[MUSIC PLAYING]
I grew up in a tiny little town that nobody's ever heard of,
and then I went to Cornell.
I met people from all over the world, people
of all different backgrounds.
I was among them and learning from them.
Coming here, sometimes you think you know everything.
Cornell quickly teaches you that you don't.
And I think it's a beautiful struggle
we have as human beings, wanting to know
so much about the world around us, to be hungry for knowledge.
Not just knowledge, but the application
of that knowledge in a way that is impactful in people's lives.
The gorges, the waterfalls, to me, the campus
is a metaphor for never-ending processes
of evolution, transformation.
Novelty is always around the corner.
There's always an opportunity to challenge oneself,
whether that's physically, socially, or intellectually.
When I teach, one of those things
that I hope my students get is this curiosity that drives us.
The questions we ask keep changing,
and they're really important.
Being able to be in a classroom environment
where you get all of those different perspectives
has been really great for me in molding
a sort of intellectual nuance.
The difficult questions, those are
the ones that, for me, are most worth pursuing.
Elite and egalitarian.
The sense of excellence, but also the sense
of, we accept the common person.
We're a space where everybody can belong.
That was true right from the beginning.
Cornell's freshman class was 1868.
The very next year, the first of African heritage
was enrolled, and the year after that, the first woman.
This was not something that was common
in American universities.
I'm just so proud to be part of the Cornell story.
I feel that when we teach, that we what we do is,
we open up in the students' minds
the capability to reason and to seek out knowledge,
and to gather in knowledge a capability that was always
in them.
We are enabling, rather than teaching facts.
Being a critical thinker, knowing what questions
to ask, knowing how to write a story,
those are all skills that I honed at Cornell.
I was a very idealistic student, and this place
adopted me, readily.
I took a seminar with Walter LaFeber on US-Japan relations,
and I just remember him spending time
with his undergraduate students, and meeting with us.
He had us come in and talk to him about how our term
papers were going, and his grad students were all out
waiting in line out in the hallway,
and you couldn't pull him away from the undergraduates.
And I think that's unusual for a large research university.
Cornell had, I suppose it still does, a tremendous faculty.
I think I would have to rate number one, Vladimir Nabokov.
That man changed the way I read.
He changed the way I write.
Even when I'm drafting an opinion,
thinking how the word order should go, I remember him.
And I can still hear things that he said.
Carl Sagan was an astronomer here at Cornell.
In addition to being a great scientist,
one of his other passions was to share this fascination,
not only with us students, but also with the general public.
His legacy and his fascination for the Universe
has inspired a whole generation of scientists, among them, me.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When I was an undergraduate, there
was a course catalog that was as thick as a phone book.
And I remember being really excited when
I got my hands on that thing, thinking,
I'm not going to take a fraction of these classes.
But it was just cool to flick through it
and think that, I'm walking around this campus
and while I'm studying philosophy or creative writing,
there's somebody taking an industrial labor relations
class, there's somebody doing veterinary medicine,
there's somebody working on architecture, all right here.
As Cornell said, I would found an institution
where any person can receive instruction in any study,
is something that's very much alive, day-to-day here.
There's a respect that's implied by that.
All the different parts of study have merit and insights
to give each other, that we're all stronger by having
any person any study, the mix.
I am interested in science, and physics, and astronomy.
Before I was hired, one of the first people who I
met with Roald Hoffmann.
And I really thought, wow, here's somewhere
that's going to be a really cool place to work,
if I get to hang out with this Nobel Prize-winning scientist,
and have conversations with him about poetry.
Any person can find instruction in any study
or whatever it is, right?
It was a laudable goal, and you're not
going to achieve it completely, but damn, they've come close,
you know?
When A.D. White was helping Ezra Cornell,
he talked about founding a university that
would make the most highly-prized instruction
available to anyone, regardless of sex or color.
And he said that in 1862, when there
was a war being fought over whether one human being could
own another human being because of their coloring,
and when women couldn't own property if they were married,
and couldn't vote.
The inclusion of things like engineering and agriculture
in the founding vision of the university, I think,
really grounded that unpretentiousness,
the practical concerns.
It's an elite school, but it's an inclusive school
at the same time, and it lacks the sort of pretentious air
of other elite institutions.
And I think, really gives it a distinctive identity,
a distinctive culture that I find very appealing.
The idea that you should be able to come to Cornell
even if your family can't afford Cornell's tuition
is just something that's cherished here.
And I think we've done an excellent job, relative to peer
institutions, of being able to do that.
In my last year at Cornell, I took only music and art
courses.
It was a wonderful education.
You never feel like you're siloed into your major.
There's a lot of encouragement to really connect
with people in a different discipline then you.
And when I first came here, I basically
front-loaded with computer science classes.
I knew I wanted to do computer science when I came here.
But also the scheme design class.
Then after that class, I was able to take
a lot of other classes, like art, lighting, and music.
I would actually consider myself, kind of,
more of a designer now than more of a tech person.
Even though I know the tech very well,
I think a lot of my strengths are
being able to merge the two.
