Agree to Disagree

On the Horizon

Rob Fishman — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

“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.

What Makes Cornell Unique?

Rob Fishman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

These last few years have seen a sea change in higher education, from an emphasis on attracting not only the best and the brightest, but more recently, the best, brightest, and least well off. In light of these trends, Cornell is beset on both sides by competitive pressures: on the one hand, from traditional measures of selectivity like those published in the U.S. News and World Report magazine, and on the other hand, by the new emphasis on generous financial aid packages.

Any Person, Any Husband?

Rob Fishman — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The ice has slowly melted, and that can only mean a few things: sangria at Collegetown Bagels, Crocs without the fur, and above all, the springtime of young love. Yet those exposing their fleshy behinds to Cupid’s bow in the next few weeks might be disappointed to learn that at Cornell, Spring Fever is not quite so contagious as is commonly thought.

One of the campus’ most pervasive comfort tales is the alleged marriage rate among Cornell grads — sometimes said to be as high as 50 or 60 percent. This statistic has always struck me as awfully high, and with only a few weeks remaining before graduation — and spousal prospects looking as slim as the job search — I decided to don my “Mythbusters” beret, and debunk this conjecture.

Vindicated — But Jobless

Rob Fishman — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It was six months ago — my how the time flies! — that I first went public with my anti-finance tirades. In calling out the “finance types” here among us, I aroused the ire of my investment banking-leaning peers, who ridiculed my entreaties to do something more valuable with their Ivy League degrees than crunch numbers for $125k-plus bonus as some pinko yackety-yak best left unread.

Yet here we are half a year later, the economy crashing down around us, and I can’t help but say I told you so, having written in November that “I wouldn’t be feeling very optimistic at the moment” if I, too, was heading from Goldwin Smith to Goldman Sachs.

Health Care for Students: Not just words

Rob Fishman — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Before reading this article, there are two things you should know about me. First, I’m not especially passionate about anyone in the upcoming presidential election, but I voted for Hillary. Second, I’m an honest-to-god, certified hypochondriac.

Truth be told, it’s tough for any young Democrat not to support Obama. Behind the boyish charm, there’s a ripened, rotund voice that churns out oratory straight from an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. His message of change has won everything from Oprah’s endorsement to superdelegates, and what’s more, his opponent offers few substantive policy differences.

That said, there’s one especially glaring difference between the Democratic candidates, and that’s health care.

The Politics of Fear

Rob Fishman — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Upon returning to campus at Northern Illinois University last week, Drew Jeskey, a student who experienced the Feb. 14 school shooting firsthand, said he had been unable to sleep the night before.

“Between midnight and 4 a.m., I must have gone through it in my mind 20 times over,” he told The New York Times. “That first shot was the loudest thing I have ever heard. You wouldn’t believe how loud it was.”

In a sense, the recent string of college shootings is a microcosm for America post-9/11. That same specter of unlooked-for violence that haunts our nation’s airports, landmarks and financial centers now looms large in lecture halls and cafeterias. Terror has breached the Western world’s final frontier of enlightenment, not on a jet plane, but in Geology 104.

Part of the Problem

Rob Fishman — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It was the fall of 1962, and the nation stood on the brink of civil unrest. That September, President John F. Kennedy was forced to send federal troops to the University of Mississippi to escort James

Meredith, the school’s first black student, onto campus amidst deathly race riots. Soon after, Kennedy summoned leaders from five major universities, including Harvard, Yale and Notre Dame, to the White

House.

“I want you to make a difference,” he implored them. “Until you do, who will?”

The first to respond to this call, as Berkeley Professor Jerome Karabel recounts in his recent study of elite colleges, was Yale’s incoming president, Kingman Brewster, Jr., who made the controversial decision to confer an honorary doctorate on Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964.

Poornell

Rob Fishman — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Having spent the first months of the New Year languishing in inactivity, I decided last week to engage in a little physical exercise. Being a rough-and-tumble macho man, I suited up for game time … and hit the tennis courts. When my partner and I (pause) arrived at Cornell’s Reis Tennis Center, we were greeted with an unwelcome surprise: a $48 fee for just an hour’s playtime.

Shelling out a Ulysses $. Grant to play a little tennis struck me as outrageous, and it got me to thinking: for what else does Uncle Ezra nickel and dime us?

Health and Welfare

I Second That Emotion

Rob Fishman — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

These gloomy winter months elicit a wide range of emotions; on the one hand, there’s torpor, and on the other, you’ve got lethargy. Yet just as rain mixes with snow to produce slush, so too can a sudden urge to bury oneself under the covers, and hide away from the wasteland outside, shock a sluggish system into a great many sensations.

To name just a few that I’ve encountered, albeit anecdotally:

Irony

At Ruloff’s Karaoke Night on Monday, playing a drinking game called “Sink the Ship,” in which competitors take turns pouring a bit of beer into a floating glass, until the loser, who overestimates his pour, has to imbibe the sunken cup’s contents.

Misguided Travelers From A Subpoenaed University

Rob Fishman — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

As part of an ongoing investigation of study abroad programs, the New York State Attorney General issued a subpoena to Cornell and 14 other colleges last month to scrutinize their relationships with independent study abroad agencies. Whether or not the inquiry elicits any wrongdoing, the subpoena does underscore a serious issue within our study abroad office, namely the preference of certain programs and even countries over other comparable alternatives.

The Diffident Ivy

Rob Fishman — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

The hot topic on campus is financial aid, and everyone’s asking the same question: is Cornell going to follow the other Ivies’ lead and come out against student loans?

