The Rose Cafe last Wednesday featured Professor Daniel Schwarz, who has taught at Cornell since 1968. His seminar focused on his most recent book, How to Succeed in College and Beyond: The Art of Learning. Of the many topics discussed, the two that I found the most interesting were on diversity and school resources. The topic of diversity was centered around greek life. Dr. Schwarz made the case that, for the most part, those in greek life seek to surround themselves with like-minded and overall similar individuals. Through this, it makes sense that there would be a stunning lack of diversity within some greek organizations on campus and around the country. To pinpoint a specific area, Dr. Schwarz highlighted a lack in socioeconomic diversity among members of these groups. Given that joining and maintaining membership in traditional greek organizations is generally expensive, this point would also make sense. If one is unable to join any organizations due to some financial constraint, those organizations automatically lose and discourage members who otherwise could’ve made great members if their financial situations had been different.

The other area of interest that was discussed involved the constant allocation of school funds worth millions of dollars towards different projects all over campus. As examples, different projects around West campus were mentioned, including the general initial construction and long-term maintenance of West campus. Although I don’t recall the figures exactly, the overall costs ranged from the millions to (if I remember correctly) billions of dollars. Because the amounts are so high, it’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around spending that much to construct and maintain a few buildings, although it makes sense that all of the smaller costs add up to such high figures. I think it’s interesting how we sometimes forget the vast amount of resources and energy that must have went into building and continue to go into maintaining such an important part of Cornell. I look forward to seeing what the future holds for the infrastructure and architecture of Cornell.