Living the Dream
I am sitting at the Bloomberg Center cafeteria on the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island between Manhattan and Queens. Back in 2012 when I began the New York Wheel project, I was in lockstep during the NYC approval process (called the ULURP process) with the Cornell Tech Campus project. We were destined to open at about the same time, but after six years, that project went off the rails while the Tech Campus continued on. This is now Cornell’s dominant toe-hold in NYC, complementing the Weill Cornell Medical Center and School of Medicine across the East River on Manhattan’s east side. As the old saying goes, I was there when this whole place was being conceived and planned. It’s a bit of a dream sitting here seven years later with the Campus not yet completed, but well along with three functioning buildings.
I am here for a Johnson Graduate School of Business Advisory Council meeting. I used to be Chairman of that group and served as an active member for almost twenty years. After I stepped down I took a break from it for a few years and am now attending my first meeting of the Council since then. For years I was a committed alumnus of the school and was a regular fixture at its building on the Ithaca campus. I even taught as a member of the faculty for ten full academic years. Now I have distanced myself for a bit, not so much by design, but by circumstance. Organizational ties age and grow weary like many relationships do. I am here today to see if things will stay this way (in limbo, so to speak) or if they are destined to reactivate. Fate favors the former.
The first thing I had to do was figure out how to get here to the central yet remote location. It is actually a perfect spot for an educational campus both near Manhattan and yet outside of Manhattan. There are three ways to get here (excluding the highly inconvenient one of driving to the island). The MTA app I downloaded told me the choices and the times it would take including the walking time of each option. I could have come by ferry from downtown to the island’s dock. I could have come by subway (with one switch of trains) to the one subway stop on the island. Or I could come by aerial tram over the East River. That tram was the first urban aerial tram in the world, I believe, built in 1976, the year I first came to New York. I chose the tram for its eight minute ride.
I was early, so there were no crowds just as there are not yet any crowds here in the cafeteria. It opens at 8am and I am meeting the ex-Dean of the College of Business. He was someone I recruited to come to Cornell during my time of peak influence and as a member of the Dean’s Search Committee. He served as Dean of the graduate school and then as the Founding Dean of the expanded and consolidated College of Business. I always figured I done good by promoting his interests as a newly sourced Dean. He has now moved on for various reasons, some known and some shrouded in a bit of mystery. This happens in academia just like it happens in corporate life and life at large.
This involvement has aspects of feel-good and aspects of nostalgia. In my case, the nostalgia is less about my days at school in the early 1970’s (I shook those cobwebs off years ago), and more about the nostalgia of the thirty year run I had of extreme engagement. Extreme engagement is a good thing at the right times in one’s life. It is sometimes sustainable and sometimes burns out. In my case, it was quite long-lasting, but then burned out due to two events which weighed on my relationship with the school and University.
The first had to do with the simultaneous support from the School and withdrawal by the University. In 2007 I went through a high-profile business event that gots lots of bad press. I neither did anything wrong nor suffered any consequences beyond losing my leadership position. But there was more than a little dust in the air over a year or more. I recall poignantly that when I sent an article about Silent Cal Coolidge that got published in the alumni magazine, it drew an online comment from an older alumni that they shouldn’t have someone like me teaching students since I was obviously morally bankrupt. This all resulted (very indirectly) in me getting asked to teach at the school and quietly being dropped from the pending Trustee nomination list. Quite a cold slap in the face.
The second was an incident that involved my son, while he was at Cornell. All three of my kids attended Cornell as third-generation legacies. The last one was a performer, specifically a singer, who joined the oldest a cappella group on campus. What resulted was an organization which fell outside the normal University guidance structure by circumstance and which had rampant pledge hazing activities. By the time the University dealt with it, my son was an upperclassman and was being unduly put-upon by the system when the real culprits were long since graduated. I watched a large organization do what it does best, throw the individuals under the bus for the sake of the long-term survival of the organization. This is something we all understand cerebrally, but only understand fully when it hits us individually in the gut. This hit me in the gut since I felt my son didn’t deserve to be put through that mill. He came out of it just fine, but I feel it clouded his senior year and put a taint on his overall Cornell experience.
