MOUNT VERNON — For the 10th consecutive year, students, faculty and staff at Cornell College will contribute hundreds of hours of community service in a single day — Saturday, Aug. 28 — before opening the school year Monday.

Volunteers will work from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at approximately 25 sites around eastern Iowa.

Last year more than 400 participants donated over 1,500 hours during New Student Orientation Service Day. This is the largest single-day community service project Cornell organizes and serves as the kickoff for a year’s worth of service projects. More than three-fourths of Cornell’s 1,150 students participate in service projects annually.

“Cornell believes in the importance of service and engaging in the world outside the college, and Service Day introduces new students to that commitment,” said Jeff Ramsey, Cornell’s director of Leadership and Service. “A connection develops between the campus and the community. Through Service Day, faculty, staff, students and the community join together to create positive change.”

Several projects are listed below. In case of rain, outdoor activities may be changed or cancelled.
- Washing ambulances and fire trucks at the Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service, 730 First St. East, Mount Vernon.
- Cleaning up trails, Palisades-Kepler State Park.
- Cleaning and painting at Southeast Linn Community Center, 108 S. Washington St., Lisbon.
- Cleaning the facilities, exercising dogs at the Cedar Valley Humane Society, 7411 Mount Vernon Rd. SE, Cedar Rapids.
- Rehabilitating houses and apartment buildings, working on community beautification through the MidAmerica Housing Partnership in Cedar Rapids. Primary work location: 1721 Fifth Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids.
- Cleaning up, washing windows at CSPS, 1103 Third St. SE, Cedar Rapids.
- Sorting donations and cleaning equipment at the American Red Cross, 6300 Rockwell Dr. NE, Cedar Rapids.
- Collecting litter and cleaning up trails at Lake Macbride, Solon.
- Cleaning up at Camp Courageous, Monticello

MOUNT VERNON - An exhibition of ink drawings, watercolors and oil paintings by Grant Wood contemporary Karl Mattern, who taught at Drake University and showed often at the Des Moines Art Center, opens Aug. 15 at Cornell College.

“Karl Mattern: Artist & Teacher,” featuring landscapes, self-portraits and genre-related imagery, continues through Sept. 22 in the Cole Library Gallery. A reception is Sunday, Aug. 29, from 3 to 4:30 p.m. in the gallery. Admission is free. For library hours, call (319) 895-4271 or go to www.cornellcollege.edu.

Born in Germany in 1892, Mattern immigrated to the United States and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and Art Students League under the direction of George Bellows. Mattern joined the art faculty at the University of Kansas in 1925. During his time in Lawrence, his wife, Mary Lieberman Mattern, attended Iowa’s Stone City Colony and Art School, directed by Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, during the summers of 1932 and 1933.

Mattern left Kansas in 1948 to become an art professor at Drake where he taught until age 70. He taught painting and art history at Simpson College for a year before retiring.

The year Mattern arrived at Drake, the Des Moines Art Center opened and he served on its acquisitions committee. One-man exhibitions of his work were held there in 1948, 1951, 1954 and 1960, and a memorial exhibition was held in 1970.

“Well-informed about art’s changing styles, his own work became more abbreviated, more cursory about details. Having survived many epidemics of art fashions he mistrusted the instant flashes and almost instantaneous clashes that kept the scene newsworthy. Mattern followed no identifiable trends, but had gradually shifted the emphases in his own productions according to inimitable convictions,” wrote longtime friend and colleague Leonard Good in the memorial exhibition’s catalog essay.

The Cornell exhibition features works from the collection of Mary E. Kohl of Des Moines and lent by J. Richard Simon, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa. Works by Mattern are also in the collections of several Midwest museums including the University of Iowa Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City and the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas.

MOUNT VERNON — To close its sesquicentennial celebration, Cornell College will confer degrees on 211 students at commencement on Saturday, May 29, 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.

Rich Martin, professor of English, will be the faculty speaker. Laura Arnold of Vienna, Va., will deliver the senior address. She is graduating with a bachelor of arts in English, with minors in philosophy and women’s studies.

Gordon Urquhart, economics and business professor, and Richard Peters, education professor, will receive faculty emeriti status. Urquhart is retiring after 20 years at Cornell, Peters after 16.

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. Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most widely respected academic honor society in the United States. There are 270 chapters in the United States, including seven in Iowa.

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 — Pandemonium, the popular steel drum band at Cornell College, will soon release its second CD, “Organized Chaos,” with songs by Carlos Santana, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder and Roy Orbison.

The band has scheduled two concerts to celebrate the CD’s release: 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 26, and 5 p.m. Friday, May 28, both on the steps outside Cornell’s Youngker Hall. Cornell’s Calypso Singers will join the band in concert. In case of rain, the concerts will move to the Orange Carpet inside The Commons. Admission is free.

