MOUNT VERNON — Summer hours for the college run Tuesday, June 3, through Friday, Aug. 22. Official office hours are 8 a.m. to noon and 12:30 to 4 p.m. Below are special hours of operation during the summer for various campus departments.

Facilities
7 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

The Commons
8 a.m. - 4 p.m. Monday through Friday

Bookstore
9 a.m. - 1 p.m. Monday through Friday (closed June 16-17 for inventory)

Cole Library
8 a.m. - 8 p.m. Monday-Tuesday
8 a.m. - 4 p.m. Wednesday-Friday
10 a.m. - 2 p.m. Saturday
Closed Sunday; closed Friday-Saturday, July 4-5

Hilltop Fitness Center (beginning June 2)
6 - 9 a.m., 11 a.m. - 1 p.m. Monday-Friday
9 a.m. - noon Saturday
5:30-8:30 p.m. Sunday-Thursday
Weight Room
6:30-7:30 a.m. Monday-Friday
9-11 a.m. Saturday
5:30-8 p.m. Sunday-Thursday

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College will confer degrees on 192 students graduating during the sesquicentennial year commencement on Saturday, May 31, at 1:30 p.m. in the Richard and Norma Small Multi-Sport Center. Each graduate will wear a 2-inch-wide medallion featuring the college’s sesquicentennial logo and hung from a ribbon of purple and white, the school colors.

Kerry Bostwick, assistant professor of education, will be the faculty speaker. Her address is titled “It’s My Way … Or My Other Way.” Alison Carley of Fargo, N.D., who is graduating with a bachelor of special studies with a major in English and minors in women’s studies and psychology, will deliver the senior address, “Ends on a Hopeful Note.”

Saturday events begin at 9 a.m. with a baccalaureate service in King Chapel. The Rev. Catherine Quehl-Engel, college chaplain, will deliver the sermon. Seniors’ words of thanksgiving for family, friends and mentors will be read at the service.

Cornell’s Delta of Iowa chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will hold a reception at 10:30 a.m. in Cole Library. Among more than 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States, Cornell is one of only 262 with an active chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most widely respected academic honorary society in the United States.

After a buffet luncheon from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Cornell seniors, faculty and administrators will assemble at 12:45 p.m. in the Multi-Sport Center for the traditional academic procession that begins the 1:30 p.m. commencement ceremony. The public is invited.

MOUNT VERNON — A University of Pennsylvania political scientist will speak at Cornell College as the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar at 11:10 a.m. Thursday, May 22, in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Rogers Smith will lecture on “The Political Importance of Stories of Peoplehood,” which covers the religious, ethnic and historical myths and narratives of the origins and characters of political communities.

“I’ll discuss Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tale of King Arthur and other kings of Britain in his 12th-century ‘History of the Kings of England’ as a story of peoplehood,” Smith says. “I’ll also discuss North Korea’s current invocation of the myth of Tan’ Gun, the legendary divine founder of the Korean nation, and President Bush’s inaugural address, which centered on what he termed the ‘American story’ and argued that its ultimate author was God.”

During his two-day campus visit, Smith also will visit politics and sociology classes and dine with students and faculty. This year the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Program made available 14 distinguished scholars to visit member campuses. The purpose of the program is to allow an exchange of ideas between the visiting scholars and the resident faculty and students, contributing to the intellectual life on campus.

Smith teaches American constitutional law and American political thought, with special interests in issues of citizenship and racial, gender and class inequalities. He is the author or co-author of four books: “The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America”; “Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History,” which was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in history; “Citizenship Without Consent: The Illegal Alien in the American Polity”; and “Liberalism and American Constitutional Law.” He is currently completing “Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Memberships.”

From 1980 to 2001 Smith taught at Yale University, where he was the Cowles Professor of Government and received the Yale College Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Prize. He has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and Yale. Under a two-year Carnegie Corporation grant, he is researching a book to be titled “Civic Horizons: Achieving Democratic Citizenship in Modern America.”

MOUNT VERNON — Cole Library at Cornell College will host readings by poet Kevin Prufer on Thursday, May 15, and New Zealand fiction writer Paula Morris on Tuesday, May 20.

Both readings, at 8 p.m. in Room 108 of Cole Library, are free and open to the public.

Prufer is the author of two books of poetry, “Strange Wood” (Pleiades/LSU, 1997) and “The Finger Bone” (Carnegie-Mellon, 2002), as well as the editor of The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). He teaches at Central Missouri State University, where he edits Pleiades, a journal of new writing.

Of “The Finger Bone,” poet Susan Ludvigson says, “Prufer spins us into bizarre, occasionally uncomfortable recognitions. He does it through language so imaginatively brilliant that even the ominous and the sad are imbued with pleasure. I have not encountered such an exciting book in years.”

