PSEC:  December 10, 2003, 1:30 - 3:00pm, Olin 702
AGENDA

1:30 - 2:15     Functional Requirements for IRIS Digital Collections (guest speakers:  Peter Hirtle, Bob Kibbe, and Brenda Marston)
2:15 - 2:45     E-Resource Usage Statistics (guest speaker:  Karen Calhoun)
2:45 - 3:00     Discussion of Lehman's Questions for Engagement (below)

CALL TO ENGAGEMENT QUESTIONS:
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QUESTIONS FOR ENGAGEMENT

1.  What should we be teaching our students?  What intellectual
dispositions, character traits, and essential knowledge should we be
nurturing?  How can we inspire our undergraduate, graduate, and professional
students to become intellectual and moral leaders of their communities?  How
can we prepare them for well-rounded lives that incorporate artistic,
athletic, cultural, humanitarian, political, and social dimensions?

2.  How should we be teaching?  Have new technologies and research on how
students learn created possibilities for better pedagogy, or are they mere
distractions?  What kind of mentorship, inside and outside the classroom,
should we provide our students at the different stages of their educations?

3.  Whom should we be teaching?  What mix of undergraduates, graduate
students, professional students, and non-degree students will best help
Cornell achieve its educational mission?

4.  Where should we be present?  As our world has changed, we have added new
places where we teach those who would earn Cornell degrees.  How much should
we be extending ourselves, our resources, and our reputation around the
globe?

5.  What does our land grant mission mean today?  What forms of extension
and public service are the best modern expression of Senator Morrill's
program for having outstanding universities contribute to the practical
education of society?  Should we do more to ensure that the fruits of our
research become part of the fabric of the larger society?

6.  How should we collaborate?  We already collaborate with other great
universities in the United States and around the world, on projects large
and small.  What other institutional partnerships, international and
domestic, might permit a scale of endeavor that would allow us to accomplish
things we cannot do alone?  With whom might we collaborate, closer to home,
to enhance the upstate New York economy and/or strengthen our ties to New
York City?

7.  Should we be identifying special domains of research emphasis where
Cornell is unusually well situated to make enduring and significant
contributions?  Can such an identification be reconciled with the highly
adaptive decentralization that has been one of the hallmarks of research
innovation at Cornell?  We have already identified some candidates for
special emphasis:  information science and computing technology,
post-genomic life sciences, and nanotechnology.  Additional themes which
have the potential to draw on multiple disciplines where Cornell has great
strength might include: technology and society; race and religion;
globalization's consequences; humanity's relationship to the natural and
built environment; peace, liberty, and security; and global health.

8.  How should the University be organized?  Our complex web of
institutional structures and processes has, for the most part, provided a
healthy mix of stability and flexibility.  But are some features
anachronisms?  Do new forms of knowledge production and dissemination
require different structures?  Might organizational changes better enable
faculty, students, and staff to achieve their individual and institutional
ambitions?