Alumni Magazine the Inauguration of David J
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c1,c2,p1,c3,c4CAMND06 10/19/06 2:22 PM Page c1 CU LAUNCHES $4 BILLION CAPITAL CAMPAIGN November/December 2006 $6.00 alumni magazine The Inauguration of David J. Skorton Twelfth President of Cornell University c1,c2,p1,c3,c4CAMND06 10/19/06 4:00 PM Page c2 c1,c2,p1,c3,c4CAMND06 10/19/06 4:00 PM Page 1 002-003CAMND06toc 10/16/06 3:45 PM Page 2 Contents NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2006 VOLUME 109 NUMBER 3 4 Letter From Ithaca alumni magazine French toast Features 6 Correspondence Natural selection 10 From the Hill The dawn of the campaign. Plus: Milstein Hall 3.0, meeting the Class of 2010, the ranking file, the Creeper pleads, and a new divestment movement. 16 Sports A rink renewed 18 Authors The full Marcham 35 Finger Lakes Marketplace 52 44 Wines of the Finger Lakes 46 In Our Own Words 2005 Lucas Cabernet Franc CAROL KAMMEN “Limited Reserve” To Cornell historian Carol Kammen, 62 Classifieds & Cornellians the unheard voices in the University’s in Business story belong to the students them- selves. So the senior lecturer dug into 65 Alma Matters the vaults of the Kroch Library and unearthed a trove of diaries, scrap- books, letters, and journals written by 68 Class Notes undergraduates from the founding to 109 the present.Their thoughts—now 46 assembled into a book, First-Person Alumni Deaths Cornell—reveal how the anxieties, 112 distractions, and preoccupations of students on the Hill have (and haven’t) changed since 1868.We offer some excerpts. Cornelliana Authority figures 52 Rhapsody in Red JIM ROBERTS ’71 112 The inauguration of David Skorton as the University’s twelfth president was more than 22 Currents just a day of academic pageantry under BAILEY,UNVEILED The concert hall stages a Ithaca’s late summer sun.The gala events | $17 million revival served as both a symbolic close for the diffi- cult chapter in Cornell history that followed CHARACTER COUNTS | Best supporting actress? the resignation of Jeffrey Lehman ’77 and an LIFE DURING WARTIME Stranded in Beirut when the opportunity for a jazz-loving new leader to | bombs fell set the tone—poetic, tuneful, and above all optimistic—for his own administration. FORBIDDEN FRUIT | Meet the elusive mangosteen Cover photograph by Jason Koski / UP Plus | Students in orbit, a master of metal, and body language Cornell Alumni Magazine (ISSN 1070-2733; USPS 006-902) is published six times a year, in January, March, May, July, September, and November, by the Cornell Alumni Federation, 401 East State Street, Suite 301, Ithaca, NY 14850. Subscriptions cost $30 a year. Periodical postage paid at Ithaca, NY, and additional mailing offices. POSTMAS- TER: Send address changes to Cornell Alumni Magazine, c/o Public Affairs Records, 130 East Seneca St., Suite 400, Ithaca, NY 14850-4353. 2 CORNELL ALUMNI MAGAZINE 002-003CAMND06toc 10/16/06 11:13 AM Page 3 004-005CAMND06lfi 10/19/06 4:30 PM Page 4 Letter From Ithaca Merci, Mon Professeur A TRIP TO FRANCE STIRS MEMORIES OF A REVOLUTIONARY COURSE MET STEVEN KAPLAN, THE GOLDWIN Smith professor of European history, drop to our syllabus, Kaplan was only a third- when I was a freshman, in the winter of year professor, a trifle precocious, and not so i 1973. I had espied his History of the much older than his students. The campus French Revolution in the spring catalog, but still clung to certain illusions of the Sixties, rather than simply register for the course I wherein it was the fashion for some of the had the dubious notion of soliciting a per- younger faculty to affect a kinship with sonal audience with him first. Even then, he undergraduates. However, no such Jacobin had a rising forehead and that beakish nose notion tainted Professor Kaplan. In matters that seemed ready to jab at anyone so foolish academic, the hierarchical distinction was STEFANIE GREEN as to defy him. I must have sauntered into his rofesseur clear: he was my superior. In class, he regarded office, bedecked in equal parts in denim and P Ka my contributions with a mocking curiosity, as naiveté, and casually inquired whether his pl if my journalistic brashness had doomed me class was any good. an in his eyes as a less-than-serious scholar. He stared for a moment, no doubt won- After college I read of his exploits in dering if some pestilence fatal to sound judgment had overcome France, where he adopted part-time residence, teaching and the admissions department. Gathering himself, he replied, “I give becoming mildly famous as a connoisseur of traditional baking. the best lectures in the University.” Four years ago, my eldest son enrolled at Cornell and, naturally, He defended his case in the very first class, introducing