With Harvard, Yale and Princeton eliminating all loans in favor of grants, and Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn promising debt-free packages to low-income students, we’re sticking out like a Big Red sore thumb in continuing to offer loans instead of grants to struggling undergrads. This may all change within the next 36 hours, however, following President Skorton’s announcement last night that the University would unveil a more “robust” plan for financial aid.

Robust or not, the new plan may amount to too little, too late.

Rushing to Judge

Rob Fishman — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

It wasn’t only in the foyers and living rooms of fraternities and sororities that rush took place last week, but also on computer screens across campus, as a website posting offering rankings and descriptions of Cornell’s various Greek houses made it all the way to Facebook.

The rankings, posted by a Cornell student under the pseudonym, cornellrushweek, sought to “present a general Cornell consensus about each house rather than a personal one,” in the poster’s words. For the most part, cornellrushweek posited, “people in the Greek system who read these will agree with my descriptions and rankings.”

And from the comments found below the initial blog — 285 responses on 19 pages — a consensus indeed emerged.

Trentacoste Agrees to Disagree

Rob Fishman — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

My first encounter with John Trentacoste ’08 was in the classroom. As two of the only freshmen in our introductory Spanish class, “Juan” and “Roberto” as our samba-wearing pony-tailed professor, Pedro, called us — we were seated next to one another, often flanking the object of our mutual affection, a senior named Jackie, who, as Cornell’s student-elected trustee, tried to prevail on our agitated debates on anything from abortion to school policy (these did not take place in Spanish).

The Pax Cornellia: An Ode to Thanksgiving

Rob Fishman — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

Tomorrow we depart from house and from dorm

From a long autumnal season, too globally warm

Came the first flake of snow just a few days ago

And whence we return, winter’s pain we shall know

Yet on the Eve of Thanksgiving, there’s good news to tell ya …

… after those rocky Lehman years, we’re amidst Pax Cornellia:

We can be thankful, most of all, for our global expansion

No locale’s too far from Skorton’s Cayuga Heights mansion

He’s jetsetting to China, making moves in Qatar,

The Big Red Empire is extending afar!

And while we’re at it, let’s say thanks for our budding endowment

We’ve got much more cash than we’ve up-until-now spent:

Last June we had but four-point-three billion in the bank

A Culture of Debt

Rob Fishman — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

We seniors find ourselves, to quote Churchill, at the “end of the beginning” — a transient junction in life most observable here at the Ithaca airport, where students in suits shuttle to New York each week to plan the “beginning of the end.” Though the worlds they’re leaving and entering are dauntingly different, they’re increasingly marked by a similar phenomenon: a culture of debt.

If I were such a student in a suit (I prefer pajamas), I wouldn’t be feeling very optimistic at the moment. As the result of backing mortgage-lending companies’ dubious loans to homeowners with low levels of credit, the nation’s largest banks are facing serious write offs and having to cut jobs in their investment banking sectors.

Right Here in Ithaca, Two Voices from Burma

Rob Fishman — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500

It’s not everyday that gross human rights abuses overseas are willfully ignored by the American people, as is the case in the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Sometimes, atrocities in foreign lands are so covered up by oppressive regimes that the Western world hardly hears about them. But in the case of Burma, what is happening there has been happening for more than a half century, and the story is available right here in Ithaca. So listen up.

In a nation so embattled that even its proper name is disputed — the U.N. recognizes it as Myanmar, but pro-democracy states like the United States and Great Britain prefer the original Burma — the fight for freedom, in the form of 100,000 protesters led by Buddhist monks, is on the march.

CornellCostumes.Edu

Rob Fishman — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Halloween came early this year, with much premature fanfare and costumed fraternizing across campus on Saturday night. For traditionalists who celebrate All Hallow’s Eve tomorrow, on its rightful date of Oct. 31, there’s another opportunity for scantily clad coeds to turn a trick (or treat).

If you’re short on ideas (or threewishes.com isn’t offering express shipping), there’s a semester’s worth of Cornell happenings to Halloweenize tomorrow night. My friend Yaya Chang ’08 was generous enough to illustrate our favorite pairs of outfits.

The Testament of the Grades

Rob Fishman — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

In Olin Café last week, a freshman girl pondered aloud her academic future: should she pursue her studies in Spanish or switch to international relations? “Double major,” her friend suggested, “you can work for the Spanish government.” Having overheard the conversation, a senior cautioned the wide-eyed newcomers against overextending themselves, as in his words, “The most important thing you can graduate with is a high GPA.” (My response was a girlfriend.)

Evidently, it’s not just civic knowledge that depreciates during our four years in Ithaca, but also youthful idealism.

The Generation of Generation Q

Rob Fishman — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Last week, Thomas Friedman dubbed us “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, so plugged in (and tuned out) that our idealism stops at the computer monitor. With so much interconnectedness among the Facebook-YouTube-MySpace cohort, and so much wrong in the world, Friedman wonders why our generation looks so complacent.

The twentysomethings fire back that their technological moving and shaking is being mistaken for indolence; as a recent Sun editorial argued, activism has “transformed from sensationalized 1960s tear-gas rallies to online petitions and Internet discussion boards.”

For a Core

Rob Fishman — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The Achilles heel of the Cornell experience is our lack of a core curriculum.

This emerging truth is being confirmed and reconfirmed from inside and outside the University by a flurry of evidence that can no longer be ignored.

While many of our competitors are embracing core curricula with greater intensity, we are backing away from a nucleus of essential knowledge. Columbia hails its core curriculum as the “cornerstone of a Columbia education”; Yale’s Directed Studies program is overflowing with more applicants than it can hold; and next year, N.Y.U. will offer General Studies as a major in its Arts & Sciences School for the first time.