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No Big Red Love for Love Story
Continuing with last week's Love Story topic, MetaEzra reader SD '12 writes in: Do I smell some cause and effect in the air? Was Erich Segal the first to observe that the Big Red Hockey Team is indeed the dream-crushing, soul-devouring juggernaut of the ECAC, effectively squashing Oliver's hopes for a life full of love and happiness with Jenny by pummeling him into the ice (and then killing his beloved)? Well, if we didn't kill Jenny, we definitely killed Harvard last year in a 4-0 season sweep. SD continues: The pep band manager also keeps a DVD copy of Love Story, which is handed down after pep band manager elections every year. Posted on Monday August 30, 2010 (#)
What can you say about a hockey team that sucks? The Times recently ran an article that explores a rather peculiar tradition at Harvard which revolves around the film Love Story. So reports the newspaper of record: Harvard students may 'pummel' the film, but no died-in-the-wool Cornellian should forget that it is the Crimson who are pummeled in the film. By none other than those hairy-chested men from far above Cayuga's waters: the Big Red. Former student-elected trustee Mike Walsh writes in to MetaEzra with the following anecdote: Though we all enjoy the story about how Ned Harkness would only allow the use of Cornell jerseys if the team won, the movie really hasn’t caught on here as much as it could have. I tried to get a similar tradition started in one of the houses on West Campus the night before The Game. It never took off. Part of the problem is the best part of the movie was about 20 minutes in, after that the entire thing is dreadfully tedious. Most students would come watch the Cornell game scene then leave. A few would stay around for the remainder, but sadly never brought the level of boisterous hate that the movie (ed. note: or Harvard?) deserved.
Posted on Wednesday August 25, 2010 (#)
Androids, Empathy, and Faith I was pleased to see that this year's New Student reading selection committee took a creative turn with Phillip K. Dick's Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, a science fiction novella that explores what it means to be human. I was also pleased to see that rather than sticking 3,600 teenagers in a stifling hot Barton Hall to be bored by a panel discussion, this year's reading project introduced several thematic lectures that students could choose to attend: Alan Hedge, professor of design and environmental analysis, discussed the technology in the book and the roles machines play in our lives in his talk, "Why Electric Sheep Need Human Shepherds" at the Schwartz Center. Other "Android" lecturers were Hod Lipson, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and information science, on "What Do Robots Dream Of?" in Baker Lab; "Pets of the Future" with clinical sciences lecturer Gretchen Schoeffler; and Thomas Whitlow, professor of horticulture, with "Biodiversity, Ecocomplexity, and the Human Experience" in Call Alumni Auditorium. I must say that this years Androids selection and last year's choice of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath have both been particularly inspired choices after a long series of duds. Let's hope the trend continues. I also had the pleasure of reading Androids this summer as part of my local Cornell Book Club. While we did spend some time gossiping on the nature of the romantic relationship between Rachel and Deckard, we also produced some more productive conversation as well. Given that one of the major conceits of the plot is that empathy is a useful trait for being able to discern the difference between humans and androids, we ended up having a rather invigorating two-hour discussion on the meaning of empathy and whether or not we agreed with Dick's premise. One of the ironies that we narrowed-in on was that the humans in the book didn't seem to have much empathy for the plight of androids on Earth, especially in light of the fact that the androids didn't pose any material threat to human existence. All of the androids we encountered in the book simply wanted to live a life of peace and dignity with the same fears and dreams that we all have; it was only in response to human bounty hunters did they turn violent. By contrast, humans did focus a fair amount of empathy towards the plight of much less sentient creatures than the androids, their pets. Deckard did seem to nurture some feelings of empathy for the androids, but said emotions were undeveloped at best and left unresolved by the end of the book. Posted on Monday August 23, 2010 (#)
Cornell To Match Aid Packages of Other Ivies There's good news for students who have been cross-admitted to Cornell and other Ivies who would prefer to attend Cornell. Starting this year Cornell will match the parental contribution and loan level amount of any student admitted to any of the other Ivies, as well as Stanford, Duke, and MIT. -- The match policy applies to U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents and international students. Please note that since funding for international student financial aid is limited, Cornell may not be able to apply the match policy to all international students. -- The policy is effective as of July 1, 2010 for new undergraduate students applying for Fall 2011 admission. Prior to this policy announcement, it wasn't uncommon to hear of students turning down their first-choice Cornell for Columbia or Penn or the like because the financial aid was better at the other schools. Now, Cornell is pledging to meet the financial aid packages of the other Ivies. Provided of course, the student can get multiple acceptance offers on the table. Given that Cornell is widely seen as the easiest Ivy to gain acceptance to, some might construe this as a merit-based scholarship in disguise. Cornell will give you more money if you get into Harvard (where students with family incomes of less than $200,000 a year only have to pay 10 percent of their income), but not if you were accepted, to say, Georgetown or Northwestern. (Which compete for students much more readily with Cornell than Harvard.) But it's not really a merit-based program because the student has to qualify for financial aid in the first place. At the end of the day, Cornell will only be giving as much aid as Harvard... or Yale... or Princeton. We've heard this discussion before. What the program is likely all about is a sly way to get around the Ivy League's crackdown on Cornell's enhanced financial aid program for athletes. Which makes sense, because most of the common-admit battles with Harvard, Princeton, et. al. are likely for athletes. Because who would want to play hockey in Allston if they can play at Lynah for the same price? Posted on Monday August 23, 2010 (#)
