"My talk today will be mostly from the vantage point of black Americans, which, of course, is my perspective. But I want to be clear that I view the celebration of diversity to be inclusive of all groups in our society." The Hon. Harry Edwards '62, chief judge emeritus, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, prefaced his speech with these words April 30 when he spoke about his experiences as an African-American student during the 1960s and about issues facing minority students, then and now. Edwards, who received a standing ovation after his speech in Bartels Hall at Cornell, was one of several keynote speakers at last weekend's conference, "Cornell Mosaic: Celebrating Diversity and Advancing Inclusion."
The intellectual and academic genius of the Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC) at Cornell was fully evident in a brilliant display of scholarship and celebration April 29. In a keynote address that crowned a colloquium on Brown v. Board of Education, Cornell alumna and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (Class of 1981, Africana studies) delivered a nuanced discussion of the challenges faced by the "post-Brown generation" of black students entering law schools in the 1980s and her efforts to put critical race theory on the academic map.
When Yolanda King, the eldest child of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, visited the Cornell campus last February and performed "Open My Eyes, Open My Soul: Discovering the Power of Diversity" in Sage Chapel, she received a standing ovation from the audience. That visit has now garnered the James A. Perkins Prize for Interracial Understanding and Harmony for the Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration Committee, which organized the event. The prize was awarded in a special ceremony April 29 in the Willard Straight Hall Memorial Room.
A team of three MBA students from Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management earned $3,000 and the informal title "Wizards of Wall Street" by making stock recommendations that impressed the financial professionals who served as judges. The Cornell students defeated nine other university teams at the third annual MBA Stock Pitch Challenge April 22 at the Johnson School in Sage Hall on Cornell's campus.
About 170 women small-business owners, including those who are members of minority groups, got help April 21 at a special Cornell-sponsored workshop, "Rebuilding New York City: What Every Minority/Woman-Owned Business Should Know." The event took place at the Cornell Conference Center in Manhattan and received excellent reviews from the participants, reported IWW Director Francine Moccio.
Although the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's search for the ivory-billed woodpecker began in February 2004, an announcement wasn't planned until May 18, 2005. The long lead time was crucial to permit the lab's partner, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), time to protect the Arkansas discovery area through land acquisitions and to allow the search team to gather convincing evidence of the bird's existence. But on April 26 the news began leaking on the Internet.
Michael D. Johnson has been named dean of Cornell's School of Hotel Administration, President Jeffrey S. Lehman and Provost Biddy Martin announced May 3.
Students opposed to Cornell's plans to build a parking lot for the West Campus house system on a parcel of land owned by the university for more than half a century took their protest into Day Hall on April 28. They sat in President Jeffrey Lehman's office for five hours before being removed by Cornell Police.
A Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) researcher at Cornell has received a grant to help assemble a unique database of DNA mutations in maize (corn). The project not only will allow researchers to study the effects of knocking out the function of single genes, one at a time, but also will create seeds for each mutation, or disrupted gene. The seeds will be made widely available to researchers.
Cornell's DSpace, an online digital archive administered by Cornell University Library to make university scholarship freely available, is offering new options for the university's scientists and scholars with the creation of "communities" for every department on campus. Faculty are invited to a half-day workshop to learn how the DSpace repositories will work and to discuss possible uses, May 9 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in Philip Lewis Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.
Cornell University doctoral candidate in ecology and evolutionary biology Karen Deen Laughlin will travel to Capitol Hill May 10 and 11 to speak to members of Congress about science policy. She will do so as a 2005 Emerging Public Policy Leader, an award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), a Washington-based nonprofit scientific association.
CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, has awarded Cornell News Service a silver medal for excellence in news writing in the category of research, medicine and science news. Each year CASE singles out universities for awards in several areas of communications, alumni relations and fund-raising. In 1998 Cornell News Service won the CASE grand gold medal for writing in research, medicine and science.
