That pungent old man smell wafting across campus can only mean one thing — the Board of Trustees is in town. And if the volume of Frank Sinatra tunes blaring from the Statler Hotel is any indication, they’re here to party like it’s 2007. Financial crisis? What is this, 2009? That old drag is long gone — it’s a new decade, a new economic climate. Our Berry Patch muckrakers have got the scoop: The trustees are going on a shopping spree, higher education-style. Here’s a list of the top five items on their shopping list:
A Fool-Proof Solution to Res. 44
It’s about time every single individual gets SAFC funding for their own one-person student group. There are currently three SAFC-funded salsa dancing groups (presumably called “Mild,” “Medium” and “Fire”), and while some people find this ridiculously redundant, we here at Berry Patch understand that large groups of people with similar interests really just complicate matters. Just ask the liberals who joined the Cornell Democrats due to a lack of other options, then ended up helping Eric “The Ticklemaster” Massa get elected to Congress.
Anti-Retirement Package
The idea is simple — free iPads for all University employees. Stuck at work at 6:30 a.m. in a snowstorm because the University didn’t think it would need to close? Free iPad! Got a huge corner office in Day Hall? Free iPad! Some Strong Island diva just sent back her Ivy Room quesadilla because it wasn’t crispy enough? You guessed it: iPad! Lucky for all these new iPad-ers, a Cornell Sun app is on the way soon!
Straight Ballin’
Word on the street is a certain Cornell sports team is going dancing in a week or so. To make sure that Newman Nation is there to support the Red, notorious basketball fan [and Chairman of the Board of Trustees] Peter Meinig ’61 has generously offered to charter a fleet of (natural gas-powered) planes to Jacksonville, San Jose, New Orleans or wherever our cagers are sent. And, maybe the biggest-ticket item on this spending spree: Coach Steve Donahue is staying!
About That Wastewater …
A campus-wide upgrade to automatically closing valves. It might not seem like a big change, but the City of Ithaca begs to differ. With these fancy new valves, the Vet School folks hope to avoid future accidental dumpings of animal waste water into the city sewer system. Our bad, City of Ithaca. Those valves? Totally should have closed them when we were done. You know how these things go, take your eyes off the valves for a minutes and — BOOM — animal waste water everywhere. No worries though, it won’t happen again.
Frack Yes!
To help improve strained town-gown relations, Berry Patchers are reporting that the TCAT bus system will be converted to natural gas. We know the hippy argument of, “This is going to destroy the environment,” or, “This just perpetuates our dependence on fossil fuels,” but natural gas is just that — natural! Listen, if God didn’t want us to use the maddeningly complex and creepy new techonology of hydrofracking to drill for this natural gas, he wouldn’t have put it there! So, we say, head out to the backyard, hydrofrack that puppy up and get them buses running on that sweet, sweet local stuff.