NPR Confuses the Cornells The folks over at Cornell Insider picked up on an interesting NPR story that tracks how well college graduates pay back their student loans. The NPR story cites the fact that Cornell has the second highest loan repayment rate in the Ivy League, at 82 percent, falling only to (who else?) Harvard's 84 percent. That's all well and good, save for the fact that NPR reported on the Cornell in Iowa. You know, the one where students only take one course at a time and the topography is flat and without any intersecting hydrological features? Cornell's actual repayment rate is 73 percent, which puts us in fourth place in the Ivies (ahead of Dartmouth, Brown, Penn, and Yale, but behind Columbia, Princeton, and of course, Harvard) and also ahead of some of the Big Red's other peer schools, like Chicago, Northwestern, Duke, and WashU. The bigger question is what exactly these numbers tell us. I'm not certain they tell you much without taking what the students are studying, their debt load, and the familial backgrounds of the students. Family backgrounds are important because a student from a family with higher income can reasonably expect to 'lean' on their family for loan payments if time gets tough. Cornell tends to have more economic diversity than its peers, so Cornell looks even better with this taken into consideration. At the same time, debt load is important too -- the higher the debt the more the monthly payment. Paying off $150,000 in debt is a lot harder to do than $60,000 in debt. The NPR story doesn't really talk about this, even though it's an important angle to their 'public v. private' Ivies comparison. Public school graduates will see lower debt loads. The same principle would apply for Cornell's contract colleges. We also know that Cornell tends to be more of a pre-professional place than a lot of our peers, so it would make sense that Cornellians might have better job prospects upon graduating. On the flip side, the consideration might only matter for future engineers, farmers, or hotel managers, tilting the scale in Cornell's favor due to those students, but telling us nothing about the marginal liberal arts student at Cornell vis-a-vis Brown or Dartmouth. Tellingly, Carnegie Mellon, a Cornell-peer but heavily concentrated in business and engineering education, has a repayment rate of 80 percent. Besting all but Harvard. And Cornell College. Posted on Sunday August 22, 2010 (#)
Cornell Acceptance Rates by SAT Scores Longtime readers of the site know my old adage -- acceptance rates tell us nothing -- because they tell you nothing about the academic caliber of the institution, nor the quality of the students applying, being accepted, or enrolling. That said, SAT-contingent acceptance rates can be very useful to students applying to a school because it may help provide guidance to their chances of being accepted. This is true even at a school like Cornell, which with many different undergraduate colleges and niche majors like architecture, viticulture, and hotel management, tends to be more focused on a qualitative assessment of the student's fit for a particular program that strict numbers like SAT scores or class rank. Longtime readers of the site also know that I find a certain amount of pride in the fact that Cornell is more open about its admissions and enrollment data than any of its peers. Good luck getting a peer school like Penn or Duke or Northwestern to disclose admissions statistics by undergraduate college, but Cornell has nothing to hide. That's why I'm particularly excited to note that the folks in Institutional and Research and Planning have significantly improved the amount of data they are now sharing on Cornell's admissions process. This year, they've upgraded their brief to include distributions of applicants, acceptances, and enrollments by SAT scores. That allows these types of statistics to be inferred:  The verdict: Study your verbal skills, kids, because Cornell accepts high SAT Critical Reading scores at a much higher rate than high SAT Math scores. But if you have less than a 650 SAT in both the Critical Reading or Math tests, there's not that much of a difference in acceptance rates among the same scores. It's also fair to point out that even if you have SAT scores below 650 in either test, you still have a better chance of getting into Cornell than schools with sub-10 percent acceptance rates like Harvard and Yale. Finally, for those of you with over a 750 Math score, don't be too cocky. You still have a 75 percent chance of being rejected. That's not all that much different than those with a 650 Math score who have an 85 percent chance of being rejected. Just more proof that Cornell doesn't place all that much emphasis on SAT scores -- unlike other colleges, Ezra's University is more about fit. As for the 5 percent of students with below a 500 SAT Verbal that are being accepted, I sure hope your parents are quite wealthy. Or you have a strong slapshot. More data below the jump. Posted on Wednesday August 18, 2010 (#)
Class of 2014 Strongest Class Ever? With orientation only a week away for the Class of 2014 and students already arriving in Ithaca for awesome pre-orientation programs like Outdoor Odyssey, nee Wilderness Reflections, MetaEzra recently came across some statistics for the entering class. And with this year's low acceptance rate and high yield, we knew that the Class of 2014 was bound to impress. The big news is that this appears to be the strongest year in recent memory, not only on the acceptance rate and yield side, but also on the academic caliber side. The later is much more important, because acceptance rates don't really tell you anything about the strength of the entering class:
