NEW YORK -- The man who founded the popular travel Web site Priceline.com, Jay S. Walker, ILR '77, told a standing-room-only New York City audience on April 27 that the "age of the muscle is ending" and is "being replaced by the age of the mind." Walker was addressing more than 225 Cornell alumni and guests at Cornell Theory Center's (CTC) Manhattan offices.
President George Bush wasn't bugged by having a slime-mold beetle named for him. In fact, he was so pleased that he telephoned former Cornell Professor Quentin Wheeler in London on April 29 to thank him.
Fred Rhoades has been driving buses – all kinds of buses, from school and senior citizens' buses to charter coaches – for more than 35 years. But according to Rhoades, the Prevost motor coaches that run eight times a week on Cornell's Campus-to-Campus express charter service beat them all – at least, based on comfort and passenger response from students, faculty, staff and alumni.
Efforts to raise money for charity were on a roll Saturday afternoon, April 30, in Barton Hall: a spring roll, or Southeast Asian-style egg roll, that is. Roll for Relief beat the old Guinness record by more than 200 meters (656 feet), while raising more than $20,000 for tsunami relief in Southeast Asia.
When Gro Harlem Brundtland talks about sustainability, people listen. As head of the World Commission on Environment and Development, she helped coin the term "sustainable development" in the organization's landmark 1987 report, "Our Common Future." She spoke April 28 at Cornell on "The Global Significance of Sustainable Development," presenting the 2005 Jill and Ken Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lectureship.
"We have a moment. A moment to transform the situation. It is not a moment, by the way, to make peace. It is a moment to end the war," said former U.S. Ambassador Dennis B. Ross, speaking April 27 in the Statler Auditorium at Cornell as this year's Bartels World Affairs Fellow. Ross was referring to the decades-old war between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
"The whole issue of sustainability is a difficult one, because it's sustainability for how many and at what standard of living? This we should never forget," said Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug, speaking April 29 as part of the closing centennial observance of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) at Cornell.
"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.