Morris wrote her first novel, “Queen of Beauty” (Penguin Books, 2002), while studying for a master’s degree in creative writing at New Zealand’s Victoria University, where the work won the Adam Foundation prize for best portfolio and has since landed on several best-of-2002 book lists in New Zealand. Her short fiction has been published in journals and magazines in New Zealand and the United States, including Landfall, Metro and Hayden’s Ferry Review.

Morris holds the inaugural Schaeffer Fellowship to the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded a Teaching-Writing Fellowship for the next academic year. She earned a doctorate in American literature and has worked as a record company vice president in New York and as a frequent reviewer and writer for New Zealand newspapers and magazines.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College vocal music students will perform pieces from musical theater, opera and operetta in a program titled “Beau Soir,” or “Beautiful Evening,” on Saturday, May 17.

The performance is at 8 p.m. in King Chapel. Admission is free.

The program includes selections from “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Consul,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Kismet,” “Les Misérables,” “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Robber Bridegroom.” The evening will conclude with Stephen Sondheim’s “Our Time” from “Merrily We Roll Along.”

The students are under the direction of Jonathon Thull with music department accompanists Sarah Libert and Lynda Hakken.

MOUNT VERNON — Odaiko New England will give a performance on the Japanese drum, or “taiko,” Tuesday, May 6, at 6 p.m. on the Orange Carpet in The Commons at Cornell College. Admission is free.

The taiko is deeply rooted in the everyday cultural and spiritual life of Japan. For centuries, the rhythm of the taiko coordinated the work of farmers in the fields, spoke to the gods during religious festivals and directed soldiers in battle. Performance taiko is a new art form developed in post-war Japan and introduced to the United States in the late 1960s.

Odaiko New England, founded in Brookline, Mass., in 1995, is one of a handful of taiko groups on the East Coast. Today the group performs at festivals, museums, colleges and other venues mainly throughout New England and the Northeast.

MOUNT VERNON — David Hansen, judge on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, will receive an honorary doctor of laws degree from Cornell College at 11 a.m. Thursday, April 24, in King Chapel.

Hansen, of Mount Vernon, has served on the federal Court of Appeals since 1991, when he was appointed by President George Bush. In 2002 he was named chief judge — only the second Iowan selected chief judge — and held that position until last month, when he took senior status, a semi-retirement of sorts. The 8th Circuit includes North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Arkansas. The court, based in St. Louis, hears appeals of decisions made in the federal courts in those states. There are 11 active judges on the court.

Hansen’s first judicial appointment was as police court judge in Iowa Falls, from 1969 to 1973. After six years in private practice, he was appointed to the Iowa District Court bench in 1976, to the U.S. District Court for Iowa’s Northern District by President Reagan in 1986 and then to the appeals court. He has written more than 2,550 decisions, including a major decision interpreting the constitutionality of the Telecommunications Act, which then was considered by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hansen is a nationally known authority on issues surrounding the Prisoner Litigation Reform Act and the Habeas Corpus Reform Act.

His service to Cornell includes lecturing in politics department classes and participating on interview practice panels to prepare students nominated for Truman Scholarships. He is scheduled to teach a course, Current Cases Before the Supreme Court, with politics professor Robert Sutherland in November.

Hansen earned a law degree with honors from George Washington University in 1963, then served as a captain in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and received an Army Commendation Medal. He and his wife, Ginger, have two sons, James and Robert.

MOUNT VERNON — The seventh annual Cornell College Student Symposium will feature research by 70 students — the largest number to present at the campus symposium — on Saturday, April 12, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at The Commons. Admission is free to the event, which is open to the public.

“The Student Symposium serves as a venue for some of our most engaged and accomplished students to share their work with the broader campus community and others, and it demonstrates the remarkable range of interests being productively pursued in and beyond the classroom at Cornell,” said Dennis Damon Moore, dean of the college.

Topics include implicit memory in pigeons, cross-cultural dating preferences and measuring the wind.

The symposium, which originated as a way to spark intellectual conversation and growth on campus, is one of the premier events at Cornell. This year, 70 students worked with 30 faculty members in 18 different departments and programs. Presentations will take one of two formats: lectures of about 20 minutes apiece summarizing projects and their findings, at four sessions in Hedges Conference Room, Harlan Dining Room and the Rathskeller (9 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 1:15 p.m., 2:40 p.m.), and poster presentations offering visual displays of projects along with explanatory comments, at two sessions (9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 3:30 p.m.) on the Orange Carpet.

