At the academic year's last Vespers Service at Sage Chapel, May 4, Provost Carolyn "Biddy" Martin reflected on "the year's end as promise." She noted that "ends are also beginnings" and an arbitrary point in time "to focus on what matters to us, to test our use of time against our principles and priorities."

And those principles for Cornell from the beginning have been "access, quality, breadth and contribution," she said. Changing financial aid to make Cornell more affordable to more people was the one thing she said she was most proud of at this year's end, for higher education has never been more important in this "global knowledge economy."

Martin also noted Cornell's hiring of new scientists and scholars, protecting academic freedom and open inquiry and broadening outreach programs as examples of Cornell's commitment to these basic principles over the academic year.

Quoting from The New York Times' columnist David Brooks, Martin also talked about the importance of a college education in this "cognitive age," which "requires the capacity of integrative thinking that allows one to absorb, process and combine information."

But the focus on cognitive skills, she said, "is also limited by its failure to emphasize poetry as a practice that is too easily lost, even or especially in higher education with our investments in big science, the development of technologies and the analysis of macro-level phenomena." Quoting the French-Algerian writer Hélène Cixous, Martin emphasized a poetic approach to the use of cognition, and allowing time and "'the space of waiting'" to let things emerge.

She concluded her meditation with two poems, "Poppies" -- which teaches about endings and beginnings -- and "When Death Comes" -- in honor of her mother, who died this past year -- both by Mary Oliver. Both poems, she said, are "beautifully reflective of the ability to absorb, process and combine information in a way that does not cancel or forestall, but brings out other lives, including, indicatively, nonhuman ones."

The service included music by the Cornell Chorus and Glee Club, conducted by Scott Tucker, and the a cappella groups After Eight and the Hangovers.

Sage Chapel Vespers is a program of spoken word, music and other art forms that celebrate the humanistic and spiritual aspects of the university's intellectual pursuits.

Graduate student Zheng Yang is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.