INDEPENDENT SINCE 1880
The Corne¬ Daily Sun Vol. 135, No. 1
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2018
n
24 Pages – Free
ITHACA, NEW YORK
News
Arts
Sports
Weather
Dance Team Qualifies
Wrapping Up the Impossible
A Milliman Bucks
Rain Showers HIGH: 71º LOW: 52º
The Big Red Dance Squad has qualified for the Universal Dance Association’s College Dance Team National Championship. | Page 3
Nick Smith ’20 and Zach Lee ’20 weigh in on the latest Mission: Impossible film.
| Page 6
Men’s lax head coach Peter Milliman shed his interim tag after guiding the Red to the NCAA quaterfinals. | Page 24
Univ. Names First Female Dean of AAP By SARAH SKINNER
Sun Assistant News Editor
COURTESY OF THE DOES CORNELL CARE WEBSITE
Maplewood mayhem | Members of a local union said that the problems with the Maplewood construction could have been avoided with the use of local labor.
Construction Union Blames C.U. for Not Using Local Labor on Maplewood Project By SHRUTI JUNEJA Sun News Editor
As students began returning to campus on Friday, members of a local construction union group gathered in eight locations around campus wearing bright red T-shirts that said “Does Cornell Care” in response to the University’s decision to move away from hiring local workers in student housing construction projects. The main objective of the self-described “informational programming” was to get people to sign an online petition, which calls upon the University to require that local skilled trade workers, companies and vendors complete the construction on any future student housing project. Over 700 people had signed the petition as of Friday afternoon, David Marsh, secretary- treasurer of the Tompkins-Cortland Building & Construction Trades Council, told The Sun. The Tompkins-Cortland Building & Construction Trades Council is a group of construction trades unions working and living in Central New York that is affiliated
Health insurance hassle | After a change in the process in which waivers are reviewed, an estimated 2,000 more students were denied the option to waive the Student Health Plan. VASUDHA MATHUR / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
with the AFL-CIO and is the group behind “Does Cornell Care” project, according to its website. In particular, the union members are trying to draw the public’s attention to multiple issues that occured recently in the construction of Maplewood, a graduate student housing complex, by EdR, a Tennessee-based collegiate housing development firm. Construction issues have delayed the opening of Maplewood, which was scheduled for August 20, by four to six weeks, inconveniencing over 100 students, The Sun previously reported. “We’ve had a lot of success, the local skilled construction unions and their contractors have for years built buildings, complex buildings, on Cornell’s campus on time and on budget,” Robert Boreanaz, who is on the Tompkins Cortland Building Council, told The Sun, as he stood with a group assembled outside of CTB. “There have been a lot of problems on the project that could’ve been avoided had Cornell require EdR, this TenSee UNION page 5
2,000 Initially Denied Option to Waive Health Plan Due to Audit Change By MARYAM ZAFAR Sun Staff Writer
An estimated 2,000 more students were initially denied the option to waive the Student Health Plan for the 201819 academic year compared to the previous year, according to Christopher Payne, director of administrative services at Cornell Health. The increase in initial denials — which, if not success-
fully appealed, change a student’s payment from $370 for a Student Health Fee to about $2,800 for the SHP — is attributed to a change in the process which reviews waiver applications. According to Payne, in the 2017-18 academic year, 95 percent of waiver applications were approved, as 10,695 out of 11,224 waiver applications were accepted. See INSURANCE page 4
J. Meejin Yoon ’94 will become the next dean of Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, the University announced Tuesday morning, making Yoon the first female dean in the school’s 122year history. Yoon will serve a five-year term as the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the college, set to begin on Jan. 1, 2019. She will leave her current position as the architecture department head at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she has taught for 17 years. She was also the first woman in her position at MIT, which shares the spot of second-best graduate architecture program in the country with Cornell’s architecture school, according to an AAP press release. Yoon described her achievement as feeling “natural, like it was finally time.” DEAN YOON ’96 “It’s amazing that it took 122 years for a woman to be named to this position, so it’s really an honor and awesome to be the first woman named in this deanship,” she said in an interview with The Sun. “It’s not because I’m a woman that I’m taking on the deanship and I’m going to do things a different way,” Yoon said. “I think it’s just finally time that women in leadership positions are rising to those positions and being sought after for what they bring to the table.” After graduating from Cornell with the AIA Henry Adams Medal, which honors one student from each graduating class for “excellence throughout their academic career,” Yoon earned her master of architecture in urban design with distinction from Harvard University in 1997. According to Yoon, the transition from leading only an architecture department at MIT to having to oversee three departments at Cornell will be a “big change” that she finds “exciting.” She told The Sun that she hopes to “amplify” the positive traits of each aspect of architecture, art and planning, while “fostering intersection” and allowing for cross-departmental collaboration to achieve more than what any single departSee DEAN page 4