While Cornell is not the only university to invite students to sit on its Board of Trustees — not all universities do — it is one of the features that makes Cornell, well, Cornell.

That said, last year, it became clear that there is a problem with the long-established system of two generally elected student trustees with one seat coming up for election each year: A second graduate student was elected, leaving undergraduates without a voice on the Board.

As a graduate student myself now, this clearly doesn’t pain me as much as it would an undergrad, but, as a former undergrad, I can see the obvious problem with this scenario. This is why I have to complement the Board for noticing this and attempting to find a solution.

My original version of this column, which I wrote last Monday night, basically went on to question and criticize the actual solution that the Board came up with, but, as day-to-day Sun readers know, student-elected trustee Doug Mitarotonda explained in a column last Tuesday how the Board came to the solution it did and why it was essentially the only option.

And while I certainly sympathize with the Board’s not wanting to take on the state legislature immediately in order to possibly add a student seat or two on the Board, the excuse that approaching the legislature is “a process that [they] are not willing to undertake at this time” is vague at best and disheartening at worst.

So, while I applaud the Board’s swift (by Cornell standards) action to put a band-aid over this problem, as far as I’m concerned, the four-year clock has begun to tick (this solution is only temporary and will be reevaluated by the Board in 2010). Specifically, I sincerely hope that this issue gets to Albany by the end of the “trial” period.

Because, frankly, the current solution, while seemingly fixing the problem, almost makes the situation worse.

In theory, making one seat always an undergraduate seat and one seat always a graduate student seat is a good idea. However, there are some obvious deficiencies with this solution.

For example: how would you like it if someone told you that in every other Senatorial election you had to vote for a different political party? So, basically, only Democrats can run in one year, and then only Republicans can run in the next election, and so on.

I thought so.

Isn’t that what’s going on here?

Another problem: Since Mao Ye is just now entering his second year on the Board, this year will be an “undergraduate year.” This means that if, say, I wanted to run for trustee, I couldn’t (not that I was going to).

And since next year I will be a second-year law student, I can’t run because I won’t be able to complete my hypothetical term. So, with the Board’s decision, a whole slew of graduate students were told that they are no longer eligible for election.

The most frustrating part about this plan is that there are several easy solutions that could make everyone happy — the most obvious solution allowing each college to elect one student each year. That said, this would obviously dilute the Board and/or turn the Board of Trustees into an unruly mob (not to mention the fact that neither the Board nor the state legislature would ever go for it).

The next possibility would be to just add two seats, one for each constituency, so that each year we elect an undergraduate and a graduate trustee. I might support this idea wholeheartedly, except that it has been rare that two candidates in one year, one from each constituency, are actually viable candidates (at least in my eyes), and so the prospect of being forced to pick one of each in each election could be particularly difficult in some years.

Which brings me to the most logical solution to our problem. Let’s just take the Board’s new plan and add one seat. This seat would be a so-called “at-large” seat and would be for a one-year term. This way, each year we will select one “assigned” seat, whether it be a “graduate year” or an “undergraduate year” and one “at-large” seat from either constituency.

Not only would this allow each constituency to elect at least one of its own each year, it would also allow students, including rising seniors and graduate students entering their last year of study, to run for a seat when they could not in the past. The four-year clock is ticking, Board. Let’s see what you can do.

* * *

As we sit here, over a year-and-a-half removed from Lehman-gate, we still don’t know what exactly transpired in the days prior to reunion weekend 2005 behind the closed doors of the Day Hall office in which President David Skorton now sits.

But we do know one thing: Nothing stops Peter Meinig ’61.

I sat in Cornell Auditorium covering the Presidential Search Committee’s faculty forum in fall 2005 as professors incessantly heaved angry questions and irate comments his way. Case in point:

“I am stupefied that you seem unable to examine yourselves. You should ask to what extent you have a flawed method of operation.”

Or how about: “I have been here since 1979 and I have never seen the community as destabilized as it is now.”

Or my favorite: “An evil spirit has been set upon the land.”

But, despite the “flawed,” “unstable” and apparently “evil” (according to some) operation that he has run over the past four or so years as chair of the Board of Trustees, and the fact that the Cornell community, while mostly healed from its Lehman-gate wounds, is still recovering from a bit of Day Hall news whiplash, Meinig just keeps chugging along.

Congrats on your re-election.