Track Battles Lafayette

By | April 16, 2004

The Red track teams might be the best things at Cornell that you’ve never seen. With only a few home meets during the indoor and outdoor seasons, the Red must travel around the country in pursuit of worthy competition. The teams will continue to rack up the frequent flyer miles or — more appropriately — the frequent bus miles when they roll into Easton, Pa., for the Lafayette Invitational this weekend. A week after splitting the squads to compete in Sea Ray Relays in Knoxville, Tenn., and at Bucknell Outdoor Classic, the Red is looking forward to a less stressful weekend.

“This is a lower key competition from last weekend,” said men’s head coach Nathan Taylor. “It’s a chance for some guys to take it a little easy, but there are other guys who are trying to bang out good performances in what we hope will be some good weather.”

Although a less stressful weekend, the Red will face some very strong competition.

“In and of itself one school might not do much,” said women’s head coach Lou Duesing. “But there are a lot of events and everyone is going to contribute in some way to some an event. We hope all events will be competitive. They are not going to score the meet. We’re not trying to beat people, so much as have good throwing, good jumping, and good running events so people can move themselves forward.”

Last weekend in Knoxville, the Red competed against a field that included top Division 1 opponents. For the men, Mr. Consistency, senior Giles Longley-Cook placed eighth in the hammer throw and qualified for the NCAA regionals. In the 800-meter, senior Aldo Gonzalez may have placed 20th, but his time of 1:51.37 qualified him for the Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America (IC4A) championship. Freshman David Pell placed second in the high jump at 6-8 3/4 while classmate Kofi Ofori-Ansah placed fifth in the triple jump. The distance medley relay team placed fifth at 9:56.51, the 10th best mark in school history.

The other half of the men’s squad was at Bucknell, where a remarkable 10 of 12 men set personal records in distance events. In the 1500-meter, sophomore Ross McGowan finished seventh with a personal best 3:57.03. McGowan is a daze staffer. The steeplechase was won by freshman Aaron Arlinghaus in 9:19.91 and classmate Brad Baird finished fourth. Junior Emory Mort cruised into a second place in the 10k in 30:22.15. Senior Ethan Albrecht-Carrie was an IC4A qualifier in the decathlon, amassing 6,264 points, the third most at Cornell all-time.

Despite all the success, Taylor continues to push the team hard.

“We have four weeks between this weekend and Heps,” Taylor said. “Four hard practices away. Even though it’s the midway point chronologically, training wise we are 95 percent of the way there. Over the next couple weeks we’re going to sharpen and let people recuperate.”

The ultimate goal remains Heps and being fully prepared for the competition.

“There are days when I’m a really harsh critic of that,” Taylor said when asked about the progress the team has made towards this goal. “There are days when I think that we’ve made about as much progress as we could make. There are days when the seniors on the team, when they’ve accomplished so much, need to focus on finishing their legacy.”

The women also had a very successful weekend. In Knoxville, the 4×100, 4×200, and 4×400 relay teams composed of junior Kari Steed, senior Hannah Garrity, freshman Cameron Washington, and junior Shonda Brown were outstanding. In the 4×100, the team set a season best mark of 47.43, eighth best all-time at Cornell, and qualified for the ECAC championship. The same group competed in the 4×200, finishing in 1:38.49 — second best at Cornell all-time.

Rounding out a busy day, the team placed eighth in the 4×400. Their time of 3:41.32 was second best all-time at Cornell and fast enough to qualify the team for the NCAA regionals. Washington ran the 400-meter in 55.39, setting a personal record and qualifying for the ECACs. Juniors Alyssa Simon and Stacey Nadolny also qualified for the ECAC championships in the steeplechase and the discus, respectively.

At Bucknell, the Red continued to shine. Six women set personal records. In the steeplechase, sophomore Angela Kudla and freshman Robyn Ellerbrock set personal records. Ellerbrock finished in 11:08.17, beating her own freshman record. The 5k was equally productive, as sophomore Emily McCabe, sophomore Christy Planer, and senior Christine Eckstaedt set personal bests.

As the team marches through spring, it continues to improve.

“Despite the weather, I would have to say yes,” Duesing said when asked if he was pleased with the progress of the team. “I know if you were to ask a lot of the individuals they would express frustration because they want to be faster. But that’s okay. I tell them limitations in sport are self-imposed, so strive and continue to strive to be better.”

Archived article by James Rich
Sun Staff Writer

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