Howdy.

Haven’t heard that one in a while, eh?

Come to think of it, there are probably more than a few of y’all who haven’t heard that one, well, ever, at least on these pages. The debonair denizen of Dixie discoursing with you presently has, after all, docked himself south of Mr. Mason and Co.’s distinguished demarcation since bidding adieu to our fair Cornell U. — and her ever-salient Sun, always available in print if not in the Ithaca sky — this time two years ago.

But.

Since we’re on the topic — and, indeed, speaking the right language — let me get right to the discussion that I’ve retreated from retirement to have with you.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Yes, mes amis, it’s true: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It was roughly 700 days ago that, after much deliberation, the Convocation Committee for the Class of 2008 was preparing to welcome Maya Angelou to campus to deliver our send-off speech. Just as she had done at President Clinton’s inauguration, Dr. Angelou would go on to inspire many of us in attendance — including yours truly — with the same knack for words that won her the Pulitzer Prize.

“You can be kind and true and fair and generous and just, and even merciful, occasionally,” the celebrated author and poet told us. “But to be that thing time after time, you have to really have courage.”

I was listening. What, however, of Cornell writ large?

It is no secret that the politics of the Big Red tend to run anything but. Democrats at Cornell, that is to say, never have to worry about being a minority on campus — unless the Tompkins County Green Party has a particularly good year.

In a few weeks’ time, our university will afford to Nancy Pelosi — Speaker of the House and Democratic partisan nonpareil — the same position of honor that it did to Maya Angelou two years ago, capping a decade of convocation speakers that have included James Carville, Wesley Clark, David Plouffe and the President from Hope himself.

The question is, was the decision to invite Nancy Pelosi a courageous one? The decision to invite Bill Clinton? General Clark? Any of the speakers these past 10 years?

“Courage,” Churchill said, “is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

Does it take any amount of courage — Churchillian or otherwise — for the average Cornellian to listen to Barack Obama’s campaign manager deliver the verbal equivalent of a thank-you note for the youth vote?

In January, fellow conservative and Sun columnist Mike Wacker ’10 advised by way of this newspaper that, in future, Cornell should seek convocation speakers that allow “seniors to put aside their differences, come together as one, and jointly celebrate an important milestone of their lives.”

I appreciate the sentiment — but have a different suggestion.

Amazing people — and amazing speakers — can be, and usually are, amazingly controversial. This is as it should be.

The concept of higher education is controversial by its very nature. Properly run, a university should challenge us in ways that we have never before been challenged. What we read, what we write, what we hear and what we discuss during our college years should both inspire and — indeed — offend us.

Yet this is where our own university so often misses the mark.

Far above the busy humming of our conservative country looks our Cornell proudly down, intent on challenging all save herself.

She trumpets the virtues of free speech with her words and works — but fails to prepare her students for the full force of the First Amendment through her endorsement of on-campus censorship and enforcement of do-good, feel-good speech codes. She holds community-wide forums to chastise conservative journalists for protesting her policies via print — but punishes nary a progressive who crosses even legal lines in pushing the campus further left. She readily doles out the wisdom of a James Carville or a Nancy Pelosi — but rarely, if ever, requests that of a Mary Matalin or a Newt Gingrich.

She is always ready to teach — but, it seems, never willing to learn.

Cornell must begin to look within if we want to continue to be admired without. Even if it is unlikely that much of the Cornell community will heed conservative ideas, the university must nonetheless provide the opportunity for its students to hear them. By insulating the campus in a liberal bubble, Cornell is ensuring only that the students it seeks to shield leave intellectually lazy and wholly unprepared for life in the reality beyond Ithaca’s ten square miles.

Changing up convocation — arguably the University’s most public and emblematic event each year — would be more than a good start. Inviting, say, a Mark Kirk ’81 or an Alan Gura ’92 from time to time would strongly signal to both the community inside Cornell and the community outside Cornell that ours is an Ivy League university every bit as revolutionary as it was when Messrs. Cornell and White founded it, an institution both welcoming yet challenging to any person of — you guessed it — any study.

