IvyGate Also Reports That Pike Will Be Shut Down

Confirming what I wrote two weeks ago, IvyGate cites an anonymous source that the Cornell chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha (Pike) will be shut down at the end of the school year.

Post-Graduation Career Trends

Someone posted a friendly comment yesterday which stated, in part:

...in other [posts], such as your career comments, you're not exactly referencing the actual statistics, just reciting the cliche angry points that make it easy to simplify what you think Cornellians in certain schools are doing and how they view their school.

Okay, fair enough, here are some numbers.

Overall Cornell, class of 2009: 33 percent (that's 1 in 3 graduates surveyed) went into either financial services or consulting. Compare that to 23 percent total who went into the public sector.

School of Industrial and Labor Relations, most recent data: 18 percent went to law school (slightly lower than I expected). BUT, among those with jobs, 42 percent went into human resources and 31 percent went into financial services or some sort of business. Only 4 percent went into labor relations, and 4 percent worked for labor.

School of Hotel Administration, class of 2009: More students went into banking and financial services than the actual administration of a hotel or resort.

College of Human Ecology, most recent data: Of those accepting job offers, 42 percent went into business management.

I'm not going to take the time to go through the other colleges.

On the other hand, here's a cool feature on someone who's availing herself of what Cornell's specialty majors have to offer.

Riley Nash Getting Hate Mail From Oilers Fans?

Not sure if this is legitimate or not, but interesting nonetheless.

Nash:

"Ya, I've been taking a beating in the media there and getting some nice hatemail. I speak very highly of the Oilers organization and feel that their future is very bright for them, this is only a tough time that all organizations go through. I haven't decided what I will be doing next year due to many factors. I think a lot of people are assuming things that I have never said, due to the fact that I haven't signed with them yet. There is still a good possibility I end up in Edmonton or with their farm team."

Cornell Expert Debunks Noah's Ark Discovery

Ha...

Hong Kong-based Noah's Ark Ministries said the structure had been found on Mount Ararat at about 14-thousand-700 feet.

Wood from the structure has reportedly been carbon-dated to reveal it to be about 48-hundred years old.

[...]

A Cornell University archaeologist, Peter Kuniholm, wanted to know if the carbon dating was conducted accurately. He also wanted more data on whether the mountaintop showed any geological signs of flooding.

Kuniholm said, quote, "There's not enough H2O in the world to get an ark that high up on a mountain."

Greening Uses Signing Bonus To Repay Loans

Here's a nice article on Colin Greening from his home town paper.

You can take time to reflect on it and be happy," Greening said, "but reality has to set back in and you have to realize this is where the real work begins. My dream has been to make it to the NHL and it's going to be a tough couple of months or even years to get there."

"When I go into camp, I'm gonna have to knock some people out of their positions and that's a very difficult thing to do."

The Sens have already indicated he'll most likely be going to Binghamton of the AHL to get a feel for pro the game.

"If I end up starting in Binghamton, I don't see that as a step back," Greening suggests. "It's just an opportunity to get more ice time at the AHL level to learn and prepare so I give myself a chance at moving up."

The article also discusses Greening's age. At 24, he's a little older than the other players hitting the pros for the first time.

Scrivens Signs With Toronto

Cornell senior goalie Ben Scrivens has signed a one-year contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs. No word yet on salary. I don't follow pro hockey closely enough to know what the goalies are like who are currently ahead of Scrivens on the depth chart.

Update: Scrivens will earn $67,500 AHL and $690,000 NHL. Recall that these amounts are prorated based on the number of games with either the AHL or NHL team.

Uncle Ezra Scrubs the Record

Now:

***edited for confidentiality*** From talking to upperclassmen, they have all informed me of what they did to their pledge class. I am certain that forcing the new pledge class to drink and stay up all night is considered hazing by the university. I just think it is so ironic that an IFC leader allows this to happen... Do you see something incongruous here? What steps has Cornell taken to ensure that there is a crackdown on hazing? Because clearly, IFC is run by corruption.

Admittedly, it can be considered libel to print an allegation of hazing without any evidence beyond hearsay. However, the edited version indicates that all upperclassmen at Cornell haze their pledge classes. I'm not sure this is better.

Regardless, it will be a fun waiting game to see what happens. As I see it, OFSA is in a difficult situation. Here are the options:

A. Do nothing, or release no public response, which sends a great message about taking hazing allegations seriously.

B. Investigate, and conclude that there is no evidence of hazing. The report will be laughed at, and OFSA will look mighty stupid when further evidence inevitably comes to light.