This may, in fact, be the first time that more than 70 percent of the entering class had a Verbal SAT greater than 650. On the flip side of things, however, we understand that entering black students plummeted this year, from 6.7% (216) to 5.3% (172), which is almost a 25 percent drop in black students. This is sure to cause some consternation in Day Hall given the amount of attention this number gets every year. One speculation is that the drop in matriculating blacks may be a result of the suicide cluster, as black students may be more sensitive to the perceived amount of student support on campus. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether or not there is a link between the SAT scores going up and black matriculates going down. The other big headline is that the percentage of international students declined substantially, from 10.5 to 7.7 percent of the class. One has to wonder if the decision to re-allocate financial aid for Canadian students might not have played a role in that change. At least we're still going to have a kick-ass woman's hockey team this year, complete with three new Canadians, and one returning Olympic gold-medal winner. Posted on Thursday August 12, 2010 (#)
Moving Past Coulter and Olbermann? By Elie Bilmes
Mark Kirk's '81 star may be falling, but another Midwestern Cornellian is poised to win big in November. As we posted in the sidebar and the Sun reported last week, Hansen Clarke '81 defeated thirteen-year incumbent Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick in the Democratic primary for Michigan's 13th District. Given that the district is strongly Democratic, analysts predict that Hansen is "all but certain" to win this fall's election. Clarke's victory was due in large part to the ethical problems facing Kilpatrick and her family, but Clarke's personal story is a compelling narrative of diversity and perseverance. His father, a Bangladeshi Muslim, died when Clarke was eight years old. His mother, an African-American Methodist, raised Clarke in Detroit on a crossing guard's salary. (Clarke later converted to Roman Catholicism.) Clarke was flagged by a teacher for a special art program, and it was through this experience that he gained admission to Cornell. However, Clarke struggled during his first few months on East Hill: He dropped out of Cornell in his freshman year and ended up back in the neighborhood, living on food stamps and struggling to survive. In an act which cemented Clarke's loyalty to his city, neighbors in Detroit raised money to send him back to Cornell. However, he had lost his full scholarship and needed to work his way through school. After turning around his academic career, Clarke attended Georgetown Law School and began working in politics. He married Choi Palmer-Cohen - bonus points if you guessed that she was born in South Korea and adopted by a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. Clarke's story is not easily simplified. He has described his politics as a "mix of Newt Gingrich and Malcolm X" - I'll let Isaac Kramnick sort that out - and has campaigned in favor of decreased federal spending. Despite Clarke's time in the Ithaca ivory tower, he is a legitimate Detroit local. In contrast to many political transplants who spent time in other areas before returning home to run for office, Hansen has received less than one-tenth of one percent of his career fundraising from New York. So, is Clarke the person to finally carry the Cornell political flag past the era of bickering Keith Olbermann '79 and Ann Coulter '84? Perhaps not. At Cornell, Clarke ran for a student seat on the board of trustees against (who else?) Coulter. It is believed that Clarke's victory in this election was a major factor in pushing Coulter to become the conservative firebrand whom we know today: “She was so laid back when I ran against her,” Clarke said. “I think that election changed her.” Clarke is not the only Cornellian on the political rise - I'm still partial to Gabrielle Giffords M.R.P. '96 - but he's got one of those stories which is likely to be discussed more and more as we get closer to January 2011. I'm hoping that Clarke's ascendancy is not evidence that we are still in the era of Coulter, Olbermann, Wolfowitz, etc., but that Clarke will instead serve as a bridge between that era of the 1990s and 2000s and a new period in which he will be only one of several new, exciting Big Red faces to make headlines. Posted on Monday August 09, 2010 (#)
Explaining Denver Last week I detailed where Cornell alumni live across the country, and I noted at the time that I was most surprised by Denver's relatively high standing in the rankings -- ahead of larger metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Atlanta. Today, MetaEzra reader AB contributes: I am in a rush, but as a proud Coloradan I couldn't help but notice you mentioning that the only thing that could explain kids going to Denver was the fact that the Coors family went to Cornell. However, the real reasons Might help to explain why so many Cornellians have been following the 'Pikes Peak or Bust' mantra. Posted on Monday August 09, 2010 (#)
I Am Cornell A cool new Cornell meme that's circulating the Internets is the I Am Cornell project, which came out of University's Office of Web Communications. Reads the project website: Make a sign telling the world how Cornell is in your life, how the university has touched your world, how you relate to the Big Red. Then have someone snap your photo holding it. Be creative. Have fun. Share your Cornell with the world. During Reunions, my rag-tag bunch of friends and I happened to come across the I Am Cornell booth at the All-Alumni Affair. Urged-along by my friends, I soon found myself up on stage, avec my now infamous blazer, holding a sign that was written for me which didn't completely fulfill the spirit of either the I Am Cornell project or MetaEzra, because after all, this humble author is but one contributor to our fledgling blog, and you can barely read the 'I Am Cornell' text in my sign, which also says "and this blazer cost $20 on eBay".