“The most successful tyranny,” one-time Cornell Professor Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, “is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.”

It’s time to open convocation — and, with it, our own shining city upon the Hill.

For now: best of luck, Madam Speaker. And the rest of you — drop me a howdy of your own sometime.

– Mark Coombs is a 2008 graduate of Cornell U.

Mohammad Mofrad started his mechanical engineering career studying fire. Now he focuses that passion for mechanics into curing humanity’s greatest ailments.

Mofrad, an assistant professor of bioengineering at U. California-Berkeley, examines how physical forces interact with living systems on a cellular level within the cellular biomechanics field.

“As a mechanical engineer by training, I always have a mechanical eye on phenomena I encounter in nature, and nothing captured my eye better than the cell,” he said in an e-mail. “You can see the beauty and the beast of nature in the cell. It has an unending mine of important engineering and scientific questions that you can wrestle with, and every little contribution you make toward the understanding of this field has double blessings; you enjoy the science and engineering of it, but also feel that you are eventually making a little step toward tackling a human disease.”

Although biomechanics dates back to Galileo Galilei, researchers have only recently been able to delve deeper into the area thanks to modern microscopy and experimental technologies.

“Francis Crick and Arthur Hughes eloquently articulated (that) if we were compelled to suggest a model of the cell, we would propose Mother’s Work Basket – a jumble of beads and buttons of all shapes and sizes, with pins and threads for good measure, all jostling about and held together by colloidal forces,” Mofrad said in an e-mail. “Some 60 years later, our understanding hasn’t changed. The field of cell mechanics is focused on defining these beads and buttons, pins and threads, and how they come together and interact.”

In his lab, Mofrad and his students are looking at cellular biomechanics as it relates to human diseases, such as cancer and HIV/AIDS. Atherosclerosis – the build-up of plaque in arteries and the leading killer in the United States – is an overarching interest in Mofrad’s research. By looking at the condition from a mechanical perspective, he noticed that it does not occur randomly in the body but rather at specific sites, such as curved arteries and smaller, branching arteries. He believes that mechanical factors contribute to the disease’s development.

In addition, Mofrad built a model of the aortic heart valve that he hopes will allow researchers to predict the calcification of one of the major tissues in the aortic valve.

“We’re trying to go where experiments cannot go,” Mofrad said.

This interest in diseases began when he interacted with patients on a personal level during his fellowship at MIT and Harvard Medical School.

“That’s why I do these fundamental projects, but at the same time I always have a disease project; I always have one foot in the fundamental and have a disease project going on so I stay in touch with reality,” he said.

After 10 days without food, hunger strikers at U. California-Berkeley ended their demonstration Wednesday evening while representatives of the strikers met with UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau to discuss their demands.

The strike, which began May 3 as a demonstration focused on a controversial Arizona immigration law and has attracted attention worldwide, concluded as all but one of the 18 strikers ate ears of corn together in a symbolic gesture. UC Berkeley senior Alejandro Lara-Briseno said he will continue to go without food until he travels to Arizona May 20 to meet with family and then travels to Mexico, where he will meet with other organizers.

Meanwhile, five students and one union worker met with Birgeneau in California Hall to represent the strikers. After a nearly two-hour meeting, the representatives announced the conclusions of the discussion to a crowd of about 150 supporters outside the building.

The strikers had demanded that Birgeneau denounce the Arizona immigration law, make UC Berkeley a sanctuary campus and provide extended protections for undocumented students, drop all student conduct charges against activists, stop cuts to low-wage employees, suspend conduct procedures and initiate a democratic, student-led process to review the code, as well as commit to using nonviolent means to ensure safety at demonstrations.

In a May 7 statement, Birgeneau addressed their first demand by calling for the repeal of the Arizona law.

As a result of the meeting Wednesday, campus officials will begin to collect reports from ethnic studies and similar programs on campus in order to assess how to improve such programs. A task force charged with examining the needs of undocumented students to be assembled by the campus next fall will now incorporate worker input.

