The Cornell Board of Trustees unanimously agreed this afternoon to allow the University incur up to a half-billion dollars in debt and scale back its endowment spending.

The Trustees authorized the University to sell up to $500 million in taxable bonds to provide working capital and institutional liquidity.

The University is also set to reduce spending from the endowment by 15 percent starting July 1, with further cuts planned for subsequent years.

“[The University] can’t keep taking the money out as if it were a larger endowment,” President David Skorton said in an interview Friday.

My recent trip to Iran as part of an academic delegation has confirmed my belief that while tensions abound in our world, “people-to-people” exchange is ever more important.

Our world is polarized along lines drawn by our race, ethnicity, religious convictions, politics, gender, sexual orientation and many other attributes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current tensions defined by the intersection of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds. The events of last week in India are just the most recent manifestations of these tensions. How to respond to this polarization?

According to Robert Massa of Dickson College, “What we’ve done in higher education is let our dreams and aspirations dictate our cost structure.” Due to the financial crisis, this prodigal era of “dreams and aspirations” may finally be over.

This past Tuesday, Cornell implemented a hiring pause, a delay on new construction, and other cost-saving measures. The contract colleges are especially hard hit. According to a dean in the ILR School, administrators — rather than tenured faculty — may have to teach some classes, while existing faculty may be allotted fewer teaching assistants.

Despite national economic turmoil and threats of the worst financial crisis since the great depression, President David Skorton assured on Friday morning that Cornell is “not in a financial crisis.” Still, in his annual State of the University Address, Skorton emphasized the need for the University to revise its economic plan for its future in light of recent “stresses and strains that deserve our serious attention.”

Before students of the Class of 2009 were even born, Carolyn “Biddy” Martin and Carolyn Ainslie were dwelling in Ithaca as Cornell employees. So it came as a surprise this summer when both the provost and the vice president for planning and budget bid adieu to Cornell after more than two decades of service.

As Cornell’s highest ranking officers gathered in Ithaca this weekend, President David Skorton announced to a standing ovation that Kent Fuchs has been appointed as the University’s 15th provost. Fuchs, who currently serves as dean of the College of Engineering, will take the reins as Cornell’s chief academic officer and second-in-command to the president in January.

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Skorton chose Fuchs nearly five months after Biddy Martin decided to vacate the position to become chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Currently David Harris serves as interim provost.

At 17, R’s mom bought her her first fake ID so she could go to Vegas on spring break with her friends. A year earlier, another R found herself wandering through the seedy alleys of Chinatown to procure her very own false identification card. Little did they know that years later each R would meet an R much like herself, with whom she would use her trusty ID in good times and bad, until one R’s ID was taken away at Ruloff’s two weeks ago. RIP R’s ID.

Up until that fateful, tragic, soul-crushing night, neither R encountered any challenges in the pursuit of superfuntimes, other than the oft-confusing plight of remembering to pretend to be who our I.D.’s said we were. Interestingly, R’s ID said she was R.

R: Who’s that?

By Tia Hicks and Zachary Murray

The discussion has shifted and now we’re talking about “intellectual diversity.” We’re talking about providing “robust discussion” instead of preventing bigotry; we’re talking about the politics of diversity instead of outlining concrete efforts to achieve diversity and equality; we’re talking about how the University can protect itself from being criticized instead of responding to groups that alienate and denigrate.

The issues that minority students face at Cornell transcend the racism of articles by The Cornell Review, whether people have the right of free speech and expression, and the feelings of conservatives that they have no voice on this campus.

My column today was motivated by a current controversy on our campus and by the larger issues it represents. Articles in the Cornell Review’s orientation issue have once again put issues of civility, diversity, and free speech squarely before our campus community and the greater Cornell family. The views as expressed in the Review articles — one focused on minority students and one satirically linking Muslims to terrorism — were clearly at odds with the values of our university.

The current controversy raises three broad issues:

1. How should we as a campus respond to writings and other forms of speech that target certain groups within our campus community in ways that many find offensive?

The Graduate and Professional Student Association met yesterday for the first meeting of the year in the Big Red Barn. In attendance were University President David Skorton and Vice President for Student and Academic Services Susan Murphy ’73.

“Any non-academic policy issue that impacts the graduate student body is within our interests,” said Mario Guerrero grad. “This is a meeting where we talk about some of the advocacy issues we’re looking into.”