CornellWatch

Maybe this will become a weekly feature. Maybe not? In any case, we have some juicy stuff that you won’t find on the likes of CollegeACB. Here’s one tipster’s gossip:

Yo Evan,

Some wild hearsay: Skorton and some other big higher-ups at Cornell scheduled a meeting with the chief Sun editors for yesterday afternoon relating to a big press release.  Apparently the shit is going to hit the fan at the end of this week, maybe tomorrow or Friday.  BUT at the last minute, Skorton canceled the meeting.  Speculations have been running wild.  Big budget cuts? He’s announcing his new concert series of jazzy flute-saxophone duets with Bill Clinton? Alien invasion of Goldwin Smith? Only time will tell.

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Most of Cornell’s class-attending pedestrians have encountered the earnest appeals of various student groups’ clunky quad displays. I, for one, have calmly settled into the habit of taking their message to heart, and then promptly forgetting it sometime during my requisite mid-lecture nap. After all, it’s a little unrealistic to envision a talking fetus named Elena, especially one giving you facts about her developing organs that she wouldn’t learn until at least ninth grade biology class.

When the encounter involves some 1,300 black flags commemorating the deaths of those killed in the most recent flare-up of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as it did this Monday morning when they were installed, it’s a little harder to criticize the reality of the message or to exorcise it with a nap. Adding fuel to the fire, the flags’ accompanying signs — statements from the UN and Amnesty International about casualties and humanitarian aid — were vandalized by three seemingly “pro-Israel” students later that day. While that situation was quickly rectified and the signs restored, the worst was to come Wednesday night, when the flags were transfigured into a Star of David under cover of darkness, finally garnering the attention of President David Skorton. Here’s an excerpt of the statement he released this afternoon, which neglected to mention the whole, um, Star of David thing:
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