Another previously announced task force to examine the code of student conduct will now also examine the process for handling conduct cases. The task force will also now incorporate students outside of the ASUC and the Graduate Assembly.

The campus will not drop conduct charges against student activists as protesters requested, but will consider offering students facing conduct charges a community service sanction for their involvement in the Nov. 20 Wheeler Hall occupation rather than a seven-month suspension.

In order to address the protesters’ concerns about union workers, campus Labor Relations Director Debra Harrington will schedule a meeting with union representatives.

UC Berkeley junior Kathy Vega said because the representatives at the meeting said resources on campus are limited for communities of color, a task force will be assembled by campus officials to look into this issue next fall.

The campus center for Chicano/Latino research will be compensated $50,000 each year for the next five years by the campus for their loss of state funding. A project examining the impact of the Arizona immigration law will be funded with this money.

According to strikers, Birgeneau said he will also consider how to address an Arizona law passed Wednesday that bans ethnic studies classes.

Protesters and administrators had been back and forth in discussions for days, trying to agree on the conditions for ending the strike.

In the past week, numerous parties have urged Birgeneau to meet with the protesters, including state Sen. Leland Yee, D-San Francisco/San Mateo, and a group of more than 80 professors. Dozens of other organizations, from campus to Japan to Brazil, also pledged support for the strikers.

Many protesters said though they were happy the meeting with Birgeneau took place and that it was a “great first step,” they wished the conversation had happened sooner.

“Regardless of what went down in (California Hall), I think what we accomplished as a community was the biggest thing,” said freshman Marco Amaral. “This was not a Latino issue, or a Filipino issue, or a black issue. This was a human issue.”

Ohio State U. men’s basketball forward David Lighty broke a bone in his left foot Tuesday, the same injury the junior suffered in December 2008, the team announced in a press release Wednesday.

Lighty took a medical redshirt that season, missing the Buckeyes’ final 25 games.

The Cleveland, Ohio, native suffered the injury during a workout Tuesday and will have surgery Friday at the Ohio State Medical Center. According to the press release, typical recovery for such a procedure could take up to 12 weeks, which would sideline Lighty through the summer.

“I seen better days..” Lighty posted on his Twitter account. “But what don’t break u will make u.. Its just fuel to my fire..”

Lighty averaged 12.6 points and 4.5 rebounds per game during his junior season at OSU.

Posing in front of the beer pong table with a Keystone in your hand. The obligatory ‘MySpace’ pic with bloodshot eyes and a joint in the background. Yup, it’s your run-of-the-mill college kid’s Facebook album. And it could get you in quite a bit of trouble.

I’m not talking trouble with the police, necessarily. I’m talking trouble with your future employer. Or, in more blunt terms: your job security could be totally dependent on what your Facebook says about you.

Whenever talking to some of my more distant friends about social media, some seem to think that whatever you put behind a privacy screen on Facebook stays that way. Forever.

“Nope, there is no way that a potential employer could see that,” they say.

But it really doesn’t matter.

What is private today might be painfully public tomorrow. Facebook is constantly reinventing its privacy statement. Every tweet since the beginning of Twitter has now been cataloged by the Library of Congress.

Essentially, your “protected” photo today might be just as easily accessible as photos of Justin Bieber through Google tomorrow.

Why all the scary hurly-burly? Because it’s reality. I’m not trying to convince you that terrorists are going to blow up SeaWorld. I’m trying to tell you the Internet is not private just because you check a box. Courts have been nebulous at best regarding whether or not the government can search data.

If the government can have a peak, there isn’t much stopping a potential employer.

Granted, I’m not advocating that people stop having fun or doing crazy things in college. Learning and growing through experience is what college is all about. But what separates the follies of our parents is the compact box of microcircuits you might be reading this on right now. Incriminating photos stayed in albums. Albums weren’t posted for all 500 of your friends to see.

Here is a good rule of thumb: If you would rather not explain it to your grandmother or in a job interview, you might not want to post it. Be smart about what you say or do. Because that one drunken tweet could be in the Library of Congress for generations to come.

