President Barack Obama has frequently commented on the incredible influences he encountered on his road to the White House. One such influence, Prof. Charles Ogletree of Harvard University, spoke yesterday at Ithaca College, commenting on the President’s impact and early years before being elected to the highest position in the country.

A Pritzker Prize-winning architect and the visionary founder of the Morphosis firm, Thom Mayne filled Lewis auditorium with an overflow crowd last Friday evening with his lecture “tC: The Continuity of Contradictions.” No doubt, much of this excitement can be attributed to the way in which Mayne’s work demonstrates how architecture can change how the public sees the world.

If art and design are some of the few fields where life and work are inextricably linked, then architect Daniel Libeskind’s lecture on Wednesday night epitomized the anti-“nine to five.” Far from being someone who sits down in a cubicle, pays his dues to the corporate world and then goes home to enjoy what non-work related pleasures he can, Libeskind, from the beginning and for better or for worse, has saturated his work with his voice, his hand, his beliefs and his personal history. From photos of his childhood in Poland and his expressive account of his family’s ties to the Holocaust, to his politicized slogans paired with highly commercial works, Libsekind’s sometimes incongruous but always passionate beliefs can be traced through his prolific building history.

The word “blue” can evoke a serene image of peace or the inner turmoil of despair. Both a color and a feeling, blue is the centerpiece for multimedia artist Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue, a film that the artist showed at Cornell Cinema Friday night. Blue, which deals with the dangerous situation of our global environment, successfully creates a piece of art that simultaneously dazzles the eyes and rattles the brain with its images of a world at war with itself.

It has been over 50 years since Ratan Tata ’59 arrived at Cornell for freshman orientation, but on Friday, the chairman and CEO of the multinational conglomerate Tata Sons Ltd. told students and alumni that the event was still fresh in his mind.

“I was one of about 2,000 people and very frightened,” Tata reminisced. “They told us to look to your left, look to your right … One of you won’t be here in four years.”

This was only one of the things that Tata talked about in the annual Olin Lecture titled “Corporate Social Responsibility in the 21st Century” during Reunion Week.

Tony Phelan wanted to be a professional actor. Unfortunately, one of his acting professors at Yale, where he was getting his undergraduate degree in theater and medieval history, told him, “You will never be an actor. You’re just not good enough.”

It is probably safe to say that at Cornell, a majority of the study body has probably felt as though they weren’t good enough. But how many students have actually had a professor say it to their faces — maybe I’ve just had nice professors — but I’m guessing not that many. It’s gotta hurt. Thankfully, all was not lost for Phelan. His professor suggested the possibility of directing, and then he landed the job as the co-executive producer, writer and director of the hit television show Grey’s Anatomy.

Even before he opened his mouth, British actor and screenwriter John Cleese was already exercising the craft that lifted him to fame — making the audience laugh.

“He is part comedian. He is part psychologist, part master-teacher and fully, a public intellectual,” said Provost Kent Fuchs as he introduced Cleese, whose serious nods to Fuchs’s words enticed laughter from the 700 audience members in Statler Auditorium.

Asmita Basu, a guest speaker from New Delhi, addressed a crowd of mostly graduate students at Myron Taylor Hall about the obstacles and successes in implementing India’s Domestic Violence Act at a midday lecture yesterday.

Basu is a fundamental contributor in the enactment of the Domestic Violence Act in 2005 as a project coordinator of the Lawyers Collective Women’s Rights Initiative, a top legal, non-government organization dedicated to empowering women through law. She spoke in a filled lecture room of around 50 people about her experience in India drafting the law, lobbying members of Parliament to form consensus over the content of the domestic violence law, and monitoring its implementation.

“Plant medicine encompasses the study of plant health problems of all types including prevention, diagnosis, management and local and international production for the next generation,” Bob McGovern ’83 said during a lecture on the “University of Florida Plant Medicine Program: Changing the Paradigm for the Plant Health,” in the Plant Science Building, last week.

The lecture was part of a weekly seminar funded by the Department of Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology, and was attended by members of the plant community.