Who Runs Cornell? | FACULTY COMMITTEE SCRUTINIZES GOVERNANCE

iN HIS BOOK THE CREation of the Future, President Emeritus Frank Rhodes asserted that effective governance of a university requires a cooperative and respectful relationship among the board of trustees, the president, and the faculty. "Both the board and the president delegate substantial responsibility to the faculty," he wrote. "The ancient universities developed their autonomy around self-governing bodies of scholars, and vigorous faculty governance continues at the heart of the university."

In the wake of the resignation of President Jeffrey Lehman '77 and the Redbud Woods controversy, Cornell's faculty is re-examining that governance relationship--and many have expressed concern about the current state of affairs. Their discontent surfaced at a meeting with the presidential search committee on August 30, when several professors objected to the secrecy surrounding the Lehman ouster and wondered if it might discourage strong presidential candidates from coming forward. The faculty's attitude was further expressed in two resolutions passed by the Faculty Senate in the fall.

On September 14, the Senate approved a resolution urging the trustees to "engage in a frank and open dialogue" with the faculty about their disagreements with Lehman. That resolution also stated that "the Senate is deeply concerned that the non-specific generalities of the official explanation for the resignation are broad enough to mask a major shift in the traditional locus of decision-making at Cornell from the President to the Board of Trustees." (Board chairman Peter Meinig '61 responded in a letter dated October 5 that declined to offer further information, noting that "former President Lehman and the University knowingly entered into a separation agreement and are bound by its terms, including the confidentiality provisions.")

At the same meeting, a second resolution was presented by four faculty members who had protested the Redbud Woods project. It advocated the naming of a faculty committee to investigate governance.Music professor Martin Hatch, PhD '80, one of the resolution's authors, says: "The people who got involved with Redbud Woods discovered that the faculty was being marginalized, with regard to governing the University, by changes in the structure of the University-- the relationship of the administration to the faculty and the relationship of the trustees to the administration."

The debate on the governance resolution centered on its references to Redbud Woods, and the Senate eventually voted to send the resolution to the University Faculty Committee (UFC) for further review. At the Senate's October 12 meeting, the UFC reported back with a new version that did not mention the ill-fated forest. It stated: "Whereas several events during the last year have raised questions about the relationship among the Faculty Senate, the central administration, and the Board of Trustees at Cornell University, therefore be it resolved that the Faculty Senate, using a slate of candidates proposed by its Nominations and Elections Committee, appoint a seven-member committee." This committee, the resolution continued, would be charged with reviewing faculty governance at Cornell over the past ten years, comparing governance at Cornell with the situation at other research universities, and making recommendations to the Senate for changes that would "broaden and strengthen the influence of the university faculty" on administrative decision-making at Cornell. The resolution passed with only one nay vote.

The Faculty Senate's Nominations and Elections Committee reviewed nearly 150 candidates for the governance committee and presented its slate at the Senate's November 9 meeting: N'Dri Assie- Lumumba (Africana Studies and Research Center), Barry Carpenter (Arts and Sciences), Eric Cheyfitz (Arts and Sciences), Cornelia Farnum (Veterinary Medicine), Kenneth Birman (Engineering), David R. Lee (CALS), and Risa Lieberwitz (ILR). The slate was approved, and Lieberwitz was named chair at the committee's first meeting on November 28. "It's important to recognize how essential faculty governance is to the health of the University," says Lieberwitz, who is chair of the Department of Collective Bargaining, Labor Law, and Labor History and has taught at Cornell since 1982. "Right now, there's a lot of frustration that the administration and the trustees don't recognize how important faculty governance is to maintaining academic freedom and therefore to maintaining the core values of the University."

Lieberwitz says the committee will meet often and may split up into subcommittees to investigate the different aspects of its charge. She acknowledges that the task is difficult with an institution as large and complex as Cornell, but expresses confidence in the capabilities of her colleagues to make meaningful recommendations. "One of the questions we will look at is whether the University, in how it functions, has become more corporate and whether that is having an effect on the scope and depth of faculty governance," she says. "Another important issue is--to use the current vernacular--transparency. Openness is essential if you're going to have any kind of democratic government in a university.Who's making the decisions and what information are they basing them on?"

