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Archives
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April 2006
And People Complain About Oil Prices
Amidst all of the talk about rising oil and gas prices, it might help to place the rising price of gas in the context of higher education... Matthew Nagowski | April 30, 2006 (#) Now Click Your Heels Three Times... Tonight, through a series of serendipitous events, I ended up meeting a fellow Cornellian from a previous generation. Even though our Cornell experiences had been seperated by a gulf of thirty years, we were still able to jointly reminisce about our times on East Hill. Matthew Nagowski | April 27, 2006 (#) Hey That's Us! There was another interesting op/ed piece in the Sun today -- Corey Earle's Walking Backwards column on Cornell lore and history. Say's Corey: Wrapping Ourselves in Numbers? Not to beat a dead horse, but The Sun is running a rather interesting editorial today in response to the much talked about New York Times article. They start out strong enough: One former Cornell student quoted in the article commented, "Cornell is Ivy and more." Cornell is exactly that - The Hill is the only Ivy League institution to come complete with a hotel school and an agriculture college, though the article incorrectly refers to CALS as "one of several at the university that are run by the state." Cornell has four colleges funded by the state of New York, however, the educational operation is governed entirely by Cornell, not by the State University of New York. Matthew Nagowski | April 25, 2006 (#) But Where's The Merchandise! One of the things Cornell alums might have learned by reading the much talked about Times article is that the imaghe committee succesfully lobbied the Cornell Store to start carrying 'cooler' merchandise for Cornellians to wear. Jealous of the retro-looking threads that some other schools offered, the Cornell Image committee succesfully convinced the administration to start selling 'cool' hoodies and hats. The New York Times even gracefully provided a picture of Cornell's 'cool' new wear:  So it wouldn't be beyond imagination to suppose that Cornell alums might try to purchase some of the newly minted merchandise in support of their alma mater. But as far as I can tell, the 'cool' hoodies and hats aren't available through the Cornell Store's incredibly clunky interface, nor are they available through ivysport.com. And I would still like to see some Cornell-brand scarves become available. Matthew Nagowski | April 23, 2006 (#) East Hill Insecurities? So by now, a lot of people have read, or at least heard about, the New York Times article on the successful lobbying efforts of Cornell’s student-run image committee. Over the weekend, it was the second most widely emailed article for the Times, and very obviously, there is a lot that may be said—both positive and negative—about the article. For starters, no publicity about Cornell can be inherently a bad thing. Moreover, the article finally gives well-deserved credit to the good work of Peter Cohl, Heather Grantham, and others in helping to re-imagine and re-brand Cornell’s public image, especially in regards to the University’s beautiful new public website and the reneging of the universally loathed JC Penny box, as well as for lobbying the University for smaller class sizes. And, the article also gives well-intentioned press to the unrivaled growth in the number of applications that the University received this past year. However, on the flip side… Section O Sucks! As part of a fundraising drive for the refurbishment and expansion of Lynah Rink, Cornell's Department of Athletics has created a website appropriately titled lynahrink.com. Matthew Nagowski | April 18, 2006 (#) The Outreach Gap Completely real scenario: You go to a troubled high school in Brooklyn. You apply and, miraculously, are accepted to Cornell for the fall. But your parents are worried. Cornell's not in Brooklyn -- it could be a dangerous place, especially for someone like you, a female minority student from New York City. What do you do? Completely ideal scenario: You look up your acceptance letter, where the contact info for your local outreach coordinator -- someone from a similar background as you, but who went to Cornell -- is clearly visible. You give them a call and hopefully receive some wisdom and some reassurance. You even put them in touch with your parents. Current scenario: You ask your teacher, in the NYC Teaching Fellows program, what to do. Fortunately, she's a recent graduate and has contacts in the college world. Your teacher asks a friend, who asks a friend, who knows someone fitting the profile who could help. But the current scenario won't work for everyone. Let's review: This student's parents, from Brooklyn, are worried about their daughter's well-being at Cornell. Clearly, we have a public relations problem if Brooklyn is deemed safer than Ithaca. This student, surely in high demand, has to try alternate avenues for information because it's not readily available. Clearly, we have an outreach problem, a gap in Cornell's supposed commitment to minority and low-income recruitment efforts. A final thought: Why the public relations problem? Does news of, say, a racially motivated stabbing make the rounds faster than news of this year's increase in minority acceptances? When well-meaning activists publicize this fairly isolated incident as merely part of a widespread, ingrained problem, does that discourage more minority students from attending in the first place? Count this as Anecdotal Exhibit A. Note to media relations officers: Step One might be publicizing Cornell's current murder rate (0). Andy Guess | April 16, 2006 (#) Alumni-Elected Trustees Announced Like a lot of other semi-important things, the vote for Cornell's alumni-elected trustees completely slipped me by. But it appears that Kelly Brown '88 and Philip Reilly '69 were elected to Cornell's 64 member governing council. Matthew Nagowski | April 14, 2006 (#) Liberal Bias Indeed Matt brings up an interesting point: How can there be a crisis of liberal bias (and more broadly, academic freedom) at Cornell if a professor can create a course that honestly investigates the questions raised by proponents of intelligent design -- a theory openly derided by President Rawlings? Personally, I have only experienced true, consistent, systematic, and blatant bias in one class. Does that mean there's a widespread problem? Not necessarily. In courses where it counts, such as history, my professors have always been extremely fair and open to all ideas (at least those that are relevant and have merit) even when they have been explicit about their own views. In a film class, despite the fact that the professor declared Hollywood's global market dominance "terrorism ... and I mean that in every sense of the word," it was hard to see how his politics would matter in the eventual grading process. Andy Guess | April 12, 2006 (#) What Liberal Bias? Proof that there may be more academic diversity and freedom on Cornell's campus than David Horowitz and company care to believe: The Ivy League school's course – "Evolution and Design: Is There Purpose in Nature?" – aims to "sort out the various issues at play, and to come to clarity on how those issues can be integrated into the perspective of the natural sciences as a whole." Cornell’s history, its intellectual scope, and its current commitments position us well to contribute to the national debate on religion and science.