The effect of these two events and the culmination of 20+ years of alumni involvement and donation plus ten years as a faculty member did a number on my long-held Cornell connection. I do not feel guilty about disengaging a bit at this moment. That is a healthy break for anyone. What I struggle with is making sure that my overall feelings about Cornell are not impacted. Luckily, my children are still very loyal to Cornell and that speaks volumes to me. I like to think its one of the most valuable things I could give my children. Cornell was a dream for my mother in 1932. It was a dream for me in 1971. It was a dream for my kids in 1999, 2003 and 2013.
When I arrived at my Ithaca house last summer, my two granddaughters ran out to the car and told me they wanted to show me their Ithaca house since they were sure I had never been to Ithaca before. They are already forming their Cornell dreams.
Dear Rich,
I recall the situation you speak of and I agree that the university acted in its own self interest as opposed to doing its due diligence. A totally harsh reaction without all the facts. They used a broad brush indeed.
Being the fourth child in my family to attend Duke, I had a somewhat similar situation that was unfairly rigged. I will relate it to you another time.
Again, just so happening to do with Duke, the lacrosse team debacle made me question and lose respect for the then administration. Their reaction was knee-jerk and meant only to distance and absolve themselves of any culpability.
I was at a family event when I first heard about it from a nephew who is a very good sports reporter. He asked me what I thought about the scandal at Duke. I said what scandal? He explained the reports of the event. I can’t say exactly why but the name Tawana Brawley immediately sprang to mind. To those of you not in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut tristate area, this might not mean anything to you. It was a total fiasco started by a young women’s lie she told to probably to keep from getting in trouble for staying out all night. It led to a three ring circus of unproven and false accusations that spun out of control and the media frenzy fanned the flames. It lasted for months. One person committed suicide because he couldn’t deal with the pressure of the aspersions and unsubstantiated claims about his involvement. The two attorneys helping to orchestrate this carnival were disbarred in part because they advised Miss Brawley to leave the state to avoid her legal obligation of obeying a court ordered subpoena. The third ring leader came out with a reputation of standing up for justice no matter how much the situation wasn’t just. You may have heard of him. Reverend Al Sharpton. Law and Order did an excellent episode that that distilled the entire event to its essence and a final scene that was probably exactly how things were resolved behind closed doors.
Well Duke immediately fired the lacrosse coach, suspended the lacrosse program and denounced the team. If you know of the travesty that followed by reading or watching it on TV, I doubt you could not shake your head in disbelief. Professors calling for expulsion of the team members, dropping the entire lacrosse program and more. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Again it was a media frenzy that eventually exposed blatant and outrageous illegal behavior by the temporary DA and others. I believe he went to jail. I will also wager that the monetary settlements from the university, City of Durham,, Durham County and the state of North Carolina was very, very substantial. At least I hope it was.
These days a lie is all too often taken as the truth from the jump. With the profusion of different media there is no hope of containment. Furthermore, so many in our society have forgotten to not believe everything they read. I’m not claiming to be psychic (psycho perhaps) but I fear the ferocity of the 24/7 news competition atmosphere has created an inverse situation. Better to have the story first and be wrong than take a chance on being ‘scooped’. This puts undue pressure on others to react too quickly and often as incorrectly.
I wish corrections and retractions were required to be as prominent as the initial headlines. As one of the Duke lacrosse players said in an interview on 60 Minutes, for the rest of their lives when you google their name, this spurious story will be attached.
Sincerely, The Lone Floridian
PS: I didn’t realize that the Cornell campus was so near completion and opening.
PSS: To anyone of the Lone Rangers friends and associates reading my comments, please accept my apologies if I happen to write something disparaging about your given profession. I have a fairly dry sense of humor. And, though I doubt it, I can sometimes be wrong. I might as well say the same stupid thing that so many say. I have many friends who are ………. . I even advised a son to go into that field ! See, I’m actually a nice guy. Forget that line about not believing everything you read.