C. Investigate, conclude that hazing occurs, and figure out how to explain that Eddie and Svante are great people when their fraternity engages in this kind of behavior.

Should be interesting.

Speaking of, what's going on with Alpha Delta Phi? Funny that Kent Hubbell's fraternity hasn't had anything happen to them.

Community College Students Get Automatic Transfer

Raritan Valley Community College, located in Branchburg, N.J., has reached a deal with the College of Human Ecology. If a student graduates from RVCC with a GPA of 3.5 or higher, he or she is guaranteed an automatic transfer into HumEc for the final two years of the B.S. program. The student will start at Cornell with 60 credits.

Maybe I'm just being an elitist here, but to me this deal seems like it's cheapening the value of a Cornell education. I have no problem with students transferring to Cornell from a two-year school, but I like to think that they've excelled at that school in order to gain admission to Cornell. A 3.5 in community college classes, with no further considerations for extracurricular activities, disciplinary record, or anything else, is a pretty low threshold.

Moreover, the agreement essentially means that two years of study at Cornell (at least in HumEc) is equivalent to two years of study in community college in New Jersey. The agreement sends a message to HumEc students from New Jersey that they should have saved a lot of money and effort by spending their first two years at Raritan Valley and then jumping to Cornell via the automatic transfer.

I don't think this deal has gotten much publicity around Ithaca, but if I'm a HumEc upperclassman, I'm pretty pissed that my college doesn't think my first two years of college are any more impressive than the two years of a B+/A- student at community college.

Update: Here's the official announcement from RVCC (.pdf)

Eight Things You Won't Hear During Cornell Days

Readers of this blog know that I truly love Cornell. To blog about the university, you have to either really love it or really hate it. And I fall into the first category.

That said, there are always ways in which our fine college can improve. Over these last few weeks, I'll be pointing out some of these areas and offering some suggestions.

In this post, I look at eight facts about life at Cornell which you wouldn't hear about if you attended Cornell Days over these last two weeks.

1. There really is no broad sense of the Cornell community. 'Community' is a buzz word these days, with the 'caring community' and all which is supposed to prevent suicides. But there are very few occasions on which the whole student body actually comes together. Slope Day might be the one exception, but the focus of the day is drinking, and the architects have final exams or presentations or something that day which prevents them from having too much fun. Aside from that, your choice of major, religion/ethnicity, and Greek (or not) affiliation are the factors which dictate what you do. There are always exceptions, but if you're a Hotelie, you'll be living in and around the Statler. An engineer, and you'll be stuck in labs and up late finishing problem sets. An architect, and you'll be in studio.

2. Many of Cornell's teaching assistants are sub-par. This hasn't affected me too much, since the humanities TAs are generally Ph.D candidates who are highly qualified to grade papers and lead a discussion section. The situation at Cornell is still better than at Harvard, where professors do very little to interact with students and teach courses. But you don't have to stop too many Cornell students before you find someone with a TA horror story. Simply put, many TAs for engineering and science courses are not proficient in English and speak with very heavy accents. They may be some of the smartest graduate students in the university, but their undergraduates cannot understand what they say and feel uncomfortable about asking them to repeat things or approaching them for help. In my four years of taking mostly Arts courses, I had only one TA with an English problem. But even in a history course, I suffered for a semester with a 19th Century specialist who had been assigned to TA a course on classical Greece and Rome.

3. Town-gown relations are not strong. There isn't really a strong sense of a Cornell community, and there is even less of a sense of an inclusive Ithaca community. With so much to offer on campus, and the relative isolation of North Campus, most freshmen hardly ever venture more than a couple of blocks off-campus, much less to the more economically and racially diverse sections of Ithaca. Perhaps they'll go to the Ithaca Mall, or to the Commons a handful of times, but that's about it. Cornell upperclassmen necessarily interact with Townies to sign leases and things like that, but they're not forming any sort of relationships with the typical Ithaca resident.

4. The Greek community exercises tremendous influence over most aspects of life at Cornell. It's not just that the entire campus social scene revolves around alcohol-centric fraternity parties. The most influential campus leaders are almost exclusively Greek. Most troubling, Greek politics makes its way into areas of Cornell life like the tour guide selection process. Greeks will choose members of their own houses for these types of jobs over more qualified members of other houses or (gasp) non Greeks. Similar trends can be seen for new student orientation, with Greeks choosing members of their own houses to serve as orientation supervisors. And don't get me started about the types of things the most prominent and wealthy fraternities can get away with.