The committee has been instructed to report back to the Faculty Senate no later than its May 2006 meeting, and it would like to meet with the finalists in the presidential search. "I hope that candidates who are on the short list would find it significant that our committee has been set up," says Lieberwitz. "We want them to understand that issues of faculty governance are of concern to the faculty, which should be important in shaping how they envision the job of being president."

-- Jim Roberts '71
with additional reporting by Susan Kelley

Alternate Universe | RON MOORE '86 IS TAKING SCI FI WHERE NO PERSON HAS GONE BEFORE

CAPTAIN JAMES T. KIRK IS NOT A real person.

This truth may seem self-evident, but it bears pointing out when you're talking about the life and career of writer-producer Ron Moore '86. As a child,Moore was a big fan of the original "Star Trek" television series; as an adult, he spent a decade working on three of its spin-offs. And as a screenwriter, he co-wrote the film Star Trek: Generations, in which Captain Kirk met his demise.

Moore got death threats. For killing off a fictional character, some of the show's more unhinged fans threatened to kill him for real. "Somebody got hold of my home number and was leaving these deeply profane messages," Moore recalls. " 'You S.O.B. --how dare you kill Captain Kirk? He's immortal. I'm gonna come and [expletive] kill you.' It was kind of disturbing. It's not just a show to some people."

That particular fact was hardly news to Moore; after ten years as a writer-producer on "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," and "Voyager," he was already well acquainted with the oddities of "Trek" fandom-- like the anonymous person who, every week for a decade, sent dozens of travel brochures from around the world to the production offices in envelopes crafted from old National Geographic covers, with no explanation. "There was a level of insanity that was ever-present around those shows,"Moore says.

His latest project--a re-imagining of the 1978 cult TV show "Battlestar Galactica" for cable's Sci Fi Channel--has also ruffled the feathers of some diehard fans. The new incarnation, like the original, follows a hardy band of humans whose home worlds have been destroyed by the Cylons, robots created to serve them. Like Jews wandering in the desert, they're seeking a promised land: a planet called Earth. But Moore's "Galactica" is no slavish homage to the original. One of its main characters, the crackerjack fighter pilot Starbuck, has been recast as a woman--a seemingly innocuous bit of artistic license, but enough to get Moore vilified on the Internet.

Even more provocatively, he's taken the man-versus-machine concept and tossed it on its head. Not only do some of the dreaded Cylons have human form--and human feelings--they also have religion. In Moore's universe, the Cylons believe in one true God; the humans are polytheists, worshiping a pastiche of Greek and Roman deities. "It's interesting to keep playing with the audience's expectations,"Moore says. "Who are you supposed to be rooting for? I like the fact that the show's complex. It tries not to present itself as a morality tale. It's very anti-'Star Trek' in that sense. On 'Star Trek,' each week you're learning something as Captain Picard or Captain Kirk solves a tricky moral dilemma."

If this new "Galactica" has contemporary undertones, it's no accident. Although the remake has the same basic premise as the original--the near-annihilation of a democratic civilization at the hands of a monolithic enemy--Moore and his colleagues knew it would have particular resonance in the age of terrorism. "I realized if you tried to tell that story today, the audience would bring an emotional connection to 9/11," he says. "They'd look at the show through very different eyes than in 1978. There was an opportunity to do science fiction that was relevant, that could comment on a lot of things in society today."

Moore's love of sci fi goes back to his childhood in rural California, where his mother was a teacher and his father a football coach and school superintendent. Growing up, he penned short stories and wrote and directed a high school play. But, he says, "no one becomes a writer in Chowchilla, California. It's not a real job." He came to Cornell on a Navy ROTC scholarship; he pledged Kappa Alpha, majored in government, and figured he'd be a lawyer. "On some fundamental level, I didn't really want to be a lawyer--I wanted to be Perry Mason," he says with a laugh. "I wanted to bang on tables and interrogate witnesses. I didn't want to spend ungodly hours in the law library." By his senior year, he says, "I just started imploding."He stopped going to class and slept all day. "I basically wasn't happy," he says. "I just sort of flunked out. I stopped doing anything vaguely academic. You can't skip an entire semester of Russian classes and then show up to take the final--which I actually tried to do."