Last semester, I was taking a sociology seminar
on Mass Incarceration in the Family.
And the fact that I was able to sit in a classroom
with one of the leading scholars,
or I'm taking a creative writing class this semester
that's similarly taught by, sort of, a leading
poet in the country, just being able to do
that on a regular basis is pretty incredible.
There are a handful places in the world,
and Cornell's one of them, where you can go,
and everywhere you turn, you find
people doing stuff that's just at the cutting edge of what
humanity is achieving.
I'm not talking just about within the realm of academia.
I'm talking about, broadly, the human enterprise.
This is a very tightly-knit community of collaborative,
interacting people from Ithaca to New York City.
And there's been no other time like this in history.
We are at a unique time, where we
are beginning to understand enough
about the molecular mechanism by which diseases like cancer
occur, that we can intervene with knowledge
of fixing what's wrong.
New York City has so much more than just tech.
And I think it's the integration of the tech
into that energy or everything else that's really powerful.
I think Cornell's going to be the major educational presence
in New York City a decade from now,
and we're so proud to be part of that.
What happened to me at Cornell created
my career, my whole persona.
Because I was a science major, with kind
of a minor in journalism, I had a unique background.
And that background enabled me to get a job
as a full-time science writer at the New York Times
when I was 24-years-old.
I'm really interested in Latin America right now,
and I've been to take all these classes in arts and sciences,
and do a minor in Latin American studies.
The end goal isn't always the job.
The end goal, I think, at Cornell, which is really great,
is how to enrich yourself and how
to keep learning, even after you graduate, in the field
that you go into.
Cornell giving you the tools to be
able to develop a career based off of something
that you really, really love, and be successful
at that, that's really the best.
It's like, what else can you ask for?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[LAUGHING AND YELLING]
It's snowing.
[SNOW BEING PLOWED]
[SNOW BEING SHOVELED]
[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC PLAYING]
I took a freshman writing seminar my very first semester
at Cornell, and my professor told me,
don't let your education limit your education,
meaning that, not to let my classes here at Cornell
limit my holistic education.
Because there's so many opportunities
outside of the classroom.
In order to prepare our students to face life after school,
I think it's very important for them not only
to have classmates who are from other cultures,
but for them to go and really get
a meaningful international experience.
Not spending a few days in London or Paris
looking museums, I mean, really getting down there, out
of their comfort zone.
I'm the team lead for AguaClara.
AguaClara is a program that's focused
on providing sustainable, clean drinking water to communities
everywhere throughout the globe.
So we're currently serving about 40,000 people in Honduras,
and we just have three new filters
that are working in India now.
We're a program that is actually doing something
really significant in value.
It's something that I found at Cornell,
and it's just become the most fulfilling part
of my Cornell experience and my Cornell journey.
What we learn here, and what we do here,
and what we discover here is much bigger than ourselves.
To have deep understandings of the places
that our knowledge and discovery can be useful,
to listen really carefully, to what
are the needs of the world, and how can we
respond to those creatively?
All of that happens when students and faculty are
put in situations of relating and interacting
with the world, whether internationally,
locally, through an internship, or a service
project, or some kind of creative project,
research, policy engagements, business partnerships,
working on issues of sustainable development in a community,
that kind of learning that combines
the world and the best of the Academy
is truly exciting and transformative
for our students.
I'm thinking of all these Cornell experiences, Slope Day,
watching the dragon, being in Collegetown, meeting
and making some of the best friends in my life.
Like every parent, you have to use reverse psychology to get
your kids to do something.
So we would never tell our daughter
that you should go to Cornell.
If anything, we'd say, hey, you should
go to a school near home.
And then my wife brought her on a college tour out East,
and our daughter just fell in love with Cornell.
And, you know, it has to come from inside.
It came to her from herself.
She just loved this place, she loved the visit,
and she felt that there was something special
in the atmosphere.
That nurturing environment that I had experienced,
she felt it from inside.
And by herself, said, Dad, if I get in,
that's where I would like to go.
There's a special connection between me
and every single student on campus,
because they're a part of the Cornell family,
and that's what I'm a part of.
And I'm always going to be a Cornellian,
and that's something really special.
[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC PLAYING]
[CROWD CHEERS]
What a performance.
Cornell to the Sweet 16!
Let's go back to Greg Gumbel in New York.
[INSPIRATIONAL MUSIC CONTINUES]
[MUSIC - B.O.B., "AIRPLANES"]
Hello, Cornell.
Ed Helms here, excited to wish you a very happy
sesqui-sem-senial, sesquicen--
A very Happy Birthday, and best wishes for the next 150 years.
Sesquin-tren-tenial?
Ses--
Happy Birthday, Cornell!
Happy birthday!
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday, Cornell!
Saskachew-is-wan.
Happy Birthday, Cornell!
Cornell, Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday, Cornell!
Argh!
(SINGING) This is your birthday song.
[LAUGHTER]
And may you live many more centuries.
Happy Birthday.
[MUSIC PLAYING]