5. The specialty majors which make Cornell a unique university have become hijacked by students who use them as springboards to popular and generally unethical jobs. More and more Hotelies want to go to law school or work on Wall Street. ILRies also want to go to law school or work on Wall Street. Liberal arts majors want to go to law school. PAM majors want to go to law school or work on Wall Street. Majors like Biology and Society and Human Biology, Health and Society are used as easier pre-med majors.

6. Cornell students are generally ill informed and don't care about what goes on around them. Just look at the embarrassingly low turnout for things like SA elections. Hell, voting for SA takes about 90 seconds of reading and clicking. And only a small fraction of students take the time to do that. Although the Sun does a fantastic and diligent job of putting together a handy daily report for students about what's happening on campus and in the community, few students actually peruse the newsy sections of the paper.

7. Yes, budget cuts are affecting academics. You can't cut hundreds of millions of dollars by buying fewer paper clips and letting the grass grow on Libe Slope. Whole academic programs have been cut, and departments like Theatre are facing crippling budget cuts. Smaller, upper-level classes, which are often the most rewarding academically, have been cut because departments have difficulty justifying the cost of holding these classes.

8. The weather here really sucks sometimes. Not much can really be done about this, but it should be said. Try walking out of your 2:55-4:10 class during the winter as it's already nearing darkness, the icy wind whips your face, and you have a prelim in three hours. Think the weather doesn't affect students' moods? I came to Ithaca from New England, where the weather isn't much better. But at least in high school, when the weather was bad, I wouldn't have to trudge 15 minutes uphill through ice and snow to get to class. I know tour guides are supposed to talk about the "four seasons" in Ithaca, but the Cornell winter seems to last forever. Unlike some other schools which have underground tunnels or glassed-in walking areas, Cornell lets us experience Mother Nature at her best and worst.

11 Percent of Cornell Seniors Applied to TFA

No official word on the total number of 2010 corps members from Cornell, but 11 percent of Cornell seniors applied to Teach for America. The national acceptance rate was around 10 percent this year, but I believe it was higher at Cornell.

Hazing, Continued

Well, yes, SAE hazes, as do most of the fraternities on the IFC. Today was Greek Awards. To the OFSA's credit, since I've been at Cornell they've been pretty good about sending the right awards to the right houses. Specifically, the houses which really don't haze tend to take home the awards for new member education. Most of the individual and chapter awards, at least from my knowledge of the IFC realm, also tend to be well deserved.

Yet, the blatant existence of hazing didn't stop SAE from receiving a prestigious Outstanding Chapter award. Go figure.

Another moment of levity, at least for me, came when a brother of Lambda Chi received an Outstanding New Member award for, in part, writing the Valentine's Day song and dance for his pledge class. This type of activity, of course, is defined as hazing by the OFSA.

I'll probably write about the Greek system a lot over the next couple of weeks. Lots to think about.

Greening Signs With Ottawa

As expected, senior forward Colin Greening has signed a contract with the Ottawa Senators. Like fellow Big Red senior Brendon Nash did with Montreal, Greening signed a two-way deal which pays differently if he's on the organization's AHL or NHL roster.

Greening: $62,500 AHL and up to $735,000 NHL

Nash: $67,500 AHL and up to $640,000 NHL

Note that Nash signed for two years, while Greening signed for one. With both Ottawa and its AHL affiliate Binghamton eliminated from postseason play, I assume Greening will remain in Ithaca through graduation before starting more intensive training over the summer.

Hotelies Make the Dough?

Not the first article about Cornell grads struggling to pay off debt, but this time it's a hotelie.

Recent university graduate Amy Horwath has grasped the golden ring in this weak economy: a job in her chosen field.

Just one problem: She's $50,000 in debt, mostly student loans.

"Sometimes it seems overwhelming," said Horwath, 23, sitting in her small apartment, where her Cornell University diploma for hotel administration hangs on the wall. "I feel like I'm barely treading water."

Casey Jones Passed Over for OSU Job

I wrote earlier in the week that Cornell's associate head coach might be leaving for the Ohio State job. Although he was a finalist for the position, Casey Jones was not hired.

Wisconsin assistant Mark Osiecki is the new head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes.

A Cornell Love Story

Ah, the magic of the Big Red.

Ms. Matsis and Mr. McCready met on the first day of college classes in the fall of 2000. Later that year, he took her to a formal fraternity dance.

“I thought it was a date,” he said.

She didn’t.

“I thought we were just friends,” Ms. Matsis explained.

