Baseball to Open Gehrig Division Schedule at Penn

By | April 16, 2004

After losing nine in a row and 19 of its last 20, the baseball team (5-21, 1-7 Ivy) needed someone to step up. The youth of the squad did just that.

Freshman Trevor Vieweg pitched five solid innings, giving up three runs on seven hits in yesterday’s game against LeMoyne (15-12). The win, which was Vieweg’s first of the season, halted the Dolphins’ 11-game winning streak.

“I was just happy to get in the game and perform,” Vieweg said.

Yet the game didn’t start so smoothly for Vieweg, as the Dolphins jumped out to a 2-0 lead after two innings.

“In the second inning I was a little worried because they were hitting the ball hard,” Vieweg said.

The Red offense, which left 11 runners on base and struck out 12 times during the game, was able to tack on a run in the third and then four more in the fourth because of four LeMoyne errors in the inning. Sophomores Josh Foster and William Pauly both doubled in runs off of LeMoyne starter Michael Falasca, who fell to 1-2, despite giving up just one earned run in his four innings of work.

Pauly, who went 2-for-5 with two runs batted in, has been a welcome surprise for the Red, as he is batting .326 with 11 runs batted in his first season with the Red after transferring from Vanderbilt. Fellow sophomore Seth Gordon set the table for the Red, going 2-for-5 with two runs scored and a run batted in. Gordon, who replaced senior co-captain Dan Parant at the top of the batting order, also had a stolen base on the day.

Freshman Kaleb Hutchinson was the third member of the Red to tally a pair of hits on the day, as he went 2-for-4 with an RBI batting cleanup.

With the win, the team feels like it can hit a hot streak going into the Gehrig division schedule. “It’s been a lot of tough breaks this season,” Vieweg said. “We feel like the way we played [in a 7-3 win] against Harvard is how we should be playing every game.”

Despite the fact that Red currently finds itself in last place in the Gehrig division at 1-7 against Ivy opponents, it is still in the thick of the playoff race. The Red is just three games back of Gehrig division-leader Columbia, who stands at 6-6 against the Ivy League.

Next up for the Red is Penn, whose 2-8 record against the Ancient Eight is good enough for third in the division. The Quakers are coming off a weekend in which they were swept by both Dartmouth and Harvard in a pair of doubleheaders.

The Red will travel to Philadelphia this weekend for two doubleheaders with Penn beginning at noon each day.

Archived article by Chris Mascaro
Sun Assistant Sports Editor

ILR Organizes Institute on Conflict Resolution

By April 19, 2004

Three people walk into a room — a union leader, a management representative and a mediator. This may sound like the beginning of a bad joke, but it is actually Irving Ives’ founding vision. Ives wanted graduates of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations to be everywhere in the labor world, on both sides of the bargaining table. With the success of the world-renowned Institute on Conflict Resolution, members of the ILR community are also in the middle of the table, working as neutrals to create new paths in dispute resolution. The institute, based in the top floor of Ives Hall, was the brainchild of Theodore W. Kheel ’35, a labor attorney, and ICR director Prof. David Lipsky ’61. Previously cooperating with the Foundation for Prevention and Early Resolution of Conflict, of which Kheel is founder and director, the ICR is now strictly a Cornell-based endeavor. ICR was established in August 1996. The intent of the institute, according to its mission statement, is “to educate practitioners, users, teachers, and students of the field of conflict resolution through the following endeavors: research; collection and dissemination of information; public and private assistance; graduate and undergraduate curriculum development; and training programs.” “What’s different about the institute … is the use of various dispute resolution techniques in areas outside collective bargaining,” Lipsky said. The institute works on fact-finding research and third party negotiations in general employment. Lipsky made the distinction between labor (union-based) relations and employment (non-union) relations. In 1954, 35 percent of the work force was unionized, according to Lipsky. Now, between eight and 11 percent is organized into unions. After an explosion of litigation in the 1960s and 1970s, Lipsky said, legal costs rose and courts became busier than ever. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) “has been a revolution,” Lipsky said, in resolving cases without going to court. Decisions are made either through mediation, in which a settlement is agreed upon by all parties, or through arbitration, in which the neutral hears both sides and then makes a final, binding decision. Prof. Ronald Seeber, executive director of ICR, said that the institute has “a broad interest … in trying to create efficient and fair systems of dispute resolution.” He explained that this is imperative because “conflict is a natural phenomenon in the workplace.” The institute’s first major study, conducted in 1996 and 1997, looked at ADR in Fortune 1,000 companies. Lipsky and Seeber published a follow-up report and several articles that are used as models in the field. According to the institute’s 2003 annual report, studies in the late 1990s found that many corporations “have moved beyond the adoption of ADR policies and practices and have advanced to the stage of implementing genuine systems of conflict management.” As a result of this discovery, the institute focuses on looking at various systems and why and how they are used. In 1997, the Hewlett Foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to ICR and MIT’s Institute for Work and Employment Research to establish a consortium of mediation organizations. The Alliance for Education in Dispute Resolution, under the leadership of ICR, was started in 1999 to train and provide dispute mediators across the country. Rocco Scanza joined the Alliance as executive director and also became deputy director of ICR. After nearly four years of running training programs with 21 institutions, creating a roster of 300 mediators, Cornell will be stepping back from the alliance this year to focus on the institute’s research and outreach. One of the institute’s biggest projects began in Oct. 2000 when the U.S. Department of Labor awarded ICR a $1.1 million research grant to create a pilot mediation program for the department’s 190 statutes. The georgia state solicitor of labor suggested cases for mediation and members of the alliance were assigned to facilitate the cases. Over three years, more than 85 percent of the cases were settled through mediation rather than litigation. ICR also helped the U.S. Department of the Interior develop an ADR system for its 73,000 employees in 2002-03. The program was designed and ready for execution when leadership of the department changed and nation-wide financial restraints temporarily halted the project. More recently, the institute worked on implementing “Resolve,” the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s program for dispute resolution, launched in June 2003. Other ICR projects include designing systems for the New York State Court System’s 17,000 employees and for other federal agencies. Lipsky noted the involvement of the ILR Extension Program in the institute’s mass training and outreach initiatives. Reaching more than 75,000 people annually, the six extension locations offer a variety of programs that are “devoted to studying workplace and employment issues,” Lipsky said. ICR is looking to develop a curriculum for undergraduate and graduate students that focuses more specifically on conflict resolution, including mediation and other arbitration. “This will be the first program of its kind in the U.S.,” Scanza said. Over the past eight years, “the Institute on Conflict Resolution has established a reputation as one of the leading academic centers in the dispute resolution field,” according to the director’s report. More than $4 million in grants, gifts and contracts have been awarded to the institute since it opened. Archived article by Melissa KornSun Senior Writer
Prof Researches Effects Of Poverty on Children

