Author Archives: vln22

Students and Campus Culture

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I attended the weekly talk about campus culture with Vice President Ryan Lombardi and it really opened my eyes to a lot of what goes on behind the scenes in administration. He first started off the talk by going into some of the history between administration and the judicial office here at Cornell. Fifty or so years ago, the students didn’t trust the administration, so they wrote into effect a code of conduct that had no input from the university. Furthermore, the university could not enforce the code of conduct at all. 

Flash forward to 2019, the Office of the Judicial Administrator is separate from Cornell University administration. However, instead of continuing to want a clear divide between the judicial office and administration, students now expect administration to step in on certain matters and to stay away when it comes to others. It’s really interesting to think about how our perception of Cornell administration changes depending on what we want. This is even true for many other things. In the moment, when we’re casually talking about a matter that requires some input from groups in power, we only want them to interfere when it benefits us. 

It’s human nature to want to do things that benefit ourselves. Because the talk was about campus culture, Greeklife inevitably came up in conversation. We discussed why people continue to allow Greeklife to continue, even through all the terrible things that go on involving fraternities and sororities. It comes down to personal benefit. Why do people go back to frats where they hear of bad things happening? The possible positives outweigh the negatives. If students don’t have a personal connection to a victim of Greeklife wrongdoing, they believe that it won’t happen to them and the possibility of having a good time outweighs both the chance of something going wrong and the issue of supporting a “shady” organization. I mean no disrespect to Greeklife, but it’s interesting to think about why we don’t blacklist organizations when it might be prudent to do so. Campus culture is really important for shaping who we are as people. As students, we have a lot more power than we think we do. We should use it.

Humans and “The Matrix”

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“The Matrix” is one of those movies that I vaguely remember seeing in the background at family parties as a child. I’d never sat down to watch it thoroughly, and even if I’d had at a young age, I would’ve missed out on a lot. First and foremost, the movie was downright trippy for me. The idea that our reality is a simulation created for us by machines in order to pacify humans while they harvest our energy is crazy, yet not crazy enough to rule out as a future (or current) possibility. 

The blue and red pills definitely represent a choice: to continue to be blissfully ignorant or to face the harsh reality of the world. When Neo takes the red pill, he chooses to be reborn and is pulled out of the comforting world that he’s previously known. This rebirth is filled with typical birthing imagery. He’s somewhat covered in slime, naked, vulnerable, pushed out of a tube and picked up by some foreign claws and brought into the light. I guess when you think about it, that’s exactly what happens to babies when they’re born. They, essentially, take the red pill.

Another idea that I somewhat fixated on during the movie was that humans are like viruses, the idea that humans don’t really respect the balance of things in the world. We go into different parts of the world, take the resources we need, and multiply with an air of disregard for our effect on nature. It hasn’t been until somewhat recently that the majority of people think about or even care about the human impact on everything.

Technology’s Effect on Democracy

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I attended this week’s house talk titled, “Overcoming Polarization in American Democracy”. Personally, I’m not big into politics and I often shy away from the subject. It was really interesting to learn how the two main political parties (republicans and democrats) have grown increasingly distant over the past couple centuries. In the 1800s, history shows that democrats and republicans were somewhat closer in their partisan, ideological and cultural identities. To some extent, they even overlapped. Today we saw that the republican party has veered off to the right side of the spectrum much, much more than the democratic party has veered off to the left. Being born in 2000, I’ve been surrounded with technology all of my life. The internet, laptops, phones, televisions, and every other piece of internet connected technology has the potential to influence us in several different ways. I think that it’s very easy to surround yourself with like-minded people, especially with the internet. Being able to associate oneself with a particular group brings a sense of belonging. Further than that, it’s very easy to propagate ideas within a group against other groups. This may be a reason why we’ve seen so much animosity between democrats and republicans. Technology has such a huge impact on us these days that sometimes we don’t even think about it, but we should definitely be more cognizant or we might blindly follow these influences.

Think Before You Eat

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I attended Bethe Ansatz: Frank Rossi, which was hosted at the Bethe House Professor’s apartment. I wasn’t too sure what to expect from an event named “Just Eats”, but I’m extremely glad I attended. I’d always been very interested in all aspects of food despite being a computer science major in the College of Engineering. There was a wide range of topics discussed during the event, but I’ll just touch upon a few of the ideas that I took away, so the paragraphs won’t really connect.

Dr. Rossi talked about the idea of intellectual property being “stolen” by large corporations that work with scientists that develop products for them, something that isn’t really smiled upon in academia. I’d never thought of GMOs as patented, intellectual property. However, that’s the reality of America. (Of course, excuse me if I’m relaying any information I misinterpreted.) From this, there’s the issue of companies being able to patent certain modifications for GMOs so that it’s nearly impossible for new producers to get into the food industry. There also poses the question as to if there’s a better GMO out there that just isn’t able to break into the industry due to the size and control of main corporations. 