They didn't "date" after that, but met up again over 7 years later.

They lost touch for several years, but in March 2008 reconnected at a Cornell alumni charity event in Manhattan, with Mr. McCready joining Ms. Matsis on the same dodge-ball team. “She was still the beautiful girl, and we were still friends, but this time it was different,” Mr. McCready said. Ms. Matsis was feeling much the same.

How adorable. And what a great plug for that nyc.cornell.edu site the university has been pushing.

Colin Greening to Sign With Senators

Senior captain Colin Greening is expected to sign a one-year, two-way contract with the Ottawa Senators today.

The Senators drafted Greening back in 2006, but if he didn't sign with them before August 15, he would become an unrestricted free agent.

Many of us expect Greening to have a solid career in the NHL.

DUE Takes on Hazing?

See Question 1 today.

The person referenced is no longer IFC president, but both he and a fellow SAE alum serve on the Ithaca Common Council.

Between things like this and the recent Alpha Delt hazing allegations, have we begun to see signs that hazing will no longer be tolerated at Cornell's most influential fraternities? Or will these allegations be quietly swept aside?

The official list of campus hazing violations has not been added to since Spring 2009.

Could Cornell Lose Casey Jones?

He's one of three finalists for the Ohio State job. Jones is a Cornell alum, but worked as an assistant coach at OSU for 13 years.

Jones is currently the associate head coach, and it's clear that he'd move up if Coach Mike Schafer '86 leaves. But if Schafer doesn't seem like he's going to leave anytime soon, I'm sure Jones wants the Ohio State job.

Thesis, Continued

In response to my post over the weekend about my honors thesis, B.C. over at Ithacating enlightened us a little about his thesis.

The differences between our respective theses are about what you'd expect from a liberal arts thesis and a scientific, "technical" thesis. Mine is much longer, but that's what we're expected to produce in A&S. His has more of an emphasis on numbers, and avoids a lot of background discussion, but that's what he's expected to do in his field. His has 31 citations; mine has 157.

It seems that the science types have an easier time breaking into the world of academia. B.C. presented his thesis at a conference last week, and my friend who's writing about geology is traveling to Calgary next month to present his thesis to a group of experts. As for my thesis, I think it's of the same quality as a lot of the published studies on incarceration, but as an undergraduate I'm powerless to publicize my findings. My only hope is for a benevolent and tenured professor to become interested and offer to publish it as a co-author in some third-tier journal if I edit it down to article length. Alternatively, I could wait 5 or 6 years until I get a J.D., hope my thesis is still relevant, and try to market it then. I've considered emailing some of the people who have published similar studies to share the results of my thesis, but I don't know if that's acceptable practice.

The real story here isn't the difference between liberal arts and technical theses, but between colleges like A&S and the ones which hand out honors like Halloween candy (or Harvard?).

Remember this Sun editorial from last spring?

There is a difference between spending a senior year slaving away over an 80-page research summary and achieving the necessary combination of B+s and A-s required to secure a 3.5 GPA — both of which are enough to merit Cum Laude in different colleges.

That's right, the Latin honors which I've worked so hard to earn are the same ones which other schools at Cornell give away for attaining a certain GPA. We're not even talking 3.9 here.

The Sun again:

These variances are too great to exist within a single university. And these discrepancies diminish the worth of the honors award.

[...]

A Cornellian should have to go above and beyond to walk away with an extra distinction. Conferring a Cum Laude on someone who meets only the most basic requirements of the school — completing distribution requirements and receiving fairly good grades — undervalues what should be a real honor.

Of the 20 or so of us who slaved away over Gov theses this year, we'll probably be divided roughly 4-8-8 among summa cum laude-magna cum laude-cum laude. But all of us worked exceptionally hard, and produced a work more significant than anything our Latin-honored Hotelie classmates have produced during their four years on the hill.

I'm sure the Latin honors discrepancy is brought up every year as graduation approaches, but it deserves the attention of someone in the Cornell administration.

Kot Found Guilty on All Counts

It's been a while since I wrote about the Kot case. This afternoon, a jury found Cornell graduate student Blazej Kot guilty on all counts: second-degree murder, third-degree arson, and tampering with physical evidence.

It's hard to believe it's been almost a year since we were shocked to hear that a graduate student had interrupted the peaceful Ithaca summer by killing his wife, leading police on a high-speed chase, and seemingly attempting to kill himself.

