9-7-23 entire issue hi res

and Love on Free Speech, Starbucks

sion, noting both as crucial aspects of the undergraduate experience.

The 2023-2024 academic year’s freedom of expression theme and the recent announcement that the University will terminate its partnership with Starbucks by June 2025 have sparked heated dialogue among the Cornell community. The Sun spoke with Ryan Lombardi, vice president of Student and Campus Life, and Dean of Students Marla Love to gain insight into their views on these topics.

Freedom of Expression Theme

President Martha Pollack announced in April that the 2023-2024 academic year would follow the theme of freedom of expression, reinforcing the University’s commitment to free expression and open inquiry.

The announcement closely followed Pollack’s rejection of Student Assembly Resolution 31, passed by the Assembly in March to urge the University to require professors to provide content warnings in advance of classes that would discuss potentially sensitive material. This resolution faced national backlash for its potential to limit academic freedom and free expression.

Lombardi and Love both emphasized the importance of balancing freedom of expression with diversity and inclu-

“There's… this tension between being a place committed to free expression and being a place committed to belonging and inclusion,” Lombardi said. “What we hear a lot, and where we see ourselves finding space, is in that tension… between these two commitments that Cornell has made as an institution, and [we are] trying to help students navigate that space.” This viewpoint is consistent with Pollack’s perspective on free speech, telling The Sun in May that she will defend diver sity, equity and inclusion initiatives as strongly as free speech.

Love also described the wide vari ety of ideas and beliefs with which students are presented upon arriv ing to college, and that college facilitates an environment for stu dents to consider which ideas they identify with most.

Graduate Found Dead

Last seen on Aug. 14, Yohanes Kidane ’23 was found dead in the San Francisco Bay northeast of the Golden Gate Bridge, according to a press release from the Marin County Sheriff’s Office.

A body was found in the Bay on Tuesday, Aug. 29 and paramedics subsequently pronounced the subject as dead.

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division staff verified that the person was Kidane on Thursday, Aug. 31. Kidane’s death was determined to be by suicide after a Friday, Sept. 1 forensic postmortem examination, with the death occurring primarily due to blunt impact injuries with drowning as a considerable contributing condition.

Kidane went missing on Aug. 14 after traveling by a rideshare service from San Jose, California to San

Francisco. Kidane had just begun his career as a software engineer for Netflix on Monday, Aug. 7.

A recent graduate from Cornell with a degree in computer science from the College of Engineering, Kidane was a teacher’s assistant for discrete math and analysis of algorithms classes, was a research assistant in the Virtual Embodiment Lab and completed a graduate-level course in distributed computing.

Kidane was originally from Rochester, New York.

Kidane’s friend Lucas Achkarian ’23 told The Sun on Aug. 18 that Kidane was a caring and trustworthy person who was always looking to help others.

“Anytime I had any sort of issue, I could come to him,” Achkarian said. “He’s what every person should honestly strive to be.”

Rosamond Thalken grad, a Ph.D. candidate in information science, hoped to use the money from her internship at Apple to pay off her credit card debt. But in March 2022, she received an unexpected email from Cornell, telling her the University had overpaid her $2,000 over the course of several paychecks and that she had to repay the money immediately. Thalken said that when she asked the University if she could repay the money in installments, she was told that she “couldn’t use Cornell as a savings account.”

“I shouldn't have to go into credit card debt to complete a Ph.D. when I'm employed by one of the richest universities in the world,” Thalken said during a Cornell Graduate Students United unionization card drive event on Wednesday, Sept. 6.

CGSU, an organization that intends to unionize Cornell’s graduate worker population, kicked off its efforts with a card drive event on the Bailey Hall steps before moving to recruit signees at several gathering places on campus — including the Arts Quad, Ag Quad, Engineering Quad and the Physical

“College is about this opportunity for students to think, ‘What is it that I believe? What is it that I believe outside of my family, outside of the K-12 system that I was involved in, outside of the community or neighborhood?’” Love said. “You're also confronted with lots of thoughts that might differ from what you believed, or thought of, or felt very passionately. And so this freedom of expression theme year is also representative of this change that's happening for students.”