Matthew Nagowski | April 12, 2006 (#) Durham's Dystopia Last year, amid some campus (and national) controversy surrounding the release of Tom Wolfe's latest novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons I had the opportunity to write a review of the book for The Cornell Daily Sun. Matthew Nagowski | April 11, 2006 (#) A Reason To Pay Your Class Dues When the dreaded red envelope asking me to pay my class dues arrived at my house in January, I probably did what most members of the Class of 2005 did -- I threw it out. Fresh from East Hill and with debt to pay off, I had more important things to do with my discretionary income, like save for retirement or purchase a $6 pint of beer with my co-workers. Why should Cornell hit me so quickly after finishing college? Wasn't 60 grand (I was, after all, in a contract college) enough to tide them over at least until I had kids of my own to send off to college. Moreover, when I paid my class dues and pledged "my senior gift" at the end of April last year, I thought my Cornell Alumni magazine would at least come for a year. But apparently my subscription ran out at the end of December. Matthew Nagowski | April 07, 2006 (#) Harvard Ups the Ante in the Student Aid Game It is easy to provide aid to low-income students if you don't have a lot of them! Following Stanford's decision to eliminate family tuition contributions for families making less than $45,000 a year, Harvard has pledged to not require family contributions from students with families making less than $60,000, in what is certainly a victory for college access and socio-economic diversity in the nation's most elite colleges: Last year, Yale said it would eliminate the contribution required of parents earning less than $45,000, an plan similar to Harvard's. This month there has been a profusion of announcements. In early March, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said it would begin matching the federal Pell Grants that its low-income students got. Pell grants are currently $4,050 a year. M.I.T., which will charge $43,550 for tuition, housing and meals, said that 16 percent of its undergraduates came from homes with incomes below $42,000, and that 90 percent of its undergraduates qualified for financial aid. Stanford University said this month that it would eliminate the parental contribution for families with annual incomes below $45,000. Last week, the University of Pennsylvania said it would replace loans with grants for undergraduates from economically disadvantaged families with incomes of $50,000 or less. If nothing else, these developments in student aid reflect the growing dispersion in wealth among the nation's top colleges and universities. In the face of Harvard or Princeton's opulence -- each school boasts more than a million dollars of endowment per student, there is no way that Cornell could ever hope to compete in the student aid game while at the same time making the required investments in its faculty, buildings, and research that are necessary to maintain Cornell's position as a research university of international importance. David Skorton has been brought to Ithaca with much fanfare as a proven fundraiser, but even if the University's current capital campaign is a success, it would be nearly impossible to match the Harvards of the world in terms of the financial aid that we offer our undergraduates. Still, it would be nice if some of the proceeds of the upcoming capital campaign would be used to subsidize undergraduate education for those students that need the help, and not all into the Life Sciences initiative. Of course, it is worth mentioning that it is relatively cheap to provide high-levels of grant aid to low-income students if you don't have a lot of them, and Cornell has four times as many low-income students as Harvard does. One wonders if these changing financial aid policies will mean any real difference in the amount of socio-economic diversity at these colleges. Matthew Nagowski | April 04, 2006 (#) |
-- WSJ: Cornell Wins NYC Tech Campus Bid (EBilmes) -- Barrier Update: City Approves Nets (DJost) -- Big Red Cymbal Guy (Nagowski) -- New York Times Survey on Campus Recruiting is Flawed (KScott) -- Barrier Update: Legal precedent suggests City of Ithaca will not be held liable for gorge suicide (DJost) -- Despite MSG Loss, Big Potential for Big Red Hockey (EBilmes) -- City Council Will Vote on Suicide Nets (DJost) -- An Encounter on the Upper East Side (Nagowski) -- Showing Off Your School Spirit (Nagowski) -- Chipotle Ithaca? (KScott) -- Cornell at the ING NYC Marathon (KScott) -- Crossing Over a Fine Line: Commercial Activity on Campus (KScott) -- Milstein's Downfall (Nagowski) -- Can any Cornell-associated organization really be independent of the University? (Nagowski) -- Slope Media Revisited (EBilmes) -- Slope Media Group Approved for Byline Funding (KScott) -- Occupy AEM? (KScott) -- New campus pub to be good for both Greeks and non-Greeks (Nagowski) -- Gagging the Election (Nagowski) -- The Changing Structure of Rush Week (Nagowski) -- Ivy League Humility in the Midwest (EBilmes) -- Of Median Grades and Economics Minors (Nagowski) -- Homecoming Recap (Nagowski) -- My Cornell Bookshelf (Nagowski) -- The Sun's Opinion Section Has Suddenly Gotten Good (Nagowski) -- Remembering the 11th (Nagowski) -- Cornellian Tapped as Top Economic Advisor (Nagowski) -- Cutting Pledging, and the Good Which Comes With It (EBilmes) -- Why Cornell Should Not Close Fall Creek Gorge (Nagowski) -- Welcome to the Class of 2015 (Nagowski)  |