Talk:Cornell University/Archive 1

message: The Cornell page is in dire need of a major overhaul.  It frequently lacks sources.  There are numerous randomly inserted factoids.  While pictures are not necessary as User:Xtreambar seems to imply, the page could use more.  As an Ivy League school, this page gets a high volume of traffic.  As such, it should seem all the more clear that this article should have a higher standard of quality than what currently exists. I suggest looking at a page such as University of Virginia (Yes, I know that UVa is not an Ivy) --128.84.16.90 01:14, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: *I had also been thinking that the page was in need of a major overhaul.  I haven't had a chance to look at the recent changes (by Xtreambar), but I think that page really lacks (or lacked) the necessary perspective about the effects Cornell has had on American higehr education — which should appear in the lead section.  I also agree with 128.84.16.90 on the point that article includes some non-encyclopedic sections and statements. btm 03:56, 6 December 2005 (UTC)

text: *I took a quick look, and I think you did a nice job with the new info, Xtreambar.  However, I agree that more is still needed; hopefully I can take a shot at overhauling the article soon. btm 04:31, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Page Clean Up

message: Does anyone have any good photos that could fill in the blanks left by images that were removed from this article? --Xtreambar 22:39, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Pictures Clean-Up

message: There was a separate article about Clara Dickson hall, which evidently originally claimed the building housed 1000 students.  It also claimed to be the largest dorm on the eastern half of the US; clearly this is incorrect since UMich has at least four dormitories with capacity in excess of 450, and the USNA's Bancroft Hall is over eight times as large as Clara Dickson.  If Clara Dickson Hall has any significance (largest hall, etc.), it should be noted in this article.  Presently, Clara Dickson Hall redirects here, but I will nominate it for deletion if nothing substantial appears here in the next week or so. Fsiler 11:23, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clara Dickson Hall 

message: Can someone please explain the following: "the only university-wide requirements for a baccalaureate degree are to pass a swimming test and take two physical education courses".  Does this mean that, say for example, if you wish to complete a degree in egnineering you have to pass a swimming test? --Commander Keane 11:56, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: That is, for the most part, correct.  As a minor, technical, point, students who transfer to Cornell may be exempt from part or all of the PE requirement, including the swim test.  See, for example,  and .  Additionally, nearly all undergrads (I think CALS students are the only exception) are required to take a writing seminar, unless they have AP or transfer credit .Kime1R 00:18, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I removed the language stating all undergraduate students must complete two writing seminars. First, the requirement may be bypassed with AP or transfer credit as noted, and several colleges only require one writing seminar. Furthermore, my understanding is that the writing seminars are technically college requirements, not university-wide requirements, for instance note the distinction made about "university" physical education requirements by the College of Arts and Sciences . -choster 06:27, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Just as a follow up for Commander Keane's question, I was pursuing an engineering degree in Cornell and I had to take a semester of swimming to pass that annoying swim test. What a pain in the ass. Sorry about being so npov. 68.40.50.73 04:02, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

text: It's a well-established legend; a relative of mine who attended Cornell in the 1920s was familliar with this myth and told it to me as true. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:30, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's the full story on the swim test from a Cornell Daily Sun article in October 2005.  CREarle 16:32, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Queries 

message: Someone with more time than me should write something about myths surrounding the swim requirement.  The usual story I hear is that some rich kid drowns and his/her rich parents donates lots of money with the condition that all graduates be required to learn how to swim.  There are many variations of this, and other schools with the same requirement have stories about it too.  The actual reason seems to have been dug up by Snopes.com (among others) . --C S July 2, 2005 07:09 (UTC)
I've always thought it was a way for Cornell to get people to take swimming classes. Ll 20:02, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a well-established legend; a relative of mine who attended Cornell in the 1920s was familliar with this myth and told it to me as true. Dpbsmith (talk) 13:30, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's the full story on the swim test from a Cornell Daily Sun article in October 2005.  CREarle 16:32, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Myth about swim requirement

