David Roger ranks the top five spots in Ithaca to get a great brunch.

A common summer sight at the Ithaca Farmers Market is the long line of local meat devotees waiting to get their hands on house-made chorizos and charcuterie from a local farm, The Piggery.

The local television access feed of the Lincoln at Gettysburg Book Project panel discussion in Barton Hall on Sunday upset me. But before I could complete a post about the choices some students made during their first intellectual experience at Cornell, I had a conversation with a distinguished university alumnus who boasts not one, but three grandchildren currently at Cornell. He related that he had taken them out to dinner the evening before and they had all proceeded in turn to tell him that they had navigated the course selection process (not one is new to Cornell) without so much as a conversation with a faculty advisor. The alumnus-grandfather expressed disappointment with Cornell; I was thoroughly embarrassed for the university that is my intellectual home.

I grew up during a politically turbulent age in a politically active family whose dog joined us at marches and rallies with a sign around his neck. So I have been following the primary season like a political junkie.

Consider this: the Class of 2008 will be the last Cornell class with any memories of West Campus before the West Campus House System opened its first house, Alice Cook House, in August 2004. Since then the House System has tripled with Carl Becker House opening in 2005 and Hans Bethe House opening this fall. Next August, house four, William Keeton House, will open. When as yet unnamed house five join this lineup in a few years, 1,800 Cornell sophomores, juniors and seniors will live, eat, work, debate, reflect, recreate, and relax in the West Campus House System together with five House Professor-Deans, five assistant deans, 29 graduate resident fellows, 15 student assistants and 150 House Fellows — Cornell faculty and senior administrators who venture down the hill to participate in various House activities.

Any American can rattle off a list of our nation’s enduring symbols. It might begin with the flag, the Statue of Liberty, or apple pie, and wrap around any number of entities, images, and landmarks. We trumpet some of these symbols; others we cannot escape. The noose now stands atop that latter list.

The case of the Jena Six nudged its way into the national consciousness more than a month ago – and since then, nooses have appeared eight times in the New York City metropolitan area alone. An African-American professor at Columbia University found the piece of rope dangling from her office door. A recently promoted deputy police chief in Hempstead encountered a similar affront, as did a worker for Nassau County’s Public Works Department. The meaning of the noose has changed little over the last century. In our day, as in the Jim Crow South, perpetrators use the noose to terrorize people, to warn African-Americans of the punishment awaiting those who ascend out of their “place.” In the era of segregation, that “place” was one of perpetual poverty, deference, and powerlessness. In our America, battles bubble up around this question at least once a year. They expose a society still shot through with racial inequality and tension.

In its unassuming way, the new school year enveloped me. Before the final week of August, my first class had already begun. Students sported shorts and sunglasses, the History Department indulged in Dinosaur Barbecue at its annual picnic, and for those hardened by Ithaca’s rude winters, the sun-soaked campus possessed a foreign feel. But it now seems impossible to deny that autumn has trickled in. Many of us have lectures to write and deliver, papers to grade, articles to research, students to advise, books to review, books to write, books to read (and reviews to read), and an academic job market to navigate. Such are the wonders and rigors of life for this Visiting Assistant Professor.