CornellWatch

In Honor of the Presidential Election, our wonderful blogger Andrew Wolf (he of Newsmaker) has created a cross post on the election and its impact on Cornell and our country.

It was just one of those moments. Time stood still, and everything began anew. Long before midnight, just seconds after the polls closed in California; Barack Hussein Obama was elected president of the United States of America. As I stepped on to College Ave., car horns were honking, strangers were hugging, and fireworks were sent loudly into the sky. Half an hour later standing in one of collegetown’s many half rate bars, we all crammed around the television as Obama took to the stage and gave a beautiful and beautifully orchestrated victory speech.

It was, of course, hardly a victory speech. It was a presidential speech. The Obama campaign would not let anyone into the park with an Obama sign. You were only given an American flag or nothing at all. The stage had no symbols from his campaign but merely a stoic line of Old Glories.

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Cornell has a well-deserved reputation for incubating a certain breed of political animals, that is to say, we pop out overzealous assholes like nobody’s business. There is, of course, our very own “Rush Limbaugh in a miniskirt”: the Cornell Review-founding, polemic-trafficking Ann Coulter ‘84. And on the other side of the partisan picket fence, there’s ESPN sportscaster-cum-liberal talking head Keith Olbermann ‘79.  And recent weeks have found our glorious institution, yet again, at the center of the shit-slinging culture war between liberals and conservatives. Except this time the wannabe pundits of Cornell are not bashing one another like the big boys and girls do — some outside libertarians are jumping into the fray, too, and it’s all because some blasted zygote had to up and scrawl her (pro-)life story on some signs (see left).

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Old people these days… As soon as they achieve the status of legendary journalists, they’re given license to spew adorably misinformed bits of crazytalk alongside dazzling rhetoric with little to no public recognition of the crazytalk part. So it was when Tom Wolfe, the father of “New Journalism,” came to Ithaca College to talk about journalism this past Halloween Eve. He called blog readers “tribal people,” equated bloggers with rumormongers who spoon-feed misinformation to said unsophisticated people, and insinuated that online journalism, even when based off of pre-existing newspapers, will contain no reporting. These opinions are rather unsurprising given that Wolfe has recently blamed the entire financial crisis on the fact that it’s hard to read stuff on “the computer.” (Perhaps fellow computer-ignoramus John McCain should consider Wolfe as his economic advisor.) The old bat’s quasi-senility is totally forgivable, but it’s worth examining some of his crazytalk mostly because it reflects opinions that are widely held among other old bats.

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Dear Aunt Edna,

Would you happen to know who paints the footprints on the Arts Quad between the statues of A.D. White and Ezra Cornell? My friend told me that when he toured the campus before freshman year the tour guide says that legend has it that the two statues come alive at midnight and meet in the middle of the Quad to shake hands after a virgin has passed through. But if the legend involves them meeting in the middle of the Arts Quad, then shouldn’t there be a trail of white footprints leading one way and a trail of red footprints leading the other way? It doesn’t make any sense that their footprints suddenly turn red. Care to explain?

                    Confused Cornellian

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Halloween costumes are so much fun! BUT DANGEROUS. Because when you are in costume — perhaps drunk! — as a sexy dinosaur or a sexy Sarah Palin or a sexy Chinese Olympic Gymnastics Team, YOU ARE A DIFFERENT PERSON. Yet still responsible for your actions? So saith the CoPo in an emergency advisory email.

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SOMEBODY GOT ON CORNELL’S SERIES OF TUBES AND SET US UP THE BOMB! The virus only contages Windows though… embarrassing.

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We’ve finally got a new provost, former Dean of Engineering Kent Fuchs, now that the former one of eight years, Carolyn “Biddy” Martin, has flitted off to a chancellorship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After being the longest-serving provost ever, we guess Biddy needed a new place to make conservatives annoyed by her existence. Luckily for us, our new man has an equally lampoonable name, sort of. His last name is pronounced “fox,” not “fucks” as many vulgar language enthusiasts in the Cornell community might have preferred. We can still dub him something funny though, like Silver Fuchs. He’s not bad-looking for an older guy, right?

Anyway, his professional credentials seem stellar at a glance. In his six year tenure as Dean of the largest engineering program in the Ivy League, nobody seems to have had any major beef with him. MetaEzra reports: “I’m not entirely qualified to comment on Fuch’s qualifications for the job, suffice to say that he was re-appointed for the Engineering deanship and Martin thought highly of him.” There is, however, one thing about Fuchs that’s a bit out of the norm: he received a master of divinity degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1984, a year before he got his Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois. Why this might short-circuit a few lightbulbs in our mind after the jump.

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Dear Aunt Edna,

I am a Freshman in the Arts and Sciences school but I am very unclear as to what I would like to major in. I started off as chem but gave it up after about a month (It’s a long story). Basically, I don’t know where to begin to look for a new one. Currently it feels as if I’m choosing my major based on process of elimination and this is far from reassuring. Sometimes I feel like I would like to study business or economics because it’s what my dad did but is this a wrong reason? How can I be sure? Where can I look for help? I tried the Career Center but all I did was sit behind a computer for hours lying about my interests (I don’t know what I’m interested in). I am constantly asked by my friends and relatives what I’m studying and I hate not knowing but feeling like I should! Oh well.

-Undecided

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The name of the body found yesterday in Cascadilla Gorge has been released, and the details may shock you. His name is Jakub J. Janecka of Lake Ariel, PA, and he graduated in 1998. Why a Cornell alum would such make an eerie pilgrimage to Ithaca to commit suicide is as strange a question as it is tragic.

And, although we send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Jakub Janecka, we believe that this story is worth investigating in the interest of preventing future suicides. With that in mind, anyone upset by this incident should talk to Gannett’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS).

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Really sad: a body was recovered around 2pm today from Cascadilla Gorge below the Collegetown Bridge, according to the Daily Sun. It’s not certain that it was a suicide, but the Sun reports that “a Cornell Police officer stated that a person allegedly dove head-first into the gorge.” So if this is true, it’s almost definitely a suicide. The body has yet to be identified, but a source close to the rescue operation tells us that it was a Cornell student and might have been male. More on this as it comes.