“I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

Taken quite literally, the Cornell motto envisions a perfect synthesis between access and higher education: a university where students of any stripe, station or color might encounter a limitless field of knowledge.

Yet in its recent bastardization of the slogan, to the simple, “any person … any study,” the University has compromised the implicit, and far more profound, message of Cornell’s mission statement. As was the case in 1865, and as remains the situation today, such an educational utopia is all but impossible; the truest ambition of Ezra Cornell was not to achieve the unachievable, but to challenge Cornellians to continuously reinvent our soon-to-be alma mater.

These last few years have seen a sea change in higher education, from an emphasis on attracting not only the best and the brightest, but more recently, the best, brightest, and least well off. In light of these trends, Cornell is beset on both sides by competitive pressures: on the one hand, from traditional measures of selectivity like those published in the U.S. News and World Report magazine, and on the other hand, by the new emphasis on generous financial aid packages.

The ice has slowly melted, and that can only mean a few things: sangria at Collegetown Bagels, Crocs without the fur, and above all, the springtime of young love. Yet those exposing their fleshy behinds to Cupid’s bow in the next few weeks might be disappointed to learn that at Cornell, Spring Fever is not quite so contagious as is commonly thought.

One of the campus’ most pervasive comfort tales is the alleged marriage rate among Cornell grads — sometimes said to be as high as 50 or 60 percent. This statistic has always struck me as awfully high, and with only a few weeks remaining before graduation — and spousal prospects looking as slim as the job search — I decided to don my “Mythbusters” beret, and debunk this conjecture.

It was six months ago — my how the time flies! — that I first went public with my anti-finance tirades. In calling out the “finance types” here among us, I aroused the ire of my investment banking-leaning peers, who ridiculed my entreaties to do something more valuable with their Ivy League degrees than crunch numbers for $125k-plus bonus as some pinko yackety-yak best left unread.

Yet here we are half a year later, the economy crashing down around us, and I can’t help but say I told you so, having written in November that “I wouldn’t be feeling very optimistic at the moment” if I, too, was heading from Goldwin Smith to Goldman Sachs.

Before reading this article, there are two things you should know about me. First, I’m not especially passionate about anyone in the upcoming presidential election, but I voted for Hillary. Second, I’m an honest-to-god, certified hypochondriac.

Truth be told, it’s tough for any young Democrat not to support Obama. Behind the boyish charm, there’s a ripened, rotund voice that churns out oratory straight from an Aaron Sorkin screenplay. His message of change has won everything from Oprah’s endorsement to superdelegates, and what’s more, his opponent offers few substantive policy differences.

That said, there’s one especially glaring difference between the Democratic candidates, and that’s health care.

Upon returning to campus at Northern Illinois University last week, Drew Jeskey, a student who experienced the Feb. 14 school shooting firsthand, said he had been unable to sleep the night before.

“Between midnight and 4 a.m., I must have gone through it in my mind 20 times over,” he told The New York Times. “That first shot was the loudest thing I have ever heard. You wouldn’t believe how loud it was.”

In a sense, the recent string of college shootings is a microcosm for America post-9/11. That same specter of unlooked-for violence that haunts our nation’s airports, landmarks and financial centers now looms large in lecture halls and cafeterias. Terror has breached the Western world’s final frontier of enlightenment, not on a jet plane, but in Geology 104.

It was the fall of 1962, and the nation stood on the brink of civil unrest. That September, President John F. Kennedy was forced to send federal troops to the University of Mississippi to escort James

Meredith, the school’s first black student, onto campus amidst deathly race riots. Soon after, Kennedy summoned leaders from five major universities, including Harvard, Yale and Notre Dame, to the White

House.

“I want you to make a difference,” he implored them. “Until you do, who will?”

The first to respond to this call, as Berkeley Professor Jerome Karabel recounts in his recent study of elite colleges, was Yale’s incoming president, Kingman Brewster, Jr., who made the controversial decision to confer an honorary doctorate on Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1964.

Having spent the first months of the New Year languishing in inactivity, I decided last week to engage in a little physical exercise. Being a rough-and-tumble macho man, I suited up for game time … and hit the tennis courts. When my partner and I (pause) arrived at Cornell’s Reis Tennis Center, we were greeted with an unwelcome surprise: a $48 fee for just an hour’s playtime.

Shelling out a Ulysses $. Grant to play a little tennis struck me as outrageous, and it got me to thinking: for what else does Uncle Ezra nickel and dime us?

Health and Welfare

These gloomy winter months elicit a wide range of emotions; on the one hand, there’s torpor, and on the other, you’ve got lethargy. Yet just as rain mixes with snow to produce slush, so too can a sudden urge to bury oneself under the covers, and hide away from the wasteland outside, shock a sluggish system into a great many sensations.

To name just a few that I’ve encountered, albeit anecdotally:

Irony

At Ruloff’s Karaoke Night on Monday, playing a drinking game called “Sink the Ship,” in which competitors take turns pouring a bit of beer into a floating glass, until the loser, who overestimates his pour, has to imbibe the sunken cup’s contents.

As part of an ongoing investigation of study abroad programs, the New York State Attorney General issued a subpoena to Cornell and 14 other colleges last month to scrutinize their relationships with independent study abroad agencies. Whether or not the inquiry elicits any wrongdoing, the subpoena does underscore a serious issue within our study abroad office, namely the preference of certain programs and even countries over other comparable alternatives.