In some ways, that news set the tone for this rough year for the Big Red. The themes which emerged from the Kot case -- that of a bright tech guy with a promising future who was driven to kill by academic-related stress and perhaps medication -- are similar to what we've seen with the recent string of suicides. The questions the Kot case left us -- why would he do something like that? -- are similar to those we've been asking about the suicides.

In this difficult year, a series of negative storylines were replaced by ones which were successively worse. Cornell was losing a ton of money in the bad economy, then Cornell was perplexed after the Kot murder, then Cornell was coping with H1N1 flu and a tragic student death, then Cornell was coming to terms with multiple student deaths over winter break, then Cornell was on the front page of the New York Times for a pattern of suicides.

Perhaps the one savior for Cornell this year was Steve Donahue and his basketball team. For as many people as there are who now associate Cornell with suicides, there are millions more who associate Cornell with a miracle run to the Sweet Sixteen. Although Donahue moved on to a huge contract and tremendous career opportunity at Boston College, his Cornell legacy is more extensive than the sum of his accomplishments on the court. He was the public relations gift to the Big Red, keeping the Cornell name in the news for something other than tragedy.

The Kot verdict will bring another round of attention to Cornell. Today after the class I TA in prison, one of the inmates asked me whether the jury from "the big murder trial in Ithaca" had reached a verdict.

It will be a couple of months at least before we get admissions statistics from the Class of 2014. Perhaps then we'll know which Cornell storyline won out: tragedy, or basketball.

Thesis Thoughts

I still have a couple of hours of editing and pagination to finish, but my thesis is essentially done.

I came back to Ithaca on the Wednesday of Spring Break, drove directly to Mann Library, and stayed there until it closed that evening. This first day of my thesis home stretch set the tone for what the last few weeks have been like. I've been ID'd more often at Uris Library (they check after 2am) than at bars in Collegetown. I averaged around 8-10 hours at the library every day. I started to scare myself when I would hear the bell to signal that parts of Uris were closing and realize that I hadn't moved from my chair between 8:30pm and 1:30am. My thesis ballooned from 45 pages as of April 1 to 131 pages as of tonight. You can do the math to figure out how many pages I averaged per day.

Of course, I brought a lot of this upon myself. Knowing that I would be a part-time student this semester, I left all of the heavy lifting until after Winter Break. A longer-than-expected stay in Florida stymied some of my plans for making progress in January, and then I didn't exactly hit the ground running this semester. Between traveling to hockey games, taking care of things for TFA and the fraternity, and spending a lot of time being a second-semester senior (read: going to bars), I didn't leave much room for thesis work. I took my time compiling data and figuring out exactly what I was going to write. It wasn't until late March when I realized that I needed to get my ass moving, and that began my period of library shut-in.

That said, writing a thesis has been an incredibly rewarding experience. For the first time in my academic career, I believe that I am a legitimate expert in an area. I had the very cool experience of working closely with faculty members on an academic project. I took workshops to learn to use Stata, taught myself ArcGIS, and wrote the longest paper I'll probably ever produce. (My AP Government final paper was 67 pages; my friend Liz wrote 90-some pages. Coincidentally, we both wrote Honors Government theses at Cornell this year.)

I missed some of the camaraderie of partying and relaxing with senior friends these last few weeks, but with every hour I spent in the library, I grew closer to the other Gov thesis survivors. Maybe I missed out on some memories, but I created something tangible of which I believe I can be proud.

Oh, and if you're interested in these types of things, I've pasted a summary of my findings below.

If you've drifted away from this blog over the last couple of weeks of inactivity, come back. I'll be posting every day for the next few weeks, at least.

My thesis makes five significant contributions to the existing scholarship on the growth of incarceration in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. First, it disproves the idea of partisan convergence after the 1988 election on a common set of tough-on-crime ideas; in fact, a Republican governor effect emerges in the 1990s. Second, my results indicate that a more liberal and Democratic citizenry is correlated to higher rates of spending on corrections; this is surprising, since conservatives and Republicans have acquired a reputation for being willing to increase spending to maintain a large prison population. Third, my thesis counters the claim that the political exceptionalism of the Southern states is to blame for the national corrections boom; removing the Southern states from the picture has only a negligible effect on regression models. Fourth, I show that the scale of incarceration increases by a smaller amount after a close gubernatorial election; I hypothesize that these governors lack a mandate to push for significant changes. Finally, I created unique data sets with information on state spending on corrections which may prove useful to future scholars.

[...]