In 1980, best-selling nonfiction writer Michael Lewis and his friend were almost arrested by Princeton, N.J. police for speeding in a golf cart. Driving down Washington Road in the middle of the night, Lewis and his friend aimed for the boat house, speeding so quickly that police cars couldn’t keep up — until they hit an uphill turn on Faculty Road. The two were caught by police officers and Public Safety and were assigned odd jobs on campus as punishment.

Nearly 30 years after his delinquency, Lewis, a former Wall Street trader, is the author of “The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game.” Published in 2006, the work chronicles football player Michael Oher’s path to NFL fame and was adapted into the 2009 Oscar-winning film. Though his success in the literary world might suggest otherwise, Lewis’s career path reflects a commitment not to fame and fortune, but to pursuing his passion in life.

In his undergraduate years at Princeton U., Lewis had a lack of interest in his academic work and a penchant for having fun. “I applied myself to the pursuit of pleasure,” he said.

His long-time friend and former roommate Carter Roberts described Lewis’s life philosophy as, “Life is short, and you should do things that are fun and with people you like.”

A former art and archaeology major, Lewis described himself as an “indifferent” student for his first two-and-a-half years at the University. He joined Ivy Club in the spring of his sophomore year and defined his Princeton experience by the friends he made and the experiences he shared with them.

In his senior year, Lewis and his roommates — including Roberts, who now heads the World Wildlife Fund — lived in a suite above Blair Arch, which Lewis described as a “24-hour open bar.”

Roberts recalled Lewis as having an “impish quality.”

“He always gets this giddy sense of excitement when he’s about to tell you a story,” Roberts explained. “Like he’s about to tell you the dirtiest, most delicious story you’ve ever heard.”

Roberts noted that he and Lewis’s other friends were always unsure of what path Lewis would eventually pursue. “We were never quite sure what Michael was going to become,” he said.

But in his last year-and-a-half at the University, Lewis became a “serious student,” he said, discovering an interest in early Renaissance art and becoming “obsessed” with his thesis, titled “Donatello and the Antique.”

Art and archeology professor William Childs, who was Lewis’s thesis adviser, said that Lewis was a “fine student [who] worked hard, thought hard and listened hard.” But Childs advised Lewis against becoming an art historian after graduation.

“I was interested in the scholarship,” Lewis said, “but I didn’t have the scholarly disposition.”

But through the process of writing his senior thesis, Lewis, who had never written for any on-campus student publications, realized that his true passion was writing. He explained that he wanted to do what John McPhee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, did on a daily basis.

“It’s like writing a senior thesis over and over again,” Lewis said. “Immersing yourself in something you’re passionate about and writing about it.”

As he became absorbed in his thesis, Lewis also enrolled in an introductory microeconomics course, taught by Wilson School professor Uwe Reinhardt, and discovered a passion for economics.

“The world was a conspiracy of people who understood this stuff [economics],” Lewis said. “I wanted to be part of the conspiracy rather than a victim of it.”

Lewis earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and worked on Wall Street and in London with Salomon Brothers. Lewis noted, however, that he found working on Wall Street difficult, given his lack of experience and knowledge.

Lewis explained that he was drawn to Wall Street for validation. “I didn’t want people to think I was a failure,” he said. “I wanted people to think I was doing well.”

He said that he believes the appeal of Wall Street is the same factor that leads students to Princeton. “It’s a tribute to the reluctance of [a] 21-year-old person, who’s got world by tail, to take risk[s] and control of their lives,” Lewis said. “The easiest way to gain validation in the world is Wall Street. It’s a sad thing, a total waste of talent.”

Lewis eventually realized that his true passion was writing. “I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Wall Street,” he said. Since his time at the University, Lewis had been submitting writing samples to magazines, and when he began writing his first book about Wall Street traders, he quit his Wall Street job to write full-time. The book, titled “Liar’s Poker,” was published in 1989 and was on The New York Times bestseller list for 62 weeks.

But Lewis’s undergraduate years did not foreshadow his success as a writer.

Lewis “wrote terribly,” Childs said, jokingly adding, “It’s probably why he makes millions writing now.”