message: I have been to Cornell many times (my brother went there), and I must say that there is nothing urban about the area (Ithaca or the campus).  I am not going to remove the "urban" label, but would ask someone who goes there if they would?
:Ithaca is a small city, but it is a city. The campus is urban as opposed to suburban or rural, although it is most certainly not metropolitan. Is there a word which properly conveys this sense?
::As a Cornell alumnus, I would certainly call the campus rural.  Ithaca does not surround the campus in any real sense, and apart from Collegetown, it is noticeably detached from the rest of the city. --Slightlyslack 12:43, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Campus: Urban

message: Are we really going to get into listing and describing individual student groups on the main page?  According to the student activities office, there are over 700 of them.  I think it would be better to put this description in a separate article, and put it in the (already existing) :Category:Cornell_University category. Kime1R 12:52, 27 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, especially since there are many far older or more notable organizations such as Quill and Dagger, the Sun, CHA, the Savoyards, the Chimemasters, CURW, etc.; we could not expect to list all of these on in the main article.choster 16:03, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: The Waiters are mentioned (rightly) in the Cornell University Glee Club article, as they were originally a sub-set of that group.  Their name now redirects to that page. JDoorjam 22:14, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re: Cayuga's Waiters edit 

message: The rivalry between Cornell and Harvard has been quite vigorous in recent years.
While it might not be NPOV, I think it's fair to say that the rivalry lately has been at least somewhat one-sided, in at least two senses.  Firstly, from what I've heard, Harvard students don't pay nearly as much attention to the rivalry as Cornell students do.  More quantitatively, Cornell has gone 15-3-1 (if I count correctly) in regular season games vs. Harvard since the 95-96 season http://www.tbrw.info/ecac/ecac_h2hbyteam.html. Kime1R 21:34, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Did a Harvardian write the hockey section? 

message: It seems to me that several of the changes made from the IP 24.6.177.206 have NPOV issues.  Also, as there have been reverts back and forth, it's probably worth putting on the record (ie. on this discussion page) a dialogue regarding whether to describe Cornell as private or as private and public.  My vote: private and public. Kime1R 06:43, 16 Jan 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Additions of user 24.6.177.206 

message: I think that an article on Cornell housing might be interesting.  This would be a list of the dorms on campus and a quick piece of information about each.   I wrote up one on Risley.  
--Xtreambar 21:58, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Housing Article

message: Watchers of this page should see this poll about whether this page should contain a phrase like "widely considered one of the most prestigious universities in the world". Nohat 15:46, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "prestige" comment 

message: Cornell is not private. This is misleading. It is partially public, therefore it is not private. Can someone change this in the description?
:Cornell is a private university that operates several colleges by contract with New York State. Operating those colleges does not make Cornell a public university in the way the University of California or the other campuses in the State University of New York system are public. As a contractor to the state, Cornell University is as public an institution as the contractors who build roads for the department of transportation. In other words, not public at all, but instead a private entity providing a service to the public by contract with the government. Nohat 04:39, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  not a private school 

message: I notice that the current president is Rawling- he was Cornell's 11th president, and the twelth was Lehman- but Lehman just "resigned" after two years, and Rawling is taking care of things in the meantime... should this be mentioned anywhere?
:If someone's feeling plucky it might make sense to make a table of all of them, with sub-pages, as relevant, to bio pages.  (If someone's feeling positively wiktastic they could do the same for board presidents.....) JDoorjam 13:53, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Presidents

message: ... are pretty barren.  If anyone knows anything about any of them, it would be helpful to add what you know to those pages.  Cheers, JDoorjam 14:35, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: The individual college pages

message: Contributors to this page may be interested in this article, which has been proposed for deletion:
Midwestern Ivy League
Please review the article and provide your input on that article's Votes for Deletion page. - 18.95.1.22 03:59, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Midwestern Ivy League" ? 