My hypothesis is this: By the 1980s, a combination of the forces described in Chapter One conspired to turn the national sentiment in favor of a stronger government response to rising crime rates. This sentiment was particularly acute in states with large urban populations, which explains the positive correlation of population density, Democratic vote share, and citizen ideology with changes in corrections outcome metrics. By the 1990s, perhaps due to a leveling off of crime rates, these states had walked back slightly from their anti-crime stances of the previous decade, and this shift explains the changes in direction for these variables. Meanwhile, Republican governors like Tommy Thompson and Kirk Fordice seized upon the Dukakis defeat of 1988 as evidence that their party had the upper hand on fighting crime, and they bolted to the right on this issue during the 1990s. Some Democratic governors, such as Zell Miller, also moved right in an attempt to negate the Republican advantage on crime, but the gap between the two parties widened and gubernatorial partisanship became significantly correlated to corrections outcome metrics.

Pike to be Shut Down

That's the report this morning from a service technician who does work for their house at 17 South Ave. Recall they sent freshmen to the hospital during rush week.

Lack of Respect for Fellow Cornellians

I apologize for interrupting my period of inactivity with a rant.

In each of my years at Cornell, I have participated in the fraternity intramural tennis tournament. Having reached the semifinals last year, with the other semifinalists having graduated, I had high hopes for how I might do this year.

We were supposed to have played our second-round matches by this morning. I emailed my opponent, Andrew, from a house we can call JIFI, on Thursday and suggested we play on Monday (yesterday). Andrew replied amicably to say that he would prefer to play on Friday or Sunday, although Monday might work as well. I suggested some times on Sunday, and said I was free all day on Monday and could play then if he had a little time.

Andrew did not reply. I waited three days, and then emailed him again on Sunday to remind him that we needed to play by Tuesday morning, and asked about times he was free on Monday. Andrew said he was not free at all on Monday, and asked if we could play on Tuesday. I reminded him that we needed to send in a result by 9:00am on Tuesday, but suggested that if he really could not play until Tuesday, he should email the intramurals director, Jeremy Hartigan, to ask for an extension.

Andrew informed me that he secured an extension until 9:00am on Wednesday, but did not suggest any times to play. I told him I could play any time Tuesday (today) before 3pm. Andrew replied that he had classes until 4:10 today, and then a meeting at 5, so he did not think he could play.

Having run out of time and options, I suggested to Andrew that we could play at 7am on Wednesday in order to finish by the 9am deadline. Otherwise, I said, he could just default. Andrew responded, "Yea I dont think I'll be able to do that. unfortunately the timing didnt work out."

Frustrated, I emailed Jeremy Hartigan last night to inform him of the situation and ask that I be credited as the winner, since Andrew had not made himself available to play before the deadline. Jeremy replied at 11:30 this morning to say that if we did not get him a result by 2pm today, he would flip a coin to decide who would advance.

At 12:15, when I got out of class, I emailed Andrew to ask him what he wanted to do. I wrote, "I think I've made a pretty reasonable attempt to play, but you just haven't been free at all. I don't want to 'lose' the match because of your schedule." Andrew did not respond, but I found out later that he had emailed Jeremy at 11:45 to tell him to flip the coin because "a mutual time didn't work out."

At 12:45, Jeremy emailed to inform us that he had flipped a coin and that Andrew would advance. Livid, I emailed Jeremy to stress that Andrew had not suggested ONE time he was free to play, that I had done my best to schedule a match, and that it was bullshit that Andrew got to advance. Jeremy responded, in part, "It is not my place to say which player tried or didn’t try to schedule times."

I don't blame Jeremy Hartigan for not wanting to take sides. I blame a fellow Cornellian and sportsman, Andrew, for cowardly refusing to play a tennis match and then stealing a victory because "a mutual time could not be agreed upon." The honorable move would have been to default. I made myself available to play all day Saturday, most of Sunday, all day Monday, and most of Tuesday, and Andrew refused to suggest one time which worked for him. Yet, in the end, it is he who advances and me who loses, without having the fair opportunity to let my skills determine my fate.

It is times such as this which make me ashamed of some of the people I call my fellow Cornellians.

The "Fence in the Students" Campaign Continues

Today, workers took down the wooden fence along the stairs heading down to the suspension bridge, but only on the side facing the gorge. They've been putting in taller metal poles secured by Quickrete. My guess is that they want to install a higher, metal fence on that side so that there is absolutely no way anyone can get close to the gorge. We'll have to wait to see if faux barbed wire is installed as well.

Blogging Hiatus

My senior thesis is due in 15 days; expect little or no blogging until that time.

This blog is not gone for good, at least not yet.