Annual Report - DFA Home - Cornell University

News of the Year
excerpts from selected stories in the ChronicleOnline and
other official university communications
Faculty recruitment
CU launches $100 million fund to recruit
faculty
Sept. 2, 2010 — Cornell faces an unprecedented
number of faculty retirements over the next decade.
The university sees that challenge as an unprecedented
opportunity: the chance to recruit outstanding new
faculty—the next generation’s Alison Luries, Carl Sagans
and Barbara McClintocks. A $100 million Cornell Faculty
Renewal Fund will leverage that opportunity, enabling the
university to significantly accelerate hiring of faculty over
the next five years, funded through philanthropy and
university dollars. “Hiring new faculty is a clear sign that
we are emerging healthier and better positioned for the
future,” President David Skorton wrote in a September
email to the campus community. “This will allow us to
build strength in strategically important areas and shape
Cornell for a generation or more.” A $5 million gift from
David Croll ’70, chair of the Cornell Board of Trustees’
Finance Committee, kicked off the initiative which will
pay for such incentives as salary, startup funds for
laboratories, library acquisitions and research stipends.
A $50 million Faculty Renewal Sesquicentennial
Challenge will match multi-year gift commitments of
$500,000 or more from donors on a dollar-for-dollar
basis with university funds.
Skorton: Renew faculty, support
humanities nationally
Oct. 29, 2010 — It’s “time for Cornell to step up
and advocate for arts and humanities nationally as we
recruit faculty locally that will define our university for a
generation,” President David Skorton said Oct. 29 in
his State of the University Address. Skorton focused his
address on two main points: first, the need for hiring
faculty in all academic areas, but especially in the arts
and humanities; and second, the role that Cornell can
play in bolstering the humanities in the national arena.
Far from being irrelevant in the digital age, the arts and
humanities not only teach the basic skills of critical and
contextual thinking, communication and ethics but also
have value as disciplines of research and critical analysis
in their own right, he said, adding, that on a fundamental
level, they teach us what it means to be human. In the
national arena, the arts and humanities struggle for
funding because their value is difficult to quantify, and
they are not seen as contributing directly to economic
growth, health or national security, said Skorton, who
added that he is planning to launch a national campaign
to increase funding for national arts agencies.
Donors endow three humanities
professorships
Dec. 1, 2010 — Cornell donors’ gifts will establish
three new endowed professorships in the humanities
in the College of Arts and Sciences, with support
from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The senior
professorships—the L. Sanford and Jo Mills Reis
Professorship, the Susan and Barton Winokur
Professorship and the David and Kathleen Ryan
Professorship—will be endowed for a total of $12
million. The Mellon Foundation pledged a $2.4 million
challenge grant toward the endowment goal to Cornell
in 2007. The grant required the university to raise $9.6
million within five years to endow the positions. About
40 percent of the 500 current Arts and Sciences faculty
are humanists. To fill these professorships, the college
will recruit established or rising stars whose scholarship
and teaching encompass more than one or several
humanistic disciplines. “Faculty renewal is Cornell’s
critical challenge,” said Arts and Sciences Dean G.
Peter Lepage. “These gifts are extremely valuable and
strategic because they ensure that influential midcareer
and senior humanists will be among the first of many fine
scholars to join our humanities faculty.”
Student experience
Student-built satellite to launch next
year
Dec. 13, 2010 — It was a waiting game not unlike
a marriage proposal—expected, yet unclear in timing.
But finally, the CUSat team gets to set a date. The
student team, which has built an experimental satellite
equipped with sophisticated GPS technology, has
Annual Report 2010–2011