This article is part one in a series investigating the genocide occuring in Darfur and the role that Cornell chooses to play in the crisis.

Imagine all of Cornell’s students, numbering over 20,000. Now imagine a number 25 times larger — around 500,000 — and not of people, but bodies.

As the Cornell community continues to debate the possibility of a climate neutral campus, Ithaca College has already taken the first step toward greater sustainability.

Yesterday, Ithaca College President Peggy R. Williams signed a letter of intent to become a participant in the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a collaboration between the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, Second Nature, and ecoAmerica.

On Feb. 13, 1872, the Board of Trustees accepted a donation of $250,000 from Henry W. Sage. Sage was an avid supporter of gender equality in higher education, and the money was used to build a women’s dormitory, one of the first in the United States.

Each person’s vision of Collegetown is different. For some, it is a place of natural beauty; for others, a noisy nuisance; for others still, a boozy vision of beer-soaked college nights. Yesterday in the meeting room of the St. Luke Lutheran Church, the Collegetown Vision Task Force presented its goals for Collegetown to the public. The statement is the culmination of a year’s work spent assessing the area’s weaknesses and strengths.

$6.5 million dollars is music to anyone’s ears. That is approximately 65 grand pianos, 2,600 oboes, 50,000 elementary violins or 26.4 million kazoos. Sidney T. Cox ’47, M.A ’48, upon his death, has bequeathed a generous gift of this amount — $6.5 million — to the Cornell Department of Music, a sum which would have exceeded $70 million in value the year of the department’s founding in 1930.

Thomas J. Bardos left the rubble of his home country, Hungary, after WWII to start again in the United States. After earning a Ph.D in chemistry from the University of Notre Dame, Bardos made his home at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he earned a professorship lasting 33 years until 1993. For his dedication to the future of cancer research, the American Association for Cancer Research has awarded 19 undergraduates from all over the country with the AACR-Thomas J. Bardos Science Education Award for the past two years. This year, one winner is Cornell’s own Erin M. Dauchy ’08.