Two distinguished Cornell departments, two major gifts -- one big boost for the social sciences at Cornell.

A pivotal campaign gift of $5 million from Cornell trustee Donald C. Opatrny '74 will bolster teaching and research efforts in the university's economics department, while an anonymous campaign gift of $5 million will endow the chair of the Department of Government, said Peter Lepage, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

"One of the great things about these two gifts -- from a dean's point of view -- is how flexible they are," said Lepage. "With these endowments each department can target the areas they determine as most in need of funding."

Among those priorities, said Lepage, are the two "R's" -- recruitment and retention -- which translate simply as "getting the best people and keeping the best people."

The new Donald C. Opatrny '74 Chair of the Department of Economics will provide funding that can be applied to needs and opportunities across the department.

Department chair Uri Possen, whose discipline provides the biggest major in the arts and sciences college, said the Opatrny endowment is extremely important in the fierce competition with other schools for top-notch economics faculty.

"It will not only help us improve life for our undergraduates, but will help us to make more attractive offers to the top people out there, and that will help economics at Cornell," said Possen. "We're not only competing with other schools -- in economics you can get work in Wall Street or even a business school where the salaries are out of sight."

The Opatrny endowment will augment resources in developmental economics and allow the department to award postdoctoral fellowships for research -- an area that is generally under-funded in both the humanities and the social sciences, said Lepage.

Mary Katzenstein, chair of the government department, said the timing for the endowment could not be better in the current "very tough recruiting market."

"Our peer departments at the best universities are able to provide research support which up until now has sometimes significantly exceeded our capabilities," said Katzenstein. "This new endowment will help to place us in a position where we can make more competitive offers and can retain faculty who are receiving top offers from the most highly ranked institutions."

Katzenstein added that Cornell's government department is bringing aboard "a new generation of young scholars who are rigorously trained in the more quantitative methods of the social sciences."

Both gifts will serve to strengthen and advance the larger social sciences initiative at Cornell, said David Harris, vice provost of the social sciences at Cornell and the university's deputy provost.