us to in the History of the French Revolution course. I mused about the political and social cross-currents in France that in 1789 were dropping in on my old professor, but let the moment pass. ominously rising against their established contours—its sulking When I think of Professor Kaplan now, in his thirty-seventh nobles, its hungry peasants, its impatient bourgeoisie, and, most year at Cornell, it is as an exemplar of the history that whetted my dangerous of all, its intelligentsia besotted with the romantic pos- youthful appetite—vivid and sweeping and yet particularized in sibilities of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution. its detail. Not only, as he intoned, was France’s present insepara- The finale to his peroration remains implanted in my mem- ble from its past but, as I came to believe, all history is insepara- ory. There was, he went on, a disturbance at the Bastille—a Paris ble and interconnected. As a writer, even of high finance, I craved prison whose importance historians have overrated. Some forty- to affix events to a historical narrative whose roots, in their murky five minutes into the lecture, we were given to understand that the and indirect way, might be no less remote than the Bastille. frustrations of the royal subjects, so long suppressed, were such It was in Professor Kaplan’s seminar on demography that I that even a mild insurrection could prove a tinderbox. Professor was introduced to the notion that history might consist of broad Kaplan lectured then, as always, without notes. His gaze was steady, popular currents—of famines, emigrations, and mortalities as but his pace slowed as he related how a courier broke the news to much as of generals and kings. He has been parodied as propos- the King, happily ignorant of any trouble. ing that the French Revolution was merely an agricultural acci- “Is it a riot?” asked the uncomprehending Louis. dent—that it was caused by a shortage of bread—but he did not “No, sire,” replied his urgent courier. “It is a revolution.” lose sight of the fact that every loaf has a baker. His history had And at that the professor left the hall. I attended every class. humanity, but it had humans, too. For certain, his Revolution had Memories of my teacher, though they had never left me, a shining star. It was not King Louis nor the spouse who followed returned with an intensity this past summer, when I toured him to the guillotine; it was not Marat nor Robespierre. It was Provence and Paris with my wife and discovered that our route Professor Kaplan himself. was peopled—in its monuments, its named boulevards, its muse- — Roger Lowenstein ’76 ums—from Professor Kaplan’s classes. I knew better than to look for a street named Robespierre—“not one, in all of France,” his ROGER LOWENSTEIN is a regular columnist for SmartMoney voice still echoed—but what about my professor had preserved Magazine, a contributing writer for the New York Times Maga- the echo with such clarity? zine, and the author of Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble In 1973, when Watergate provided a suitably political back- and Its Undoing. 4 CORNELL ALUMNI MAGAZINE 004-005CAMND06lfi 10/16/06 11:22 AM Page 5 006-009CAMND06corr 10/16/06 11:26 AM Page 6 Correspondence How Selective? ANNUAL FUND LETTER RAISES QUESTION CORNELL ANNUAL FUND CONTRIBU- Ed. Note: Our apologies for not includ- tors recently received a thank-you letter ing a polo wrap-up in the May/June from Hunter Rawlings, who noted that issue. The men’s team was 14-6, end- “Cornell set a new record in admissions ing their year with a loss to Texas this year, with 28,000 applications for this A&M in the national semifinal match. year’s entering class of 3,000,” and that The Big Red men (and horses) had therefore the Class of 2010 was “the most won the national title in the previous selective class in the history of Cornell Uni- year. The women’s squad suffered a versity.”It seems to me that Rawlings’s con- similar fate, falling to Colorado State clusion, while probably accurate, is not jus- in the national semifinal and finishing tified by the facts presented. If admissions with an 8-13 record. accepted all 28,000 and only 3,000 are coming, that would not be very selective. If A Lion Roars they accepted only 3,000—or even 3,100— YOU PROUDLY BOAST OF NEW then their selectivity is very impressive. York-Presbyterian Hospital, “the Lonnie Hanauer ’56, MD ’60 teaching hospital of Weill Cornell West Orange, New Jersey Medical College,” placing sixth in the nation in U.S. News & World Report’s Ed. Note: According to Cornell’s official ranking of America’s best hospitals “Profile of the Class of 2010,” there were (From the Hill, September/October 28,098 applicants, of whom 6,935 were 2006).