Cornell plans to add between one and three international universities as partners to its recently approved New York City tech campus over the next five years, Provost Kent Fuchs said in an interview Friday.

Bucking a recent trend of plummeting state aid to the University, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s (D) proposed 2012-13 executive budget will preserve funding for Cornell’s contract colleges. His proposal, released Jan. 17, must still be approved by the New York State Legislature in March.

This year, an underground art movement have taken over an abandoned subway station, calling into question the value of the art market and complicating the artist's relationship to that which he rejects yet ultimately is defined by.

Throughout the history of modern culture, New York has been the center of the most cutting edge trends in popular music. From Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train” to the punk and avant-garde sounds of the 1980s, New York has been a Mecca for musicians who want to make new and interesting music. This past year was no different. With pop music in a funk, forward thinking New Yorkers are rethinking their approach to music, taking it in new directions and adding outside influences.

With immigration to the US always growing, prejudice and nativist attitudes have skyrocketed, placing immigrant workers life threatening situations. In particular, regions with the greatest degree of documented and undocumented workers have experienced drastically increased violence against immigrants. Last year’s killing of an undocumented worker in Suffolk County, New York is a shocking example of how much hatred towards immigrant workers has amplified. Reporting on instances like this is minimal and difficult to find considering raging political opinions. Nonetheless, should the rights of immigrant workers be limited or has hatred gone too far?

Despite news of rising employment rates and other positive economic indicators, the recession is still very much on everybody’s minds. The Fall 2009 collections that debuted last spring are interesting snapshots of the fashion community’s take on where we were then and where we would want to be this fall. The general consensus is that designers handled the gloom in one of two ways: through extravagance or a more staid conservatism. This, as with any binary system, is a gross over-simplification, and many designers mixed these two elements in one collection.

“We live in a terrible century of banalization and trivialization, of repetitious things; all our world is surrounded by…bombastic things. And we the humans like to experience something unique, once in a lifetime, if never again. All our works have this quality that if you miss them, you will never see them.”

As the semester rolls to a close with bands booking their last shows at The Nines, a capella groups begging you to come to their spring performances and Slope Day just a week away from filling the East Hill with one final musical celebration, I’ve already started to switch the gears on my music agenda to focus on summer.

About 60 ILR students saw their course work come to life yesterday when Patricia Kakalec, deputy bureau chief from the New York Attorney General’s Labor Bureau, lectured to two ILR classes taught by Prof. Kati Griffith, labor and employment law. Kakalec regaled students with real-life anecdotes of subpoenas, labor lawsuits and depositions.

While the focus of Griffith’s courses are the study of law, she explained that, “We study … what the law actually is, but students often don’t have exposure to real practice, real cases, what’s going on out there. So I brought [Kakalec] as somebody who actually enforces the law from the government’s point of view … I think students should get a sense of how things work in the real world.”

Over break I visited friends in New York City, where I had previously lived for five years. During that time I rarely schlepped out to Queens from my Brooklyn apartment — with one big exception: the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Museum summer parties. This time, I decided to take in the museum sans hipster-packed, alcohol-sopped outdoor rave. This trip made me wonder, though, whether beer-goggles were needed to appreciate the often vapid beauty — or more often, politicized disparagement of beauty — that crowds the contemporary art scene.