Of course, this all occurred two months ago, but I'm only able to share the resulting picture with you now, dear reader, due to some bureaucratic hold-up that occurred between the University and the photo studio, Laughing Penguins. (Who take pretty nifty pictures, I should add.) The Big Red Tape strikes again! Looking through the Flickr pool, it's pretty clear that the project is off to a good start, but it definitely needs more diversity. To date, the pool features a lot of white alumni and professional staff. Not a lot of faculty. Nor are there a lot of faces of color. Where's the 'such diversity in one university' that we love and cherish?
The good news? If you take your own I Am Cornell picture from the comfort of your own home (and not a sweltering Barton Hall), you should be able to get it online pronto. Posted on Sunday August 08, 2010 (#)
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-- Math department encounters massive cuts? One comment. Advice on how to interact with fellow sorority girls? Massive comment-fest. We obviously have our priorities in line. -- The Cornell CIO's single-year bonus could have paid for more than 10 years of undergraduate tuition (2.5 full scholarships) or one year's pay for the three Theater, Film and Dance department members laid off in July. -- IHE picks up Cornell's financial aid moves a week after MetaEzra had the scoop... with no mention of us! Where's the love, IHE? -- Sigh -- There is undoubtedly a stereotype that everyone in AEM is a future Gordon Gekko, and this is completely and utterly false -- AEM is also filled with future Bernie Madoffs and future Lloyd Blankfeins. Get your stereotypes right, people! -- Get your Cornell Dairy ice cream now before it runs out -- Should Cornell hold a formal parting ceremony for helicopter parents? -- A sad goodbye to The Unofficial PAM Blog. MetaEzra loved your earnestness and cheer. -- Why a Cornell Nobel Laureate is worried about helium -- Did Harvard divest from Israel? -- A number that some people care about -- Another university pulls a Cornell. -- Stephen Golding lands at Ohio University... what ever happened to his 'economic development' post? -- ILR library to acquire Hotel, Johnson School library holdings -- Ratan Tata '52, who is currently looking for a successor, "has lived for years in a bachelor pad surrounded by books and dogs." -- College: The Sequel (AGuess) -- Reunions Wrap-Up (Nagowski) -- Cornellians in Politics Roundup (EBilmes) -- Matt and Andy: Reunion Weekend Free-For-All (Nagowski) -- Fuchs and Skorton Did Not Want AEM in CALS (Nagowski) -- Breaking: Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management (Nagowski) -- Reunion Week! (Nagowski) -- Elie's Graduation Post (Nagowski) -- Gifting Demographics (Nagowski) -- Skorton Increasingly Lehman-esque (Nagowski) -- On The Sport of Lacrosse (Nagowski) -- Fuchs: I Am The Decider (Nagowski) -- The Cornell Reunion Blazer! (Nagowski) -- AAP Has Erosion Issues (Nagowski) -- An Interview With Student-Elected Trustee Nighthawk Evensen (Nagowski) -- The Real 161 Things (Nagowski) -- The Costs of Decentralization (Nagowski) -- University CIO To Start Own Hedge Fund (Nagowski) -- Overenrolled Again? Yield Higher Than Expected (Nagowski) -- Supporting Students (Nagowski) -- Steven Strogatz is a Cornell Treasure (Nagowski) -- Happy Slope Day (Nagowski) -- Incoming Freshmen Class Always Impresses (Nagowski) -- Munier's Swan Song (Nagowski) -- $71 MM in Cuts, Future Layoffs Imminent (Nagowski) -- Skorton's Bedside Manner (Nagowski) -- Historical Integrity (Nagowski) -- Discriminatory Professor Loses Discrmination Lawsuit (Nagowski) -- Introducing Opzi, a Cornell Startup (Nagowski) -- Courting the Canucks (Nagowski)  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
