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The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/2003/02/07/fencers-hit-the-road/)

February 7, 2003

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Fencers Hit the Road

By wpengine | February 7, 2003

Following a disappointing showing last week at the MIT multi-meet, the fencing team will be back at it tomorrow, as it faces off against Temple, Fairleigh Dickinson and host Princeton.

The bright spot for the Red last weekend was freshman Meghan Phair, who went 11-1 in epee. In all, Cornell was 2-2 with that weapon. The Red did not fare nearly as well with the other two weapons, going 1-3 with the foil and 0-4 with the saber.

Despite being shutout, the saber squad did have some positives, as junior Lily Nierenberg won seven matches and senior Eleanor Bartolomeo won six.

Cornell’s record stands at 4-5, including 0-3 in Ivy League play, a mark that the Red will hope to improve on when it meets Princeton during the meet. Thus far this season, the fencers have fallen to Yale, Harvard, and most recently, Brown.

Following this weekend, the Red has just one regular season meet left; it will face the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, and Columbia on Feb. 22 at Columbia.

Archived article by Owen Bochner

Related

Reno '60 to Speak on Experiences at Cornell

By wpengine February 10, 2003

This Thursday, twenty students will have the opportunity to personally interview former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ’60 about her experiences as a female student at Cornell in the 1950s. The interview will be a small, informal event in Balch Hall, open to the public but with a limited supply of tickets to keep the setting intimate. The students conducting the interview, which will be videotaped for the Cornell historical archive, are enrolled in the course HD [Human Development] 258: The History of Women in the Professions. “Because Janet Reno was the first female attorney general of the United States, she is worthy of historical attention in her own right … How did she get there? Where was she educated, trained, etc.?” said the course’s teacher, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor, human development. “The fact that [Reno] happens to be a Cornellian means that as social historians, my class will be focusing on her undergraduate experience in the years 1955-60 to see what the University was like for her, and for her cohort of women students,” Brumberg said. “We will be finding out what it was like for women in the ’50s as opposed to our generation in 2000,” said Afsha Abid ’04. The class will be speaking with Reno specifically about how her gender affected her experiences at Cornell, as this is the aspect of Reno’s life most pertinent to the class. “The course … offers students an historical overview of the way women entered and experienced the feminized service professions (teaching, nursing, librarianship, social work) but also more male-dominated professions such as medicine, law, the clergy and the academe,” Brumberg said. “It makes you see your future differently, how your gender affects what you might become,” Jaffa Panken ’05 said. A group of 11 students met last Friday to plan the specific topics on which they want to question Reno. Most have prepared by collecting and reading a biography of her life, and the class as a whole has made connections between the historical issues discussed in class and Reno’s biography. According to Brumberg, “some students have also read Charlotte Conable’s book, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Co-education.” “Most of the interest for me is actually in Cornell history, the rules that they laid out for women in Conable’s book and how that’s so exponentially different from our freedom now … even just the concept that we are allowed to follow our own initiatives,” Panken said. Brumberg was reportedly overjoyed when she found out that Reno was coming to campus and that the students would be able to interview her, as she has wanted her students to interact with famous Cornell alumna in politics throughout the 20 years that she has taught HD 258. “I even spoke to President Rawlings’ office about how we might arrange this, e.g. taking a bus load of students to Washington D.C. to do interviews about the role of gender and the Cornell experience in the shaping of professional expectations and careers,” Brumberg said. “I felt really honored that we were chosen to do this. I’m a pre-law student, and I always wanted to go into government. For women in government, especially, the very concept of being in the realm of two-party dirty politics is somewhat inherently distasteful. [Reno] represented the ability to do well in politics by being honest and being yourself,” said Amanda Schlager ’03. “You can always get to hear a lecture by a famous person, but it is rare to be able to actually speak to someone. That is one of the benefits of such a large school like Cornell,” said Nida Chaundry ’04. “Everyone in the class is really excited. We are finding out things that we want to know about,” Abid added. “The interview tape will be a historical document for the future. It will contribute to future historians’ knowledge of Janet Reno’s college life and career expectations in the late 1950s; it will also be a very interesting historical commentary on generational differences because the questions that students are asking are not only about historical topics/ideas introduced in my course, they also reflect their own lives as women students at Cornell a half century later,” Brumberg added.Archived article by Aliza Wasserman
Activist Lectures on Sri Lankan Problems

By wpengine February 10, 2003

Recent violence in the nation of Sri Lanka was the subject of a lecture entitled “Accounting for Peace as Violence by Another Name? Heretical Thoughts From the Margins of the Sri Lankan Conflict” by Dr. Arjuna Parakrama of the University of Peradeniya last Friday in Sibley Hall. Prof. Barbara Lynch, city and regional planning, introduced Parakrama, calling him a “scholar-activist par excellence.” She also praised his propensity to move back and forth “between academia and activism.” In his lecture, part of the International Studies in Planning Seminar Series, “Crossing Boundaries,” Parakrama spoke on the still-prevalent child abduction, government corruption and problems with the current peace process in Sri Lanka. He also offered critiques of anthropological work being done. “I offer you today some of the most frustrating and rewarding parts of my work,” he said. Pakarama described the problem of child abduction in great detail, explaining that they are being taken and forced to fight in the country’s ongoing civil war. “One doesn’t have to know the exact numbers to know that this problem is of horrifying proportion,” Parakrama said. According to Parakrama, the parents of the abducted will not speak for fear of reprisals; compounding this effect is a “lack of public faith in police” in Sri Lanka. Concerning the peace talks, Parakrama said that he has seen a “marked increase in violence against civilians as talks have progressed, or should I say regressed.” He felt that the peace talks, which involve only a small group of elites, were accomplishing little or nothing for the civilians experiencing the violence. Parakrama focused much of his lecture on critical analysis of the anthropological work that has been done in Sri Lanka, saying that studies of violence in the south “have hardly progressed beyond the colonial paradigm.” He described the present state of anthropological work on the region as fraught with irresponsible generalizations, numerous contradictions and a lack of regard for Sri Lankan scholarship. Parakrama also said that anthropologists tended to portray Sri Lankans as “transparent and accessible.” He also described incidents in which Sri Lankans admitted “exaggerating themselves” to anthropologists, “wanting to make the foreigner happy.” The lecture concluded with a poem that Parakrama had written about the peace talks, entitled “Running Away from Peace.” “I say this is not peace, but war by another name what else but war can legitimize violence against civilians at such an awful scale?” Parakrama asked in his poem. In the question-and-answer period that followed, audience members questioned Parakrama’s simultaneous rejection of the current peace process and condemnation of the war, asking him to propose a satisfactory solution to the ongoing conflict. Parakrama responded that successful negotiations must take place “on the ground,” involving ordinary Sri Lankans, unlike the current talks proceeding exclusively among the nation’s elites. Sara Shneiderman, grad, expressed the audience’s general reaction to Parakrama’s speech. “I think it was very useful, very thought-provoking,” she said.Archived article by Mike Holloway