Pres Pollack Remarks, New Deans, Reunion Rooms
Fall is in full swing in Ithaca but there’s already been snow. As we well remember from our days at Cornell, weather is an ever-present challenge in upstate NY! This photo captures a golden day.
Earlier this month, Cornell President Martha Pollack gave her annual “State of the University” address in Statler Auditorium to 700 Cornell alumni, friends, administrators and faculty. More than a dozen CU ’74 Notables were there. President Pollack offered statistics about Cornell’s strong application and yield numbers and shared that the University has hired 173 new faculty across the Ithaca, Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech campuses. She highlighted a number of faculty who’ve received national awards. Pollack also talked about the growing mental health needs of college students and how Cornell has hired more professional staff in the health center and provided drop-in counseling sites across campus. Listen to Martha’s speech here (go to minute 35:40.)
Three new academic deans have been hired by President Pollack in the past 19 months since she took office. Ray Jayawardhana, Professor of Astronomy and a renowned astrophysicist and science writer, became Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences September 1. Formerly Dean of the Faculty of Science at York University in Toronto, “RayJay” has degrees from Harvard and Yale. Professor Jayawardhana gave an educational and entertaining talk on campus a few weeks ago about our solar system, the demotion of Pluto, and the search for alien planets and life. Read more here.
Kevin Hallock, Dean of the ILR School for the past 5 years, was tapped this fall as Dean of The SC Johnson College Cornell of Business. An accomplished economist and scholar, Hallock will now preside over the Johnson Graduate School of Business, the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management (in Cornell’s College of Agriculture & Life Sciences) and the School of Hotel Administration.
Meejin Yoon, B.Arch. ’95, will become dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning in January. She’s currently head of the architecture department at MIT.Yoon is the first woman named to the Cornell Dean’s position since the college was formed in the late 1800’s. Cornell’s undergraduate architecture program is consistently ranked first in the U.S.
Switching gears to Class of 1974-specific news, our Reunion Chairs are hard at work planning a terrific weekend in June. We will be housed in Becker House on West Campus (at the bottom of Libe Slope). This is the ONLY air-conditioned dorm on West Campus! Information on reserving dorm rooms will be sent in late winter. If you’d like to stay in a hotel, check the Reunion page on our class website for a list of Ithaca hotels.
Our next Class of ’74 event will be a reception with other Classes of the 70’s in Boston on Friday evening, February 8, 2019. We’ll be sharing more info on this in early 2019. Hope to see you there or at Reunion.