By April 19, 2004

Low-income children are disproportionately exposed to a wide variety of highly damaging physical and psychological risk factors in areas ranging from exposure to pollution to quality of parenting, wrote Prof. Gary Evans, design and environmental analysis and human development, in a new article in the current issue of American Psychologist. Evans, who researched nearly 200 existing studies dealing with various specific aspects of poverty, found that nearly all the risk factors he studied could be linked to poverty. A risk factor was defined as an environmental condition that is likely to lead to harmful emotional or physical consequences for children later in life. “I certainly expected to see that there would be relationships between poverty and risk factors, but I didn’t expect them to be so dramatic … You name a risk factor, and it’s probably related to income,” he said in an interview. Evans said that he believed that focusing on specific aspects of poverty, as many of the studies did, rather than looking at the big picture failed to provide a sufficient understanding of the effects of poverty. “We have a tendency to isolate [risk factors],” he said. “One of the things that is unique to poverty is that you’re exposed to a plethora of risk factors.” He termed this phenomenon a “confluence of risk.” “Being poor, in general, is not a good thing for children,” he said. Evans said his article brought together physical, social and emotional risk factors rather than treating each area separately as most past studies have done. “Families reside in both a social and a physical world,” he wrote. While the effect of each individual risk was not necessarily severe, when children were exposed to many different risks in combination, the harm could be serious and long term, Evans wrote. “Maybe part of what’s going on is that a number of factors have intertwined,” he said. Evans pointed to divorce rates as an example of one of the psychological risk factors he studied. Children of divorced parents are likely to do worse in school and suffer adverse psychological effects. According to U.S. Census data which Evans cited in his article, the divorce rate is inversely related to family income. Among families in the bottom fifth of income distribution, those making less than $21,800, the divorce rate is slightly more than 25 percent, whereas for families making more than $86,000 a year (the top fifth), the rate is just under six percent . Other social risk factors which Evans examined in his article included under-qualified teachers in low-income schools and lower percentages of parents who are closely involved in their children’s education. Among the physical risk factors Evans studied, he found that low-income children were much more likely to be exposed to industrial pollution, cigarette smoke and poor water quality than high-income children. Low-income children are also much more likely to live in violent neighborhoods, Evans found. According to a nationwide study which he cited, low-income teens reported the presence of weapons and physical assaults in their schools more than twice as often as teens with higher-income families. Asked what he hoped his article would accomplish, Evans responded that “hopefully the article will provoke people to think a little differently about these issues.” “I wanted to change the lens which people used [when they looked at poverty],” he said. Evans said that he had observed “a very strong gradient between income levels and health in this country and many other countries.” Nabil Iqbal ’06, whose family lives in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, agreed with Evans’ conclusion that poverty has damaging effects on children. Poorer families in Bangladesh, he said, were often unwilling to send their children to school. “The kids need to work in order to keep the family afloat … Parents don’t really want to send the children to school, especially girls,” Iqbal said. Christopher Daeffler ’06, a member of the Cornell Republicans, said that while he sympathized with low-income children who were exposed to many risk factors, parents should be responsible for their children’s well-being. “I feel bad that the parents aren’t working hard enough to get them out of the harmful environment,” Daeffler said. Evans was optimistic on the subject of public concern about the harmful effects of poverty. “I think that most Americans on an individual, personal level, if they see or experience disadvantage themselves they feel bad about that,” he said. He added, however, that concern about the problems of low-income families was very low at the societal level.Archived article by Elijah Reichlin-Melnick Sun Contributor