One night around 4 a.m., while eating gravy fries at Manos Diner, a friend suggested to Moore that he move to L.A. and try his luck as a screenwriter. But degree or no degree, he still owed the Navy a few years. Out in California, he dutifully went to an induction physical--only to find that an old knee injury had worsened. "The flight surgeon opened this drawer in his desk," he says, "and took out a rubber stamp marked PERMANENTLY MEDICALLY DISQUALIFIED."Moore was a free man. He spent the next few years supporting himself with day jobs as a messenger and receptionist in an animal hospital while writing scripts. In 1989, he sold one to "Next Generation," which led to a staff writing gig and a prominent position in the "Star Trek" universe.

But if "Star Trek" defined science fiction on the small screen, Moore's new "Battlestar Galactica" flies against its conventions at warp speed. There's no time travel, no alternate universes, no colorful uniforms; while the good ship Enterprise was a bright and cheery vessel promising a future of technological innovation and racial harmony, the Galactica is much more gritty. "It has a different aesthetic," Moore says. "It takes a documentary approach.We de-emphasize clichés.We're playing it more as a straight-up drama, as realistic as we can. It's a chance to reinvent science fiction on TV."

-- Beth Saulnier

Specialty of the House | GREEK EATS GO LOCAL

STANDING AT THE STAINLESS steel sink in the Alpha Phi kitchen on Thurston Avenue, chef George Smith washes a strainer full of fresh spinach. Satisfied each leaf has been rinsed of dirt, he empties the strainer into a sauté pan and throws another mass of leaves into the sink. Soon, a case of dirty spinach has been transformed into a mound of steaming greens in a chafing dish. On the stove, several pounds of spuds boil their way toward mashed potatoes, and a pot roast bubbles in the oven. Dessert, a banana brown betty from Smith's own recipe, cools on a rack across the kitchen, drawing noises of appreciation from sisters and house staff who pass by.A new dish, pumpkin stir-fry, hasn't fared as well. "It's turned into pumpkin mush," says the chef, giving it a nudge with a spatula,"but it tastes good, and that's my primary concern."

Smith, who started the sorority job in August, isn't your stereotypical institutional chef, reheating industrial-sized cans of prepared foods for dinner every night. He combines a penchant for culinary experimentation with a commitment to using fresh, local ingredients whenever possible. "These jobs are set up for one person to cook for twenty to forty people, depending on the house," says Smith, who is currently on leave from Cornell's graduate program in nutrition. "There's the expectation that you'll use a lot of convenience, packaged food. I make it harder on myself, doing things from scratch."

The difference hasn't gone unnoticed. "George puts in a lot more effort than our last cook," says Alpha Phi sister Doria Voiland '07."He says he's morally opposed to buying processed foods."

The local foods movement encourages the consumption of seasonal, locally grown ingredients over food flown and trucked in from afar; advocates range from small farmers to nutritionists concerned about the links between overprocessing and obesity. This fall, a coalition of Ithaca-area chefs, farmers, food retailers, and environmentalists, led by Cornell Cooperative Extension, launched a "buy local foods" campaign to market the notion and facilitate logistics.

Critics may balk at the limits of a seasonal menu and the higher front-end costs of buying from small farms, but crop and soil science graduate student Christian Peters, who has made the topic his dissertation focus, says that eating local uses less energy, cuts greenhouse emissions, and ultimately saves money. On average, the distance from farm to fork in the U.S. is 1,500 miles. "Transporting foods long-distance is a luxury," he says. "If we're to consider all of the things we use energy for today, this is a place where we have fat to trim."

Given the American appetite for variety, Peters recommends a triage approach to increasing local food consumption. "Start with foods that have the most transportation input for nutritional value--fruit, vegetables, and liquid milk," he says. "Those are the ones to buy locally." Foods shipped by barge or train--such as coffee, beans, and grains--hold less embedded energy, he explains, than perishable lettuce shipped cross-country by refrigerated tractor-trailer. Institutional chefs like Smith, who feed large numbers, represent an added food transportation benefit--decreasing the number of individual trips consumers make to the grocery store. "New Yorkers can complain about strawberries shipped from California," says Peters, "but individual grocery trips are a big share of the energy consumed transporting food."