“Organized Chaos,” recorded in King Chapel on campus and at Trilogy Production Studios in North Liberty during spring break, features 14 tracks arranged by music professor and director Martin Hearne, including his original “Ubeque Samba.” Other songs include “La Bamba,” “Congo,” “Steel Ellington,” Santana’s “Flor D’Luna,” Lennon and McCartney’s “Blackbird,” Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” and Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing.”

Pandemonium debuted in March 1997, released its first CD, “Six Layers of Shrimp,” in spring 1998 and has performed in France, along the Mississippi from St. Louis to New Orleans, in Kansas City and at several area elementary schools. Current members of Pandemonium and the Calypso Singers are students, two alumni and geology professor Paul Garvin, on the bongos.

“Organized Chaos” will be available in the Cornell Bookstore.

MOUNT VERNON — Robert Froehlich, an internationally recognized authority on investment strategy and global financial markets who is known as Dr. Bob for his dynamic and entertaining presentations, will speak at Cornell College on Monday, May 17, at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons.

His lecture, “Boomernomics: The Baby Boom, Globalization and Financial Markets,” will focus on the investment synergy created when demographic trends driven by the baby boomers converge with the economic trends driven by the end of the Cold War and the creation of the global marketplace. Admission is free.

Froehlich is vice chairman of Chicago-based Scudder Investments and chief investment strategist for Deutsche Asset Management Americas. He has appeared on financial programs on FOX News and on CNBC, including “Squawk Box” and “Kudlow & Cramer.” He was one of the original regular guest financial commentators when CNN launched its new network, CNNfn, in December 1995. He has been interviewed on “Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser,” “Money Line” with Lou Dobbs and “The MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour.”

Froehlich has written two investment books: “Where the Money I$” identifies the dominant global investment trends and themes for the first decade of the millennium; “The Three Bears Are Dead!” explores the investment impact of low inflation, falling interest rates and declining government spending around the globe.

Froehlich’s daughter, Stephanie, is a junior at Cornell.

MOUNT VERNON — Cornell College will wrap up its yearlong sesquicentennial celebration with an exhibit of artifacts and archival images at The History Center in Cedar Rapids from May 15 through July 4.

“Cornell College: Celebrating 150 Years of History” will be on display in the lobby. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday (until 7 p.m. Thursday) and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free to the Cornell exhibit.

On Saturday, June 26, there will be a book signing from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. with Richard Thomas, who was a History Center board member for over 30 years and now serves on the board’s collections committee. Thomas and William Heywood are co-authors of the recently published “Cornell College: A Sesquicentennial History,” the first scholarly history of the college. The authors are emeriti professors of history who live in Mount Vernon. The book, along with other commemorative sesquicentennial items, will be sold in the museum store during the exhibit.

The exhibit features a wall mural timeline of Cornell, dozens of archival and modern photos and select items from the Cornell archives, including the original skeleton keys to College Hall, built in 1857; an 1899 diploma signed by Cornell President William Fletcher King, the college’s longest-serving president (1863-1908); an antique student desk with signatures of Cornellians - the earliest from 1861 - inside a drawer; autographs of famous campus visitors; and the original drawings on linen of the tower of King Chapel, the campus centerpiece completed in 1882.

Cornell began classes in 1853, the first college in operation in Linn County. Today the liberal arts college enrolls approximately 1,100 men and women from 42 states and 14 foreign countries. The hilltop campus, which features 41 buildings on 129 wooded acres, is one of only two U.S. campuses listed in their entirety on the National Register of Historic Places.

MOUNT VERNON — For the popular tours he leads of the historic Cornell College campus, Charles Milhauser has been awarded a Certificate of Recognition in the Loren Horton Community History Award competition sponsored by the State Historical Society of Iowa.

The annual Horton award recognizes the best project that increases awareness and participation in Iowa history on a local level. The certificate recognizes an outstanding project related to an education activity. The honors will be presented in a ceremony Monday, May 10, in Des Moines to celebrate National Historic Preservation Week.

Milhauser, of Tequesta, Fla., is a Cornell classics professor and registrar emeritus. Over his 30 years at Cornell, he created a personal archives of Cornell history on thousands of notecards. In 1980 he began offering tours of the historic campus. At last count he had conducted 365 such tours.

For Cornell’s sesquicentennial in 2003, he and the college offered enhanced tours during homecoming last October that incorporated seven Cornell students and one alumnus reenacting legendary characters from Cornell’s past. Milhauser wrote the original historic tour script as well as the reenactment scripts. Several hundred alumni attended each of four tours, led by Milhauser and Dee Ann Rexroat, chair of Cornell’s sesquicentennial committee and director of college communications. Response was so positive that Cornell plans to offer the reenactments annually at homecoming.

