THE ARCHIVE

As if things couldn’t get worse, the Daily Sun published an article on Monday discussing the average starting salaries of Cornell graduates. As you can see, the future is rather bleak for those of us in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (#4) who can expect to make significantly less than our collegiate peers. Although the numbers are difficult to refute, the graph itself is misleading and I decided to write a letter to the editor expressing my concerns.

Here’s my letter as it appeared in today’s issue of the Daily Sun:

To the Editor:

Re: “Cornell Class of 2009 Grads Find Fewer Jobs, Earn Less Than In Previous Years,” News, April 19

I glanced at the cover of Monday’s Daily Sun and was dismayed to see a bar graph entitled “Starting Salary for Cornell Grads by School.” Not only does this chart point out that my fellow architects and I will be getting paid far less than other Cornell graduates next year, but it does so in a graphically irresponsible manner. The problem is that the bottom of the graph has been chopped off without indicating a new baseline value. Believing that the x-axis of the graph is zero, we get the impression that students in AAP earn a mere quarter of what one might earn after graduating from the College of Arts and Sciences, and only 8 percent of the starting salary of engineers!

The fifth-year architecture students are stressing out about thesis right now, and this visual affront on our livelihood is unfair. My best friend nearly cried when she looked at the graph and I had to explain to her that the situation is not as bad as it may seem. We can expect to earn about $37,000 next year, which is more than half the starting salary of our rivals in Duffield Hall. And although we are doomed to a low-paying career, it is clear that there will always be a need for our graphic skills.

TL ’10

If I were to describe my stress level right now using the Homeland Security color code, I’d say bright red. The severity of the situation is mostly due to my thesis project, which must be completed before the final presentations on May 11^th. If the next three weeks aren’t miraculously productive, my five year tenure at Cornell will be extended to six, and a serious damper will be placed on the impending graduation festivities.

So far, things are not going very well. Let me list for you some of the set-backs that I have experienced during the past two weeks.

1. I walked into my first job interview and managed to catch the interviewer off guard. He literally jumped out of his chair in surprise when I entered the room. Talk about first impressions!
2. Our college hosted an alumni career forum and I showed up before my classmates to sign up for an open interview. I got the time slot I wanted and stuck around for a couple hours to listed to the panel discussion. To my dismay, the people at Career Services had made a serious error; they posted two identical sign-up sheets and ended up with twice as many names as they could accept. They discarded the sheet that had my name on it.
3. I told my parents over the phone that I am looking forward to a healthy period of unemployment and the line went silent.
4. I woke up on Friday evening and couldn’t find my car in the parking lot behind our house. Apparently I drove it to campus on Wednesday, forgot about it, and walked home with friends. I finally found it with two days of tickets on the windshield; luckily it had not been towed.
5. As noted in #4, I have become nocturnal. I wake up between 8pm and 10pm and work until the following afternoon.
6. I gave a campus tour on Saturday and a girl asked me how I pull it off. How do I manage all the work at Cornell? I almost admitted to her that I was nocturnal and hadn’t slept for 26 hours, but realized that it wouldn’t go over well with the moms. So I spoke about academic advising and time management, admitting only that “I lead a strange life.”
7. Today I deposited birthday money from my grandparents and mailed a check to Commuter and Parking services, suffering a net birthday-week loss of $10.  Sorry Grandma.

The new barriers flanking the bridges at Cornell present a serious dilemma. While they are intended to prevent impulsive suicides,  they invariably provoke a sense of dread among those who pass them every day. As many have already stated in their own way, the natural beauty of Ithaca has been hastily exchanged for chain-link reminders of death.

In the past few days, opinions concerning the significance of the new barriers have plastered on the pages of the Daily Sun and on the fences themselves. Some students have sought to turn the chain-link partitions into memorials by covering them in flowers, while others have sought to undermine the solemnity of the whole affair by attaching bras. The fences along the footbridge in Collegetown received a fresh coat of colorful paint last night and the fasteners on the suspension bridge fence have been repeatedly clipped.

Among the student body, ideas for changing the fences have run wild. In the short term, there is a strong desire to deface them, to cut them down, and to make them into something which they are not. In the long run, students are beginning to imagine viable (in some cases ironic) architectural solutions to the so-called ‘bridge problem’ at Cornell.

Dean of Students Kent Hubbell revealed his own feelings about the suicide fences in a recent email, stating frankly: “As an architect, I look forward to the day when we have much more pleasing, permanent approaches for enhancing safety while preserving the natural and man-made beauty of our campus.”

If the fences are to be re-designed, as the University suggests, what should they look like? How should they feel? What message should the convey?

Considering these questions, a few architecture friends and I decided to initiate a University-wide ideas competition to “Re-Think the Fence.” The goal of this project is to visualize the many ideas people have for the future of Cornell’s bridges and review them as an entire community. Perhaps, in doing so, we might develop a better understanding of what we want (and don’t want) our campus bridges to look like in the coming years.

To participate in the competition, submit at least one 8.5”X11” landscape image of your vision to rethinkthefence@gmail.com before April 16th. Additional details can be found on our Facebook page Re-Think the Fence.

Students returned to campus after Spring Break to find 10-foot high chain-link fences installed on each of our campus bridges. Despite the administration’s repeated attempts to justify these barriers, students are unhappy.  The fences not only destroy the natural beauty for which Ithaca is famous; they are an affront on the wellbeing of the entire student body at Cornell.

Suicidal or not, it is now impossible to walk across the gorge without thinking about death. The fences serve as a continual reminder of those who died and seem to imply that the rest of us need to be fenced in so as not to kill ourselves.  If the university intends to move on from the tragedies this year and improve student morale, it ought to remove the fences so that our campus looks more like a college and less like a concentration camp.

The administration has, unfortunately, backed itself into a corner.  As students continue to criticize the fences, the university continues to defend them by citing various studies and claiming bridge barriers as the “most effective means of suicide prevention.”  We are expected to believe that suicide is a geographical problem, rather than a mental one—and that fences are the only solution.

The problem is that the experts advising Cornell don’t account for the enormous negative impact that  fences can have on a community. To understand that phenomenon we’d have to ask other experts—perhaps historians—who would attest to the long association between fences and oppressive regimes. In the past week, I’ve heard the word “Auschwitz” in reference to the fences many more times than I’ve heard the word “safety.” This can’t be good for anyone’s mental health.

Despite my criticism, I recognize that our administrators are well intentioned. They know that the temporary chain-link fences are ugly and are moving quickly to develop a permanent solution to the “bridge problem”. In the next couple weeks, architecture firms around the country will be invited to participate in a competition to redesign the Cornell bridges with barriers that enhance safety “while preserving the natural beauty of our campus.”

I can imagine what architecture firms might propose for our bridges and it won’t be pretty.  Tall, impenetrable barriers do not dissolve into thin air. And fences of any shape or size aren’t exactly the hallmark of a caring community.

We used to say “Ithaca is Gorges” but the university has moved aggressively to block the gorges and their associated beauty from our lives.  Now, Ithaca is Fences. Is that what we want?

The tour guides at Cornell are working on a new video project to share information and insight about our school with a larger audience. Our idea is to collect questions from the public (prospective students, alumni, parents, etc.) and ask several tour guides to respond to them on camera, so that all of you can hear the answers. Please help us by sending your thoughts to questioncornell@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Don’t hold back. Questions can be as serious or strange as you’d like.