message: I thought it would be useful to have an athletics page at Cornell Big Red (intended to include more detailed information that wouldn't belong on this page).  I put up a stub that includes a (possibly incomplete, but long) list of sports that Cornell competes in.  I found an interesting page at the College Hockey Wiki; the page has a useful sidebar (which is, of course, GFDL) that would look good on a page about athletics, which includes the years of Cornell's hockey championships and could be expanded to include other sports.  Does anyone know if other schools have similar Wikipedia pages on their athletic programs?  Also, if you know about Cornell sports or feel motivated to find out, add any info that is relevant to Cornell Big Red. - 24.47.236.78 05:07, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It's linked to from Cornell University in the infobox and About Cornell section. Btm 05:29, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Cornell Athletics

message: There's some loose code around the page, most notably at the top above the infobar, where a law school photo was removed, and at the very bottom of the page.  I didn't want to simply remove it because I thought perhaps that these were parts of design elements someone intended to implement; if their full implementation will better the page, they should be integrated, neh?  Does anyone who knows wiki code want to take a crack at fixing those? JDoorjam 22:26, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clean-up needed 

message: I said:
:I betcha a nickel you can find Curious George in the Cornell Library. I'd frankly be astonished if you couldn't. And I betcha a nickel I can find Hamilton's book on Quaternions in the Boston Public Library. 
While nobody took me up on these bets, it was quickly established that the Cornell library system indeed has Curious George. Now, the BPL's online catalog does not cover the research library or the rare books, so I sent in an email query and received this reply:
:Dear Mr. Smith:
 
:Thank you for your recent inquiry.  According to our catalog, we hold one copy of Lectures on Quaternions,  by William Rowan Hamilton.
:The card catalog information is below:
 
:Lectures on Quaternions, containing a systematic statement of a new mathematical system.  With illustrated diagrams and some geometrical and physical applications.
:Dublin, Hodges & Smith, 1853.
Big libraries are amazing, just amazing. Dpbsmith (talk) 21:40, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aha! The BPL '''does''' have "Lectures on Quarternions" 

message: A.D. and Ezra were followers of the Elephant, and we were idiots for not realizing that the Republican Party was the dominant party in the North after the Civil War.  I cannot believe how long it said that Uncle Andy and Uncle Ezra were Democrats. JDoorjam 04:03, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: They were Republicans

message: I'm snipping the last phrase in the sentence
:Current undergraduate enrollment is now over 13,500, the largest of any Ivy League university, and almost 20,300 total students including graduate and professional students in Ithaca and medical students at the New York City campus, a number comparable to the total populations of other Ivy League institutions.
simply because I cannot figure out what it's supposed to mean. And therefore can't figure out how to verify it. It could mean that Cornell's enrollment is about the same as that of the other seven Ivies combined... but I don't believe that. Our article on Penn says "10,000 undergraduates, 9000 graduates," and, well, Harvard and Yale and Princeton must have a few thousand each.
Does it mean that the New York City campus alone is comparable in enrollment to the total enrollment of other Ivies? I don't believe that either.
Does it just mean that Cornell's total enrollment is comparable to the total enrollment at other Ivies? That hardly seems worthy of mentioning...
Just baffled. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:50, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Ahh, I'd seen that and meant to snip it out but got distracted by something.  There is no possible meaning that is both accurate and relevant, and most that you've called out seem to be neither.  So long as the full population is mentioned in the article, the "comparable (etc.)" passage, misleading at best, can go, IMHO. JDoorjam 21:21, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "A number comparable to the total populations of other Ivy League institutions." 

message: The lead section should really be more of an overview.  As Wikipedia:Lead section says, "the lead should briefly summarize the most important points covered in an article in such a way that it could stand on its own as a concise version of the article."  Other than mentioning that Cornell is in Ithaca and that it's an Ivy League school, it just reads too much like a list of too-specific facts that doesn't really tell readers the main information they would be looking for from an encyclopedia entry.
It's also interesting to note that "for the planned paper Wikipedia 1.0, one consensus recommendation is that the paper version of articles will be the lead section of the web version. Summary style and news style can help make a concise intro that works stand-alone." btm 09:17, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree wholeheartedly with this approach.  I like the lead you created in User:Btm/Sandbox/Cornell_University.  Rather than list an assortment of facts about size, Far Above Cayuga's Water, and the Hotel school, you've managed to pinpoint the essentials distinguishing Cornell from other Ivies.  I think we should just zap the whole beginning, replace it with Btm's lead, and start editing from there.  --C S (Talk) 13:49, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Lead section