Milhauser wrote “Cornell College: 150 Years From A to Z,” a coffee-table book published a year ago to mark the beginning of Cornell’s sesquicentennial celebration.

MOUNT VERNON — Kathie Olsen, former chief scientist at NASA who was appointed by President Bush as associate director for science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, will lecture at Cornell College on Monday, May 10, at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Her lecture, “From a Science Degree to the White House,” is the first in Cornell’s Donna Russell Fox Women in Science Lecture series. Fox attended Cornell in the 1940s and is a retired speech pathologist at the University of Houston.

Olsen was appointed to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in 2002. Previously she had been chief scientist at NASA, serving as the administrator’s senior scientific adviser and principal contact with the national and international scientific community. She was also acting associate administrator for the Enterprise in Biological and Physical Research.

OSTP advises the president on the impacts of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The Office of Science and Technology, as OSTP was known from 1961-73, was directed in 1969-70 by Lee DuBridge, a 1922 Cornell graduate and internationally known physicist who also was White House science adviser to Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.

Olsen earned a bachelor of science degree, with honors, in biology and psychology from Chatham College and a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California, Irvine. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of neuroscience at Children’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School. At the State University of New York at Stony Brook she was a research scientist at Long Island Research Institute and an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral science at the medical school.

Prior to joining NASA in May 1999 she was the senior staff associate for the Science and Technology Centers in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Integrative Activities. From February 1996 until November 1997 she was a Brookings Institute Legislative Fellow and then an NSF detail in the office of Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana. Preceding her work on Capitol Hill, she served for two years as acting director for the Division of Integrative Biology and Neuroscience at the NSF, where she has worked and held numerous other science-related positions.

The Donna Russell Fox Women in Science Lecture series will bring to campus high-achieving women in the science or social science communities to lecture and serve as role models for students intending careers in these fields. Fox holds a doctorate in speech pathology and psychology from the University of Missouri. She taught for 30 years at the University of Houston, where her primary research focused on cleft palate toddlers, along with other communication disorders.

The lecture series, initiated in 2004, honors Fox’s parents, Raymond and Cecillia Russell.

MOUNT VERNON — The Cornell Jazz Combo and Cornell Jazz Ensemble will perform Wednesday, May 5, at 8 p.m. in Ringer Recital Studio of Armstrong Hall. Admission is free.

The Cornell Jazz Combo will perform a program including the jazz standards “Pennies from Heaven” and “Take Five,” plus a new blues called “Awesome Sauce” composed and arranged expressly for the combo by director Don Chamberlain. “Take Five” was written by alto saxophonist Paul Desmond and became one of the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s best-known numbers. “Little Sunflower” (written by trumpeter Freddie Hubbard) and “Dealer Takes Four” (recorded by T.S. Monk in 1994) round out the combo’s concert.

The Cornell Jazz Ensemble will present a sendoff performance prior to its trip to New Orleans and Kansas City, which is part of a class exploring the origins and major performers of two important styles of early jazz. In keeping with the theme of the trip, the band will play a swinging rendition of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” arranged by Les Hooper. Other pieces are inspired by the big bands of the Kansas City jazz scene, especially the Count Basie and Benny Moten bands, including “The Red Bank Express” (Basie was born in Red Bank, N.J.) and the Basie favorite “Li’l Darlin’” composed by Neal Hefti.

Since many of the Kansas City bands were “riff” bands, the Jazz Ensemble will perform two “head charts” - arrangements created during the performance - based on the tunes “Moten Swing” and the Jazz Ensembles’ original blues called “A Cold One.” Members of the band learn the melody and chord changes for a tune and then play a variety of riffs and solos to create the arrangement.

MOUNT VERNON — The women’s studies program at Cornell College will mark 20 years with a commemorative lecture by program founder professor Diane Crowder on Thursday, April 22, at 11:10 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.

Crowder, professor of French and women’s studies, will talk about Monique Wittig, French writer, theorist and a founding leader of the French feminist and lesbian movements, in a lecture titled “Remembering Wittig: A Personal Memoire.”

Crowder has published numerous articles on Wittig’s works and was one of three American scholars invited to participate in an international conference in Paris in 2001 recognizing the publication of Wittig’s collected articles in her native France. The French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur commented that Wittig was the most important philosopher in the global feminist movement since Simone de Beauvoir published “The Second Sex” in 1949. Wittig died in 2003 at the age of 68.

Crowder was instrumental in founding Cornell’s women’s studies program in 1984. She also developed each of the three core courses in the women’s studies major: Theory and Methodology of Women’s Studies, Feminist Theories and the Senior Seminar. Today Cornell’s women’s studies program is an interdisciplinary program that includes approximately 20 faculty who represent a wide range of disciplines at Cornell.