Food waste is also a huge problem in the world. Dr. Rossi strongly believes that we don’t need to produce more food—we need to waste less food. Of course, this was something that I’d been hearing more and more over the past few years, but I think that especially with the precarious future of the Earth and its ecosystems, it should be a much larger issue than it currently is. Cornell Dining has been trying to reduce food waste (as well as cut other costs like water) in the past few years that few students are really aware of. At Appel (which, in my opinion, is superior to RPCC), the removal of food trays was a push to reduce the amount of water being used to wash dining objects, but also resulted in an 80% reduction of food waste. That number is astounding to me, but the psychology behind it is so clear. With a smaller plate, people are more inclined to take less food, due to the plate looking so full so quickly. Without a tray, people won’t get multiple plates of food at one time and the employees won’t have to wash extra objects. 

The last thing I want to talk about is the value Americans have for food. I don’t even think about my view of food at all. Sure, I love it but probably not like other cultures around the world love food. Dr. Rossi compared Americans with the French. In France, it is considered almost barbaric to eat while working, because food is so sacred. In France, people will mainly eat with others and it’s seen as a social interaction. On Cornell’s campus and around America, people do tend to eat alone and often. Dr. Rossi claimed that this almost devalues food because it’s just something that we have to do and we do it quickly and without emotional ties. Americans have this stereotype around the world of being more obese, eating too much, and I really wonder how this type of culture of devaluing food was instilled in a large portion of our population. 

 

Trapped

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“Housebound” was definitely not what I expected it to be. The last third of the movie was actually a lot better than the first two thirds. Spoiler alert: The movie is about a girl with anger issues who gets put under house arrest after trying to rob an atm. The house appears at first to be haunted, but then it gets revealed that there is a benign man living in the walls of the house. All of this is connected to a murder that occurred over a decade ago in that house, though it comes to be shown that it is not the deceased’s spirit is not the problem. 

There’s an interesting theme of being trapped throughout the film. Of course, Kylie is trapped in the house because of her house arrest. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend are trapped with a verbally (and sometimes physically) abusive daughter. The man inside the walls is trapped because he’s afraid of what will happen if he leaves. The predicted murderer is trapped because of the way he is perceived and other bad things (not murder) that he’s done in the past. The police are trapped in their own arrogance and occasional stupidity. Everyone is trapped somehow and it doesn’t help that there is a sense of claustrophobia throughout the movie that is propagated by the cluttered-ness of several settings. 

The only thing that sets all of these characters free is the eventual demise of the true murderer. The best way to fix a problem is to go to the root. The movie made me really think about ways that I, myself, might be trapped in my life and I feel obligated to discover the cause of my own confinement. 

99 Children

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My experience with packing food at the Feed My Starving Children event was much different than what I was expecting. I had no prior knowledge of what would go on, so I assumed that we would be sorting food donations (non-perishables) for children in America. I was very wrong. 

As soon as we arrived at the church, we were asked to put on hairnets. I was sort of embarrassed at first, because of how I looked wearing it. We learned about the process of packing the food, which involved scooping different ingredients into a plastic bag, weighing it, and sealing it. The small 400g bag contained enough food for 5 servings at about 210 calories per serving. If you do the math, that’s 1050 calories per bag of food, but it contained much needed nutrients for children in impoverished areas outside of the United States. 

The packing process was an assembly line frenzy. There’s no other way to describe it. I was a sealer and the job became very mechanical. After a while, my partner and I were working like a well-oiled machine and we were, I dare say, the most efficient sealers in the room. Even though my thumbs began to hurt and the smell of some of the more powdered nutrients wouldn’t leave my nose, I felt really happy to be where I was that night. The embarrassment of the hairnet became non-existent as I worked because it was absolutely nothing compared to the overwhelming enthusiasm everyone had for helping others. We got to watch a video about a young boy who benefitted from the program and it made everything we were doing seem all that much more important. At the end of the night, we learned that we had packed enough food for 99 children for a whole YEAR, which almost brought tears to my eyes. 

It’s sometimes hard to get yourself to do community service in college, but once you get yourself there, it’s all worth it. I didn’t study that night, but I felt like I had grown a little as a person even from those few hours. 

North Campus Expansion

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Going into the Café Talk Board of Trustees, I admit I didn’t really know much or think about how the Board of Trustees affected my life or the lives of my peers. After attending, I definitely came away understanding more about what the Board of Trustees does for Cornell and for the students. The specific conversation that most interested me was that of the Balch renovation. I lived in Balch my freshman year and I really loved it. It seems like the Board of Trustees is really considering all aspects of the effect of renovation. Coincidentally, I met a freshman living in Balch earlier today and found out that because of the future large scale renovation, maintenance is not really taking minor requests at the moment. If something is not urgent, it probably won’t get fixed. I wonder if the university is aware that this is a bit of an issue for the current residents of Balch (disclaimer: it could just be one instance that I happened to come across). 

Renovations aside, I think it’s interesting that the renovation of Balch and the North Campus expansion might increase incoming class sizes in the future. Finding an apartment in collegetown is cutthroat. An increase in class size by several hundreds would definitely put a strain on that already very stressful experience for students, an experience that sometimes causes a lot of tears and even ends friendships. Overall, the Board of Trustees Café Talk definitely opened my eyes to a lot of the future issues that Ithaca may experience with changes happening on campus.