“I would not describe Michael as the best writer or most disciplined writer in our room,” Roberts said, noting that Lewis’s success was a “tribute to what happens when you devote yourself to a certain craft.”

Speaking from his own experience pursuing his passions, Lewis said he hoped that current college students wouldn’t miss their chance by following a path to quick validation.

“If you don’t take risks with your lives now, it’s unlikely that you will,” Lewis said. “If you have a glimmer of passion, go try it. If you don’t, you’ll always regret it. My glimmer of passion was being a writer.”

Being a student is no easy job with vigorous courses, mountains of homework and a credit load that keeps you from sleeping at night.

But there’s one advantage that American students might overlook at times: speaking English.

International students are faced with the same challenges, but in a language that many are learning for the first time. Students who cannot meet academic and English language requirements to gain acceptance to Oregon State U. can take classes at INTO OSU, where they gain credits that will go toward their major and increase their language skills.

“The purpose of INTO OSU is to prepare students for regular classes, which means helping them with their English as well as adjusting to the culture,” said Chris Bell, academic director at INTO OSU.

INTO is a company based in the United Kingdom that recruits international students to universities in more than 50 different countries. INTO OSU is the first partnership between the company and a university in the United States.

Arriving in the U.S. during the winter of 2006, Anwar Alkhalifah, a 23-year-old sophomore in computer and electrical engineering, enrolled in what was then the English Language Institute, now known as INTO OSU.

“I had no English base when I started out,” Alkhalifah said. “Pretty much I knew nothing and I wasn’t able to have conversations.”

Alkhalifah’s vocabulary was very basic, with an understanding only a limited number of words such as “apple,” “table” and “door.” There was no solid existing foundation of vocabulary or grammar, and comprehension was also a struggle.

To officially gain entry to the university, international students must attain a passing score on the TOEFL language proficiency test and Alkhalifah’s English language skills were so low that he started out at level one.

“We worked on grammar, writing, reading and comprehension,” Alkhalifah said.

He needed extra help, so he went to office hours and looked to his American roommate.

The need and pressure to learn English quickly was heightened by Alkhalifah’s scholarship stipulations, which required that he take language classes for only a year before proceeding on to integrated university classes.

“When the year was approaching, I asked for a six-month extension and received it,” Alkhalifah said.

After a year and a half of English classes, Alkhalifah went ahead and took the TOEFL test required for university admission and wasn’t able to meet the needed score.

“After taking the test, I decided to go to Chemeketa Community College in Salem to take classes there,” Alkhalifah said. “I did pretty well; I got As and Bs and my English had improved a lot.”

In the fall of 2008, almost two years after he arrived, he returned to OSU and enrolled in official courses. Alkhalifah enrolled in WR 121, chemistry, math and health and human services courses.

The results weren’t what he had hoped for.

“I failed most of my classes because I wasn’t able to do the homework by myself,” Alkhalifah said. “The pace was too fast and I started to fall behind.”

Now as a sophomore, Alkhalifah’s experience with the Oregon education system has led him through ups and downs, but the struggle to succeed continues. With a 14-credit load that includes engineering, math, computer science and health and human services, academic life can seem hard at times.

“I’m not too happy with how I’m doing right now,” Alkhalifah said. “I have a lot of reading and I’m slow at it and end up getting behind.”

The path many international students take is similar to Alkhalifah’s: working on language skills at INTO OSU to eventually fully integrate into OSU classes.

The most popular program at INTO OSU is academic English, which focuses on language instruction from beginner to advanced levels, along with development of academic skills to prepare students for the university system.

“The measure of our success is based on the number of students we can integrate into OSU and seeing that they are achieving their goals, whatever those may be,” Bell said.

For Bell, success is not only academically based.

“Success is for the student to excel academically but who also integrates well in the community and that’s hard to measure,” Bell said.

With integration comes the task of keeping up with increasingly challenging classes.

Susan Meyers, director of writing, has worked with international students in the past and from her experience, one area of improvement for international students is on Writing Mechanics.