Love added that she sees her role as helping students to navigate potentially challenging ideas and, beyond simply accepting ideas at face value, to consider which ideas are most equitable and just. She also noted that students should consider how their identities inform the ideas they believe.

“How do we help students [think about] that — not just on topics of race, but [on] topics of religious ideology, on topics of social status and social class, on economics, on politics,” Love said. “All of these ideas are what I think this [year] is about.”

Starbucks Partnership Cornell faced intense pressure from members of the student body and the surrounding area to end its partnership with Starbucks due to allegations of union-busting tactics on behalf of the company in local

Sciences Building. Graduate workers signed union membership cards while a series of speakers spoke on issues affecting their experiences at Cornell, such as lack of access to healthcare or support for international graduate workers.

“We have hundreds of grads signing cards right now,” Sophia Taborski grad, a Ph.D. candidate in classics and an organizer with CGSU, said in an interview with The Sun. “We have a lot of support. We have a lot of momentum.”

A card drive is the first step in the unionization process. For an organi-

zation to call a union vote, at least 30 percent of workers must sign a card or petition stating they would like that organization to represent them as a union. If that threshold is reached, the organization can file a petition to the National Labor Relations Board to call an election. The NLRB will certify that organization as the collective bargaining representative if a majority of the votes in the ensuing election are in favor of the union.

If over 50 percent of workers sign the card or petition during the

Daybook

A LISTING OF FREE CAMPUS EVENTS

Thursday, September 7, 2023 Today

AI and the Future of Work: AI is Accelerating Workplace Shifts

11 a.m., Virtual Event

Center for Innovative Proteomics at Cornell Journal Club

11 a.m. - Noon, 421 Weill Hall

Workshop: “Monetary Policy and the Labor Market: A QuasiExperiment in Sweden” with John Coglianese, Federal Reserve Bank

11:35 a.m. - 1:15 p.m., 498 Uris Hall

Weaponizing Geography: An Environmental and Technological History of Cold War Mega-Projects in Latin America

Noon - 1:15 p.m., Virtual Event

Decline and Fall of Malaysia’s Dominant-Party System

12:20 p.m., 374 Rockefeller Hall

Neurobiology and Behavior Seminar: “Indirect Genetic Effects in Dyads and Groups of Drosophila melanogaster” With Julia Saltz

12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m., A106 Corson/Mudd Hall (Morison Room)

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Seminar Series: Charles Harvey

4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m., Mann Library

Department of Astronomy & Space Sciences Colloquium: “It Takes Two: On the Secular and Stochastic Dynamics of the Weird Wide Binaries in the Milky Way”

3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m., 105 Space Sciences Building

Materials Science and Engineering Fall Seminar Series: Edwin Thomas

4 p.m. - 5 p.m., B11 Kimball Hall

ILR Study Abroad Information Session

4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m., 217 Ives Hall

Acing Your Behavioral Interview

4:30 p.m. - 6 p.m., G76 Goldwin Smith Hall (Lewis Auditorium)

Linguistics Colloquium: “The Identity Relation in Ellipsis: Variation in its Domain of Application” With Vera Gribanova

4:30 p.m., 106 Morrill Hall

Reading by Rebecca Morgan Frank

5 p.m., Literatures in English Lounge, 258 Goldwin Smith Hall

Independent Since 1880

in June and one for incoming freshmen in July — make for a total of 61 issues this academic year. Subscriptions are: $60.00 for fall term, $60.00 for spring term and $120.00 for both terms if paid in advance. Standard postage paid at Ithaca, New York. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Cornell Daily Sun, 139 W. State St., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850.

West Campus Gothics Raise Health Concerns

Bugs, bats, water leaks among issues spooking residents of West Campus Gothic buildings

By SOFIA PRINCIPE Sun Staff Writer

Abbie Conrad ’26, a resident of Baker Tower in Alice Cook House, slept multiple nights wearing her AirPods set to the noise-canceling function. Water was dripping inside the heaters in her room, so loudly it kept Conrad and her suitemates awake at night. She called her on-call graduate resident fellow to report the issue and ask for repairs, but they informed her it was not an emergency and she would need to wait for the maintenance request to be addressed, which typically takes 24 hours to process.