The higher price that local ingredients can command, says Smith, hasn't been an issue for him. He gets his produce from organic farmers in Tompkins County; this fall, he filled the freezer with beef from a cow supplied by Newark Valley Angus, about an hour from Ithaca. "I wind up in the same place cost-wise by buying higherquality, unprocessed local ingredients," he says.A bigger challenge than the budget is the extra prep time involved in scrubbing baby leeks or tailing whole green beans. "I can't work with high-maintenance vegetables."

For Phi Psi chef David D'Aprix '84, a former lecturer at the Hotel school with a dozen restaurant openings to his name, feeding fifty-two brothers a day with fresh local ingredients means making a few culinary compromises. Protein is king at Phi Psi: meat tends to form the centerpiece of each meal, and the brothers consume about thirty dozen eggs each week, so D'Aprix buys free-range organic from an Ithaca farm. Brown rice appears on the menu simply as "rice," and celeriac, a knobby root vegetable, makes understated appearances--usually as chunks in vegetable soup. On fish nights D'Aprix makes sure there's plenty of mac-and-cheese, and to cut waste he'll season split-pea soup with a leftover ham bone or tuck slices of roast beef into grilled-cheese sandwiches.

Both Smith and D'Aprix sometimes struggle with the logistics associated with buying locally. The majority of Cornell's fraternities and sororities, along with some campus eateries, spend some $4 million annually on food and supplies. About $3 million goes through the Student Management Corporation (SMC), a buying co-op launched by Lambda Chi Alpha brother Gary Hedge '72 in 1971 to enhance his fraternity's purchasing power.With SMC as a broker, says executive director Jackie O'Connell, smaller units get better prices, better service, and simpler billing. But SMC's primary vendor, Pennsylvaniabased Keck's Food Service, doesn't necessarily care where its products originate, and sometimes chefs have to be creative to meet the member requirement to make 75 percent of their purchases through SMC while fulfilling their personal commitments to local suppliers. This fall, Smith helped Newark Valley Angus become an approved vendor. Over the coming years, he says, he'll spread the local-foods gospel beyond his kitchen. "Now that I know local buying is feasible, I want to push to have other houses buying locally," he says. "That would have a bigger effect than anything I can do within the house at this point."

-- Sharon Tregaskis '95

Less than Zero | SCOTT PEDERSEN '89 PLAYS NAME-THAT-DECADE

in 1998, with the millennium fast approaching, Scott Pedersen '89 had a vision. The world would soon enter a new decade, and that decade would need a nickname. He had the solution: "The Naughty Aughties."

It seemed the perfect fit. "If you look at the scope of this decade, any aspect of life," he says, "you're going to find something naughty."

Pedersen contacted a lawyer and successfully filed to trademark the term. Then came the hard part: injecting it into the popular lexicon. He created a website, issued press releases, planted lawn signs in front of his Ithaca home, and wrote letters to the editor in papers ranging from the Ithaca Journal to the Western Courier, the student newspaper of Western Illinois University. "I've gone as far as painting the side of my car."

Pedersen studied operations research at Cornell and currently works as an electrician. "I have, quote unquote, not used my degree yet," he says. But his Cornell education and old fraternity affiliation have provided him with invaluable contacts, including the lawyer who helped him file the copyright, the webmaster who designed his site, and the Zeta Psi brothers who helped promote Naughty Aughties paraphernalia in Miami during spring break.

Still, a difficult journey awaits Pedersen and his dream. With the decade now half over, few mainstream outlets have picked up on the catchphrase, and no major licensees have approached him. Family and friends are increasingly skeptical. Pedersen remains undaunted: he hopes to sell nighties and CDs with local music from his website, and is tentatively planning a cross-country tour to promote the brand. "I could spend a hundred hours a week on this," he said. "I'd love Time-Life books to contact me and say, we want to license your mark. That would be the ultimate goal. I want to make that phone call to my dad and say, 'See, I did use that degree.'"

-- Michael Morisy '07