“Many students are prepared on the big picture components such as thinking critically and being engaged with ideas,” Meyers said “However, they may still need to continue working on more localized issues, such as grammatical patterns, for quite some time.”

A Writing 121 course can be challenging for both native English speakers and international students whose work is graded on the same criteria.

“All students are held to the same standard when it comes to grading,” Meyers said. “I ask for drafts – that way there’s an opportunity to improve the writing, and hopefully by then we have identified the student’s patterns.”

Success involves participation from the student and professor.

“It takes effort from both sides,” Meyers said. “Students need to learn what their resources are and the professor needs to put in the time to help.”

Time is one of the educational components that Alkhalifah wishes professors had more of when it comes to getting extra help.

“I’ve gone to office hours where there are a lot of students there for the same thing,” he said. “By the time it’s your turn you might only get five to 10 minutes; that’s not enough.”

In efforts to improve, Alkhalifah hopes to make some changes.

“Sometimes I put too much pressure on myself and that doesn’t help anything,” he said. “I also plan to take advantage of going to more office hours and managing my time better.”

He never gives up the goal of increasing his English language skills.

“I always try to continue to improve my English through all forms possible,” Alkhalifah said. “I’ve already come a long way.”

Ohio U.’s entire campus could receive a full facelift soon.

A renovation plan that once included only OU’s South Green now includes the other two residential greens and numerous academic buildings.

President Roderick McDavis said OU wants to expand the renovations to include almost every part of campus.

“What is exciting to me is that what started out as a singular green plan … has now escalated to an entire university plan, and I really think that’s what we needed to be talking about early on,” said McDavis.

The three-phase plan calls for the renovation of 36 dorms, including 19 on South Green, nine on East Green and eight on West Green.

“Right now, all we have is Bush Hall scheduled and approved for architectural engineering,” said Christine Sheets, executive director of Residential Housing. “We are currently reworking our 10-year plan, and we will meet with the Board of Trustees in June for the master plan.”

McDavis estimated the residence hall renovations could cost $400 to $500 million. Administrators originally estimated the South Green renovation would cost $200 million.

“These halls are in terrible shape,” said Marnette Perry, chairwoman of the Board of Trustees, at the January meeting.

Three of OU’s 42 dorms – Lincoln, Shively and Biddle – have been renovated in the past five years. South Green’s Adams Hall was constructed in 2007.

South Green’s Front Four were built between 1965 and 1967. South’s other dorms were completed between 1968 and 1970. None have been fully renovated since. Dorms on West Green were completed in the 1960s. East Green’s dorms were built in the 1940s and 1950s.

OU’s current renovation model consists of taking one dorm off-line each year, but administrators say by the time all buildings have been updated the first ones renovated will be in disrepair again.

One option for the renovations would be to take numerous buildings off-line simultaneously.

“We have to think that through very carefully,” McDavis said, adding that taking down too many buildings might negatively affect the university’s enrollment.

Top administrators have proposed a public-private partnership for the renovation, which would let OU share or completely offload the cost of renovations. The Board of Trustees must approve any such deal.

OU plans to bring in architects and consultants to look at the structures of the buildings; some buildings may need to be gutted and redone while others may need to be demolished and rebuilt.

“We certainly want to maintain the architectural design that we have on campus,” McDavis said. “When you walk this campus, it’s one of the most picturesque in the United States, but when you go inside our buildings, we look old.”

Before the final vote on the renovations, the Board of Trustees plans to tour the residence halls in June, said Katie Quaranta, OU media specialist for communications and marketing.

Some Trustees have already toured the dorms, including Trustee Sandy Anderson, who stayed on West Green during Pelotonia, a cancer fundraiser sponsored by Ohio State U.

“I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all the dorms like Adams; however it will take some time,” Anderson said. “I am very interested in having the dorm experience be positive; we want to offer a positive learning experience for our students.”

The Board of Trustees expects to have more cost estimates and plans at their meeting in June. A final decision is in “the not-too distant future,” McDavis said, and could be made at the board’s September meeting.