“It just feels like they honestly don’t care that we’re living like this,” Conrad said.

The West Campus Gothics, which includes Baker Tower, have become associated with unwanted critters and maintenance issues among Cornell’s student body, despite their outward, ivy-lined beauty. However, Karen Brown, senior director of campus life marketing and communications, said that it is common for unwanted pests to enter residences through open doors and windows during move-in, and that the University works with local authorities to address any issues.

“We work with the Tompkins County Environmental Health Division as needed to assess exposure risks, and with pest control vendors as needed,” Brown said.

According to Nicole Cioffi ’26, a resident of Founders Hall, another resident found a bat on the third floor. Everyone in the building was instructed to stay in their rooms for an afternoon so animal control could remove it.

Sia Harisingani ’26, who lives in North Baker Hall, said she improvised her own methods of dealing with pests. When she and other residents found two bats in one of the lounges, they were forced to chase one of them with a pillow until maintenance could respond. Harisingani was also ultimately instructed to stay in her room until the bats were removed from the building.

“I was extremely surprised and quite scared when I first saw the bat,” Harisingi said. “Even more so when I realized that there were two.”

Cioffi also said she noticed an abundance of bees and other bugs in her living spaces and communal bathrooms.

“It’s uncomfortable to go into the bathroom and try to get ready for the day and think there are going to be bugs in there,” Cioffi said. “It makes it difficult to live.”

Bat and bug infestations are not the only issues that affect the Gothics, whose residents have also complained of essentials such as showers and window screens falling into disrepair. Both Conrad and Petros Georgiou ’26, a resident of South Baker Hall, said the shower in their suites often lack hot water — an issue that Conrad mentioned could be a safety issue as temperatures begin to drop.

“The shower itself doesn’t even get hot — the water is always cold,” Conrad said. “[This] feels like a health hazard to me, especially as winter comes around.”

Georgiou, meanwhile, said he faced long wait times for basic maintenance such as paper towel replacements and stressed Cornell should be maintaining the older residence halls even as new ones

open on North Campus, a complaint that students have been raising for over a decade.

“Especially with how much they are working on the new dorms, it would be the bare minimum to keep the older dorms to the same status,” Georgiou said.

Brown told the Sun that Housing and Residential Life staff are taking immediate action to address complaints.

“Our team is actively following that

Lombardi, Love share goals for Cornell student experience SCL Sits Down With T e Sun

By SOFIA RUBINSON and AIMÉE EICHER

Sun Managing Editor and Sun Assistant Managing Editor

Whether students are having a lazy day in their dorm room, visiting Cornell Health for a check-up or participating in an on-campus organization, Cornellians are constantly engaging in projects and initiatives developed by Student and Campus Life. Last Tuesday, Aug. 29, The Sun sat down with Vice President of SCL Ryan Lombardi and Dean of Students Marla

Love to discuss the office’s top priorities for the coming years.

Residential Experience

Central to SCL’s priorities is developing and expanding the on-campus residential experience for first- and second-year students. Beginning last fall, all underclassmen were required to reside in campus-affiliated housing, a change that was aided by the development of additional dormitories through the North Campus Residential Expansion project, which added approximately 2,000 beds.

Currently, the historic women’s dormitory Balch Hall is undergoing renovations, which are slated to be completed in Fall 2024, with about half of the dormitory opening in the beginning of the semester, and the other 50 percent by mid-semester. Lombardi said the University plans to begin construction on

the Gothic residence halls on West Campus next summer, focusing on exterior renovations, such as roofing and preventative measures for water leaking, over the course of four years. Residents told The Sun previously that they believe renovations are needed for the Gothics.

The next major renovation planned for the next few years is Clara Dickson Hall, according to Lombardi. He said that SCL has made tentative plans for the next 20 years for all residence halls that will need to be renovated, with Risley Residential College high on the list and Mary Donlon Hall lower in priority, being mindful to space out construction so that ample beds are available for students.

Lombardi also pointed to SCL’s recent decision to change the housing selection process for current sophomores and juniors. Now upperclassmen have the opportunity to reserve on-campus housing for the following year in September as opposed to the spring semester, which is more in line with the timeline students follow when deciding to sign off-campus leases.

