Cornell forms task force to define 'better'... report due 2031?

On Saturday the Cornell print shop stopped taking walk-ins. The letterhead had run out before lunch.

Every office had ordered fresh paper with one line already set in the header: we must do better. President Michael Kotlikoff said the university must do better on how it handles sexual assault allegations. The campus heard a command.

By midmorning a new desk in Day Hall had a queue around the corner. Staff would not take a complaint, a budget note or a room request without the betterment form. The form asks for three improvements, then three more, then a vow that the first three were not enough.

Dale Pendergast, chair of the Committee for Measurable Betterment, called the queue a moral win. Better, he said, is a direction, and directions do not stop.

If we can still walk to the copier, we have not done better.

The urn stays covered

At the alumni lounge the coffee stayed under a cloth until someone said the line three times. A visitor from Rochester reached for the tap. A student monitor slid the cup back and tapped a card on the urn.

Marjorie Hull, class of 1979, paid for that lounge. She said she would fund three more urns only if the first kept its rules. "I did not write checks so Cornell could shrug," she said. "I wrote them so Cornell would do better, and then do better than that."

Skip Harmon, of the campus group Standards First, called the coffee rule the republic in miniature. "They will not stop at the urn," he said. "Next they ask the chapel bell for a self-assessment. Then they ask whether it rang with enough remorse."

So this is where we are... A president says the place fell short, and the remedy is a form that cannot be finished. I'm just asking the question nobody else will... If must means must, who gets to say the job is done?

Kotlikoff's remark, as Fox News reported, was about how the university handles allegations after questions over fraternity cases. The sentence left the building. It came back as a rule for coffee.

Pendergast said the committee meets again next Saturday, then the Saturday after. He would not name the unit of better, because naming it too soon would fail the test. The shop window asks customers to return when there is paper, and a clerk said the slogan was out of ink.