Cornell Registrar Traded to Saudis For $5 Million?

The Sun implores us to connect the dots:

Earlier this year, the University announced a research partnership with KAUST [King Abdullah University of Science and Technology], which is located in Rabigh City, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KAUST awarded Cornell a five-year, $5 million dollar grant to fund the KAUST-Cornell Center for Energy and Sustainability.

University Registrar and Assistant Vice President for Student and Academic Services David Yeh will be resigning from his position at Cornell to take up a post at KAUST in Saudi Arabia, Director of Cornell Press Relations Simeon Moss ’73 confirmed on Tuesday.

I'm sure Yeh's decision to leave was more complex than this; we're waiting on an official statement from Cornell. Yeh also held the title of Assistant Vice President for Student and Academic Services.

In my mind, Yeh's legacy will be inseparable from two scheduling issues.

The first is the disastrous transition to PeopleSoft, an interface for scheduling classes which replaced the slow yet reliable Just the Facts software package. The Sun's coverage doesn't quite do justice to the experience of swearing at one's computer at 6:30 am, as you find yourself unable to access the system for enrolling in classes. Or being unable to believe your bleary eyes as you are prohibited from enrolling in a certain class because PeopleSoft believes it is scheduled from 10:10 am to 11:00 pm on Mondays and Wednesdays, and informs you that it conflicts with multiple classes already on your schedule. Or being told several times that all the problems had been fixed and that course enrollment should go smoothly, only to encounter new problems.

It was inexcusable for Cornell to switch to PeopleSoft without doing any sort of testing which might reveal server overload problems. Yeh was probably too confident about the software:

The new software also will empower students, said David Yeh, assistant vice president for student and academic services. "We really want to advance this whole notion of not having to stand in lines," he said.

Yeh was also in charge during the Schedulizer fiasco. Schedulizer is a private site which allows Cornell students to figure out their class schedules with easy-to-read weekly calendars and a helpful interface. Cornell and Schedulizer were unable to work out a way to allow Schedulizer to grab course data from PeopleSoft, so students were forced to abandon Schedulizer in favor of PeopleSoft's not-to-scale and misleading weekly calendar readout. We were not happy:

Meanwhile, students who have tried to use Schedulizer since it went down have responded with outrage. Because PeopleSoft has prohibited many students from adding and dropping courses due to complications with the program that started this morning, many Cornellians still don’t have their schedules finalized. According to some students, Schedulizer’s downfall further complicated the process.

“As one of the top colleges, I’m glad we use scheduling software as user-friendly and compatible as PeopleSoft,” said Pete Kelly ’11 sarcastically, who has already sent an e-mail to the registrar expressing his frustration. “They’re going to have hundreds of emails tomorrow.”

An arrangement was eventually reached and Schedulizer is back in business for Cornell students.

I'm not sure if Yeh made any improvements to the transcript services, but those are very efficient (and free). He might deserve some credit there. And I'm sure we'll learn about more things he's accomplished from the university when it issues an official release.