 to 41 and Native American faculty from five to nine,” she apparently chose not to mention the increase in faculty members of Asian descent from 91 in 1997-8 to 140, as reported in the first ethnicity column of “Table 3, Distribution of Faculty Minority by Racial/Ethnic Status.”

It seems to me, at least, that adding persons of Asian descent back into the pot not only leaves us with questions concerning why so many ethnic groups lumped within the Asian label have been so successful, but also rather contradicts the author’s generally downbeat story line.

Why the omission?

Chuck Chambers ’94