To: Department Chair

From: President David J. Skorton

Dear Department Chair,

I’d like to take this time to talk to you about some new strategies we’ve been discussing here in Day Hall on how to navigate these shaky waters of the “Great Recession.” Cornell University stands at a crossroads, and our swift and decisive action today will certainly have lasting implications on our prestige, for decades to come.

The College of Arts and Sciences memo that leaked to The Sun, it turns out, is only the tip of the iceberg. To truly rebuild our endowment and continue our practice of employing all-star professors with $4-million salaries, we need to be a lot more creative.

The summer session idea is genius! We’ll sell it as “summer scholars in Ithaca” — I see a brochure with kids sitting under a tree (one black, one asian, one girl) with a slightly ethnic looking professor waving his hands wildly as if lecturing on some great work of Shakespeare. And the increase in “educational capacity” as the memo so eloquently put it has a 14 percent revenue increase! So I say, let’s keep going … Hell! Three summers in Ithaca — for all colleges. And those Fall semesters off? We can set up expensive study abroad programs with thousands of dollars in “administrative fees.” This is going to be huge.

Increasing enrollment, of course, is also a major part of our strategy. We figure, if Psych 101 can handle 1,300 students a pop, why not every course? OK, OK, so maybe senior seminars in English will be limited to 500, that way if 10 students raise their hand per class session, everyone will get one chance to comment on the literature once a semester. I think that’s fair.

And grad students … if they don’t pay, they’re out! Honestly, we all know, secretly, that sections are useless.

But all this is small change. The big cash cow lurking under our noses? Masters degrees.

Masters degrees are gaining popularity. Mummy and Popsicle’s bright little boy didn’t get a job on Wall Street this year? “Well, we can afford one more year of student loans. And besides, Cornell is offering a great Masters of English program!” Bam! Instant tuition dollars.

And students love masters programs. You push off job hunting for one or two more years. And you get an instant upgrade in your alma mater. Didn’t get into Cambridge the first time around? No problem! For a small fortune, you can get a Masters of History and pretend you’re a real undergrad. Some colleges will have easier times than others with this. Already, the M.Eng is catching on. But some will be a hard sell … I mean, do you know of anyone interested in a Masters of Hotel Management? Our target market, of course, are the other half of applicants from Long Island who didn’t get in the first time around. I see the brochures for this one too: “Cornell is just as gorges four years later …”

Another great kudos to the folks over in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences! Applied Economics and Management is a huge success. Who’d of guessed it’d be this easy to justify a business program in an Ag school? I think we’re really on to something here — programs students want, in colleges they don’t. It doesn’t matter that a Wharton-knockoff has nothing to do with agriculture or life sciences … it’s tuition dollars and prestige! I mean seriously, we’re ranked higher than Stern and they’re in the friggin’ City!

The next move is obvious. We open up a poly-sci program in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and a sports medicine program in Human Ecology. Hell, why not a finance major in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning? The name could be “Finance and Regional Economics” or FARCE for short. We need to be careful with the acronyms for these things though … when I hear “PAM” I think cooking spray. Who came up with that dud?

But it’s not all about new, lucrative programs. Oh no. The cuts will be real and they’ll be made with surgical precision. I am, after all, an M.D.

The first thing to go? Programs that don’t sell. We need to shed comparative literature, obscure languages (like anything besides Spanish, French and Chinese) and any science that doesn’t have the words “medical,” “nano” or “electrical” in the title. In fact anyone who so much as uses the word “theoretical” in their research descriptions will be gone by the end of the fiscal year. Like that Theoretical and Applied Mechanics department? Come one! Don’t we already know that stuff? It’s just springs and pulleys. That cannot possibly sell.

Also, this whole agriculture, industrial and home economics stuff … that’s got to go. While we’re at it, I think CALS should change its name to the College of Business, Communications and Meteorology.

In short, folks, it’s go Ivy or go back to the farm. Cornell’s done with this whole New York State economic development business. Paterson’s pulled our funding, so what do we owe them anyways? If we’re not as small as Brown and pumping out more online degrees than the University of Phoenix by next year, I’ll consider our time wasted.

Sincerely,

David

Munier Salem is a former Sun assistant design editor and founded the Science section. He is a senior in the College of Engineering. He may be reached at msalem@cornellsun.com. Critical Mass appears alternate Mondays this semester.