Following the symposium, Cornell’s Delta of Iowa chapter of Phi Beta Kappa will hold its annual induction ceremony at 3:45 p.m. in Harlan Dining Room. Thirteen students have been selected for membership based on academic potential, scholarship, creativity, professional attitude and character. Phi Beta Kappa considers members from the top 15 percent of the senior class and the top 5 percent of the junior class. Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most widely respected academic honorary society in the United States. A reception will follow the ceremony.

MOUNT VERNON — Franklin Littell, a leading international scholar on the Holocaust and genocide studies, will speak Monday, April 14, at Cornell College on the Holocaust and the 1900s as a century of genocide.

His lecture is at 11 a.m. in Kimmel Theatre. Admission is free. The lecture title, ” ‘Who Remembers the Armenians?’ The Century of Genocide,” refers to Adolf Hitler’s comment about the world not caring if he proceeded with plans for genocidal slaughter.

Littell graduated from Cornell College in 1937, Union Theological Seminary and Yale University. He is emeritus professor of religion at Temple University, a former president of Iowa Wesleyan College and founding member of the board of directors of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., serving from 1979 until the museum’s opening in 1993.

He was the first Christian appointed by the Israel cabinet to the International Council of Yad Vashem, the international heroes’ and martyrs’ memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem. He lives in Merion, Pa.

The 20th century as a century of genocide reached its low point with the murder of 6 million Jews during Hitler’s reign, notes Littell, but the beginning of this genocidal period can be traced to the murder of 1.2 million Christian Armenians in the dying throes of the Holy Muslim Empire, 1894-95 and 1915-16.

“The governments of the democracies were ineffective, if not totally passive, in the face of both genocides,” Littell says. “In the emergence of international cooperation since 1945 — in the United Nations, in the European Union and other regional alliances — there is hope that free peoples are learning to think and to act cooperatively and creatively before being backed up against the wall.”

The lecture is sponsored by Cornell’s Chaplain’s Office and the Lecture, Artists, Cultural Events Consortium.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College doesn’t give up its secrets easily, but classics professor and registrar emeritus Charles Milhauser found enough interesting tidbits after 30 years of research to fill a 160-page coffee-table book, “Cornell College: 150 Years From A to Z,” published this month by WDG Publishing of Cedar Rapids for Cornell’s sesquicentennial.

Milhauser will sign copies of the book from noon to 1 p.m. Monday, April 14, on the Orange Carpet in The Commons at Cornell. An open house and reception for him follows, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Brackett Guest House on campus. The book can be purchased at both events.

Rich in archival photos never before printed, the book showcases Cornell history that is “memorable, funny or quaint, charming or unusual,” Milhauser writes in the preface. His research touches on more than 100 topics, including conductor Aaron Copland losing his score in Mount Vernon, Frank Lloyd Wright lecturing by candlelight in a building he ranked as the second ugliest in the world, the Cornell airport and Cornell’s connection to Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg, Martin Luther King Jr. and other major historical figures.

Milhauser, a former teacher of Latin, Ancient Greek and English at the University of Iowa, came to Cornell in 1964 as assistant professor of classics. From 1970 until his retirement in 1993, he was registrar, frequently fielding requests for historical information and documentation. In these searches he often came across facts and anecdotes unrelated to the question at hand. These tidbits he jotted down on index cards, eventually amassing thousands, his own archive of Cornell history.

“At first, my subjects involved academic matters and the buildings, but as I sought the answer to a question at hand, my eyes invariably spotted items about Cornell students, faculty and campus visitors. Here, in these personal accounts, I discovered a truly fascinating history of Cornell College,” says Milhauser, who lives in Tequesta, Fla.

“The book contains what I consider the choicest items from my collection about people, places and events that define Cornell,” he says. “Were it not for the fact that I live in Florida, I should be spending my retirement in the college’s archives.”

Since 1980, Milhauser has offered historical tours of the campus, and at last count conducted 362 such walking tours. As he did with the book, he donates his research and writing time for a column, “Cornelliana,” that he authors for the college magazine, the Cornell Report.

“My 30 years at Cornell were unequivocally happy and rewarding both professionally and personally. My book is my way of saying thank you for all that Cornell has given me,” he says.

“Cornell College: 150 Years From A to Z” costs $44.95 and is available at the Cornell Bookstore in The Commons, by phone at (319) 895-4378 or online. Two Mount Vernon gift shops, the Silver Spider and the Perfect Blend, also sell the book.

Cornell will mark its sesquicentennial during the 2003-2004 school year, with a major celebration during homecoming Oct. 18 and special exhibits at the History Center, the Eastern Iowa Airport and the Cedar Rapids Public Library. A formal history of the college, written by emeritus history professors C. William Heywood and Richard Thomas, will be published toward the end of the celebration.