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cORNELL STANDS OUT AMONG UNIVERSITIES FOR
many reasons, including its commitment to democratic
access and opportunity, its combination of Ivy League and
land-grant missions, and its remarkable academic breadth and
depth. It is indeed a place where any person can find instruction
in (virtually) any study. But I am
struck by historian Carl Becker's
conviction that Cornell's ethos, its
defining identity, is a passion for
intellectual freedom.
You can't measure passion, but
you certainly can see and feel it in
action. Anecdotes help, and Becker
tells them best: "There is the story
of the famous professor of history,
a passionate defender of majority
rule, who, foreseeing that he would
be outvoted in the faculty on the
question of the location of Risley
Hall, declared with emotion that
he felt so strongly on the subject
that he thought he ought to have
two votes."
As I return to full-time teaching
at Cornell (for the second time), here are my own impressions
of the Cornell character in action.
 For some years, I have invited students to my office to discuss
anything on their minds. One undergraduate, Abby Krich '04,
stopped by frequently to urge that Cornell develop wind and solar
power as alternative energy sources. I grew impatient hearing the
same utopian message from the same student semester after
semester, but she made her appeals with passionate integrity, supported
them with solid research, and presented them tirelessly
and tenaciously to dozens of Cornell administrators and engineers.
Single-handedly, she persuaded us to fund and implement
two of her proposed initiatives. Abby Krich earned her master's
degree in engineering last month--and the respect of many a
Cornellian on campus.
As many Americans know, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
has taken a lot of heat for announcing last year that at least one
ivory-billed woodpecker lived in the swamps of Arkansas--and
then launching an expensive and thus far futile effort to locate the
bird. But lab director John Fitzpatrick is not embarrassed, apologetic,
or ready to give up. He welcomes critiques by fellow scientists
and said in his address to Cornell's doctoral graduates on May 27
that this project is too significant to abandon for fear of
failure. That is a good message to new PhDs about to begin
careers in research, and a good example of Cornell intellectual
courage at work.
One final example: After Hurricane Katrina flooded New
Orleans, thousands of students at
Tulane, Xavier, and the University
of New Orleans lost their belongings,
their campus, and a chance
to continue their education. Cornell
stepped in to help. Experts
from the land-grant units traveled
to Louisiana to join the relief
effort. And Cornell offered admission--
and free tuition--to any
student-evacuee who arrived in
Ithaca. With an outpouring of
support from faculty, staff, Cornell
students, and members of the
community, 200 hurricane victims
spent a semester in Ithaca. Cornell
acted immediately and instinctively
to assist those in need.
If Carl Becker best captured
the Cornell spirit in prose, Archie Ammons is our poet laureate.
The last lines of Archie's great poem Garbage describe the virtues
of creative tension:
the
poem that goes dumb holds tears: the line,
the fire line, where passion and control waver
for the field, that is a line so difficult to
keep in the right degree, one side not raiding
the other: if I reap the peripheries will I
get hardweed seed and dried roughage, roughage
like teasel and cattail and brush above snow in
winter, pure design lifeless in a painted hold.
Carl Becker often said that the Cornell spirit was free, but also
a bit wild at times. So much the better: I have no doubt that "otherwise
thinking" individuals, with independent, irreverent casts
of mind, will continue to keep Cornell on "the fire line, where
passion and control waver for the field." I can't wait to
get back to
Cornell's classrooms.
-- Hunter R. Rawlings III
Hunter Rawlings completed his term as interim president on June 30. |
