The west campus slope, as seen on my way to North.

A little higher up.

A snow-covered log.

Window covered in fall leaves and ice.

Prickly seed-pods.

North campus bridge, at night.

A look over the bridge’s gorge.

Balch hall.

Robert Purcell Community Center (RPCC).

Cornell’s Donlon Hall.

You can check out full size versions of any of the photos in the Cornell University Flickr Set. If you’re interested in using any of these photographs in your work, please send us an email to request permission.

It would be nice if the cameras indicated whether they would be used to monitor your computer usage, whether the recordings are permanently archived, or what privacy policy (if doubtful any) governs the surveillance.

BOULDER – If you’re caught walking around the University of Colorado at Boulder with a Nerf gun, you could be arrested. Notices have been posted around the campus’ dorm buildings, warning students that Nerf gun sightings will be treated like real gun sightings.

Nerf guns have been popping up around CU this week, after some students started playing the popular game “Humans vs. Zombies.” It’s similar to the game of tag.

“sightings of Nerf guns will be treated like real-gun sightings”

Really, the Onion couldn’t make up stuff this good.

“The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you.”

The problem which most have talking to strangers is that people in general have difficulty talking to people who aren’t like them. If two students went to the same University, it’s the same as two people from the same town or city transplanted elsewhere. I guarantee that if I (now in NYC) bump into someone who lived in Sexsmith, Alberta we would be able to break the ice as easily as if I run into another Cornellian.

“The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth.”

If you want to measure “worth” objectively you will arrive at some education versus income charts and begin to understand that the marketplace places worth on your elite education. If the marketplace considers you a more valuable asset, by what other valuation can you claim that a reasonable sense of self-worth is false? Students at elite universities have the opportunity to receive the best education possible in their fields.

“The final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. [...] Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas.”

OK, maybe us engineers are boring as all hell, but I promise you there are students in the Arts and Sciences whose curiosity exceeds even my own. Deresiewicz probably doesn’t consider athletic pursuits to be intellectual, but athletes share a common passion, if a different object. Besides academics and jocks on campus, we also boast republicans, anarchists, musicians, dancers, poets, writers, engineers, chemists, etc. All of them passionate about their field of study and self-improvement. Whether considering passions of the mind, body, or soul, the human endeavor cannot be reduced and limited to Deresiewicz’s notion of intellectualism.

In the end, Deresiewicz’s point–that the modern student lacks the passionate imagination and curiosity to innovate or engage complex ideas–could be equitably applied to students from so-called “elite (read: ivy league) universities” or those studying at public institutions. The determination “elite education” rather than education in general needs significant improvement betrays the author’s bias. The piece, littered with unsubstantiated jabs at prestigious universities, goes down tasting of sour jealousy. And, if Deresiewicz were to be believed, as a lifelong ivy-league academic (5 degrees in 13 years from Columbia University followed by a professorship at Yale) by his own admission he must lack the faculties to introspect and condemn the elite education he himself has been a part of.

If you must read, treat the premise as an assessment of the current apathy present in all higher education. Grade inflation, student apathy, “dumbing down,” the culture of standardized testing, etc are all symptoms of an increasingly unhealthy academic culture. To the degree in which they present variously in different institutions, they are problems in all of them–Cornell included.

• C.U. Investment Performance Rises By 6.2 Percent
• C.U. Endowment Begins Climb From 2008 Depths

Joanne DeStefano, vice president for finance and CFO of the University, is quoted: “We earned 2 percent on our endowment from January through June 2009.” The endowment suffered a 27% loss in the second half of 2008, as global markets crashed and the US entered a recession. Unfortunately, the Cornell endowment website has not yet published its June quartly report.

The S&P500 index is +2% for the January to June period, which makes Cornell’s 2% performance an interesting match. The S&P500 is up another 16% from July through the present: I will be interested to see how Cornell’s endowment performs in the second half.

The University has set very low expectations for future growth of the endowment:

“The ultimate goal of the endowment is to generate sufficient returns to grow the real value of the endowment while meeting annual operating budget pay-out with an annual five percent pay-out growth,” DeStefano said. “This translates to a minimum return target of CPI plus 5 percent.”

At a 5% rate (not including any pay-outs), it will take Cornell at least 7 years before the endowment is back to the level-water line. However, if Cornell can earn 14% a year, it might only take them 5 years.

School Slogan: “Cornell–Mediocrity Delivered”

Most people don’t realize that three out of the seven of Cornell’s undergraduate schools are publicly funded, but most people do realize that all seven are lucky to have been part of whatever blunder placed them in the Ivy League. Cornell produces top “scholars” in two things: agriculture and hoteling; everyone else is stoked on whatever finance job or gorge they’re lucky enough to land in.

The book, by the way, is hilarious.

Untitled photo, Facebook, May 22, 2008

Schor’s family has created an In memory of Warren Schor website with photographs; there are also several Facebook groups in his memory: Warren Schor RIP We Love You and In loving memory of Warren J. Schor.

At least 520 students at Cornell have reported flu-like symptoms. For more information about swine flu at Cornell, please see CU and the Flu.

A website Dead Malls has an entry (from 2004) for Pyramid Mall:

IN the late 90’s much change took place inside the walls of Pyramid Mall, due, for the most part, to the changing retail scene nationally, as well as regionally. All three of the original anchors of the mall closed, due to Chapter 11 (Ames, which bought out Hills, and Montgomery Ward), or mismanagement of the company (JC Penney). However, due to the mall’s location, the needs of big box stores to expand into the smaller markets, and the inability of developers in the Ithaca area to get any large scale power centers built, Pyramid was able to benefit.

She suggested that Monroe’s Office of Career Advancement shows preferential treatment to students with excellent grades. “They favor more toward students that got a 4.0. They help them more out with the job placement,” she said. iReport.com: “Don’t sue your alma mater”

Asked whether she would advise other college graduates facing job woes to sue their alma maters, Thompson said yes. “It doesn’t make any sense: They went to school for four years, and then they come out working at McDonald’s and Payless. That’s not what they planned.”

It probably doesn’t help that she got poor marks in an undergraduate degree in Business Administration, a degree like an MBA but without the years of work experience that usually precede it. Reviews for the college, which we’ve never heard of, are appalling:

• “As long as you can walk into the building and could sign a loan, receive financial aid, or pay up front they will accept you.”
• “… all they talk about in the hallways, bathroom, and even class is they BABY DADDY DRAMA.”
• “Monroe College is a mediocre school. Very similar to community college.”

The institution is a private, for-profit, college with 4,361 full-time students, 71% female, charging on average $9,000 / yr tuition. The school has a statistically skewed diversity profile, with 52% Hispanic, 42% African-American, 1% Asian, and 1% Caucasian. The graduation rate is 54%, and the acceptance rate a startling 61%. There’s no listing of the average SAT score of incoming freshmen (a bad sign), and a warning that “Monroe understands that for many students the SAT may not be a good indication of a student’s academic aptitude” is another red flag. We can interpolate from their minimum requirements for a presidential scholarship of an 1800 on the SAT (about the 80th percentile) that few of their students are objective academic achievers.

In a recession where qualified, experienced workers are being laid off, it takes a massive ego and sense of millennial over-entitlement to give up your job hunt after just three months and blame the college for your poor GPA and lack of marketable skills.