message: In my opinion, the "Suicide" section and "Big Red Box" paragraph are not significant enough for inclusion in the article.  The suicide section reads like it admits to being speculation and hearsay.  The only verifiable facts that I can spot are the number of suicides per year and that "Cornell is involved in a collaboration with the Jed Foundation" — neither of these are significant enough to be included in the article.
The section on the logo debate reads like it was written by someone on the ad-hoc committee (i.e., it’s POV): it gives a lot of credit to the committee; it makes claims about the university's administration paying more attention to doing well in rankings that may not be true (especially now that Lehman resigned); and it implies that shifting resources and priorities to improve in the rankings is necessarily a good thing.  Is the logo debate important enough to be included in this article? btm 09:17, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree about the Big Red Box thing.  I boldly removed it. JDoorjam 13:19, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

text: How about chopping up / reworking the "Suicide" section and putting it under the Cornell Legends section of Cornelliana?--Xtreambar 17:02, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: That would work for me.  As I said above, its really not relevant enough for the main article, and, in my opinion, it's just doesn't have enough factual content in current form.  The old Big Red Box section could also have a place in Cornelliana, but could also use a rewrite from how it looked before. btm 03:30, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Speculative sections

message: I stumbled across a question regarding Cornell University's relationship with New York State on another talk page.  The university itself is private but some of its divisions are public.  So students at the school of agriculture pay a state university tuition and New York State residents have an advantage when seeking admission.  Students at the school of arts and sciences pay the more expensive private university tuition and New York State residents have no advantage when seeking admission.  The university publishes a complete list of which divisions exist under which of these two status classifications. Durova 18:20, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The university is private, and all of its divisions are private, though three undergraduate units and one graduate unit are "statutory" colleges, meaning that, by authorization of a statute (and not that they are state colleges), they get funding from NY.  I still haven't seen it documented anywhere that NYS students get preferential admissions in the contract units, though it wouldn't surprise me.  (That talk page, incidentally, wouldn't have been this one, would it?) Cheers,JDoorjam 00:38, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Public/Private 

message: Given the number of other things called Cornell, not the least of which is another institution of higher education, "Cornell" should lead to the Cornell (disambiguation), in my opinion. 24.63.125.223 16:34, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm pretty confident that the vast, vast majority of people who would search for "Cornell" in wikipedia are looking for Cornell University. JDoorjam 17:05, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  That may be true, but I'm sure many people (perhaps even a "vast, vast majority of people") who are not familiar with them would also confuse the two institutions, thinking that Cornell College and Cornell University are related (as Harvard College is the undergraduate division of Harvard University). 24.63.125.223 17:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I concur.  Only once in my many edits have I found a misdirect of "Cornell" to "Cornell University" when the link should have gone to "Cornell College". --Xtreambar 17:26, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't doubt that, but not all Wikipedia readers are informed editors who know the distinction between the two.24.63.125.223 17:42, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

text: You are missing my point. Let me try to explain it another way: the number of Wiki users who visit the Georgetown University page, seeking Georgetown College or the University of Georgetown is probably slight as well. Nonetheless, the clarifications at the top of those articles adds useful information that is relevant to the article, regardless of a user's intended destination. The purpose of an encyclopedia entry is to expand knowledge and such clarifications help in that regard. 24.63.125.223 19:09, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Cornell" redirect/disambig 

message: Any idea why the endowment, and every subsequent piece of information with an endnote, has an endnote reference number that's 2 higher than the actual number of the endnote?  The endowment is listed as endnote #3 but at the bottom it's #1. JDoorjam 17:18, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I noticed that too.  I changed the page with a workaround.  It's a bug either in the ref template (there's a discussion here: Template_talk:Ref#.7B.7Bref.7D.7D_in_image_caption_messes_up_numbering) or possibly even in the MediaWiki software.  Actually, I suspect it's the latter, maybe I'll look into if there's are any related bugs filed for this.  The only workaround I know of is to avoid using s outside of the main text (i.e., in infoboxes, image captions, etc.).  It may also be necessary to override the automatically generated counter for external links. btm 22:18, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  End note numbering