INDEPENDENT SINCE 1880
The Corne¬ Daily Sun Vol. 131, No. 91
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2015
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ITHACA, NEW YORK
12 Pages – Free
Dining
Arts
Sports
Weather
French Toast Face Off
Studio Ghibli
Red Versus Green
Cloudy HIGH: 7º LOW: -7º
Emily Jones ’18 goes on a nostalgia-fueled quest for the best French toast in town. | Page 6
Stephanie Meisel ’18 finds “movement, liberty and evasion” in The Tale of Princess Kaguya. | Page 7
ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Women’s basketball splits weekend games against Harvard and Dartmouth. | Page 12
Arts Quad Sculpture Will Be Featured In PBS Documentary By KIMBERLY LEE Sun Contributor
All the world’s a stage | The Schwartz Center for Performing Arts in Collegetown houses studios and stages for performing and media arts majors and the community.
Years Later, Community Feels Effect of PMA Cuts By GABRIELLA LEE Sun Staff Writer
Five years after $1 million worth of budget cuts transformed Cornell’s Department of Theatre, Film and Dance into the Performing and Media Arts department, some Cornellians and Ithacans say the cuts have negatively impacted Cornell’s relationship with the local community. Prior to the budget cuts — which were implemented over a two-year period beginning in 2010 — the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts drew audiences of about 20,000 people, according to Prof. Bruce Levitt, performing and media arts. Now that figure has “dissipated to near nothing,” according to Brian Murphy ’16, president of the Schwartz Ambassadors — a student group that promotes and plans performing arts events and welcomes prospective students. When the entire University faced budget cuts in 2010, the theatre, film and dance department was challenged to re-think the structure and curricula of the department under a new budget, according to Gretchen Ritter ’83, dean of the
It was supposed to come down in December, but now the 46-foot needle sculpture on the Arts Quad will not only remain until at least spring — it will also be featured in a Public Broadcasting Service documentary. The PBS show, which is currently in the making, will focus on the installment, titled “A Needle Woman: Galaxy was a Memory, Earth is a Souvenir,” as well as its unique design and creation. Producers of the series “Art in the 21st Century” are creating a documentary on the scientific process behind the sculpture’s polymer surface used by Kimsooja, the artist-in-residence for the Cornell Council for the Arts biennial and her team of scientists, according to Stephanie Owens, director of the Cornell Council for the Arts. “Kimsooja, Susan [Sollins, founder and director of “artt21”] and I spoke at length about the potential of a follow-up documentary on Kimsooja's project with her son, architect Jaeho Chong and Cornell,” Owens said. “It is wonderful to have an art documentary on the project, particularly to tell the story of the artist’s collaboration with Prof. Ulrich Wiesner, [materials science and engineering], and his Nanomaterials Lab, because it was a process of discovery the entire time.” There may be an on-campus screening of the documentary when it is completed in the spring, according to Owens. The sculpture is part of the Cornell Council for the Art’s biennial celebration, which aims to highlight collaboration between artists and scientists and explore creativity and research “on the micro scale,” according to the Cornell Council for the Arts. The biennial is themed “Intimate Cosmologies: The Aesthetics of Scale See SCULPTURE page 4 K.K. YU / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Space needle | Kimsooja’s “Needle Woman,” the sculpture that will be featured in a PBS documentary, has become a well-known fixture of the Arts Quad.
See PMA page 4
Weill Cornell Medical College Receives $6.2 Million Grant
NIH grant to fund research towards curing tuberculosis and other preventable diseases By JONATHAN DAWSON Sun Staff Writer
Weill Cornell Medical College will receive more than $6.2 million in firstyear funding from the National Institutes of Health, which will aid researchers attempting to find ways to prevent tuberculosis-causing bacteria from becoming resistant to treatment, according to a University press release. The overall funding,
provided by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, could total up to $45.7 million over seven years. When an infection from tuberculosis-causing airborne bacteria is not effectively treated, the resulting disease is usually lethal, Dr. Carl Nathan, chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Weill Cornell, said in the release. “Neither academia nor
pharma can solve this problem working alone,” Nathan said. “We have to work together to improve
than it is today.” In 2013, an estimated nine million new cases and 1.5 million deaths from
“We have to work together to improve treatment of tuberculosis, or it will continue to spread...” Carl Nathan treatment of tuberculosis, or it will continue to spread and become even more resistant to treatment
tuberculosis were reported, according to the World Health Organization. Of the deaths caused by bacte-
rial infection, tuberculosisrelated deaths are the largest, according to Dr. Michael Glickman, an infectious disease specialist and Alfred Sloan Chair at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “The incredible concentration of T.B. expertise in the Tri-Institutional community, which includes investigators studying human genetics of T.B. susceptibility, microbiology, and
immunology, constitutes a formidable research team to contribute to tackling these problems,” Glickman said in the release. Tuberculosis-causing bacterium “has learned enough about our immune systems to survive our efforts to eliminate it” due to human co-evolvement, Nathan said. “Two issues have plagued See WEILL page 5