“We’re continuing to tweak and iterate and change this process so that we can support as many students as want to live with us on campus in those later years as well,” Lombardi said.

But Cornell’s housing plans did not go without some con-

troversy this year. To start the semester, dozens of mainly firstyear students were forced to live in rooms with more students than the intended layout, or in lounge areas converted into dorm rooms.

“[Converting lounges to dorm rooms] is not a completely new practice for us. It was something that we had to do quite frequently pre-COVID. We still don’t love it. But it does happen when we get into these variables that are not always completely linear,” Lombardi said. “The good news is that of those lounges, none of them still have five students in them, so they’re all de-densified.”

By mandating more students live on campus, Cornell may be helping to slightly alleviate some of the housing problems not only in Collegetown, but also in the greater City of Ithaca. Students wishing to live in Collegetown typically sign leases almost a year in advance and face expensive price tags. The City of Ithaca is the second most expensive city to live in New York State and continues to manage its relatively-large homeless population.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

protocol this week, including looking for gaps in exterior walls and roof joints, and securing screens on windows that lack them or where they’re not tightly attached,” Brown said.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Grad Students Demand Better Wages, Treatment

UNION

Continued from page 1

the card drive, there are two additional methods of recognizing the union. The employer may choose to voluntarily recognize the union, or the NLRB will order the union recognized if the employer commits any infraction that would cause the election to be set aside.

Unions mean different things to different people, according to Connor Davis grad, a Ph.D. candidate in applied physics and CGSU organizer. To Davis, a union is a way to ensure higher workplace safety standards and increased workers’ compensation.

“I work in a high-powered laser lab, and there are huge safety risks,” Davis said in an interview with The Sun. “If I accidentally blind myself, or if I accidentally burn my hands, I have to go through a bureaucratic nightmare for workers’ comp[ensation]. Grad workers have been demanding better workers’ comp for years and the administration has been ignoring us.”

Most speakers at the rally, such as Don-Gerard Condé grad, a Ph.D. candidate in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, focused on the financial insecurity they faced for one reason or another. Condé, who suffers from a disability that requires frequent physical checkups and mental health evaluations, said he was able to manage his care adequately at CUNY Hunter College

— where he completed his undergraduate degree — but Cornell did not provide him with enough health insurance for his required appointments. When Condé tried to take out a student loan to cover his medical expenses, he said it was rejected.

“Most of us haven’t seen a dentist in over a year,” Condé said. “A lot of us with disabilities haven’t seen our specialists in that same amount of time. But Cornell’s estimated cost of living for graduate student workers does not take into consideration those of us who have disabilities or health concerns.”

Robert Cantelmo grad, a Ph.D. candidate in government and the Democratic nominee for mayor of Ithaca, addressed Cornell’s treatment of graduate workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and its financial effects — while assistant professors had their tenure tracks frozen and graduate students were left in limbo, their expenses did not cease.

“Did your rent, your mortgage wait and see? Did your healthcare bills wait and see? Did your child care wait and see?” Cantelmo said.

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun. com.

Asli Cihangir ’26 contributed reporting.

Sofa Principe can be reached at sprincipe@cornellsun.com.

Jonathan Mong can be reached at jmong@cornellsun.com.

Outward beauty | Despite the Gothics’ ivy-lined beauty, the interiors are host to a variety of concerns for students, including unwanted critters and nighttime noises.

Sofa Rubinson can be reached at srubinson@cornellsun.com. Aimée Eicher can be reached at aeicher@ cornellsun.com.

ADMINS Continued

Starbucks locations. Tensions rose between members of the Starbucks Workers United union and the Cornell administration last semester, when organizers occupied Day Hall on May 11 and May 12.

Among the administrators present at Day Hall those days were Lombardi and Love, who met with students and engaged in extensive back-and-forth conversation over the possibility of Cornell ending its contract with Starbucks, as Cornell is a current participant in the “We Proudly Serve Starbucks” program, serving Starbucks products in several on-campus dining halls and cafés.

Asked about their thoughts on the occupation, Lombardi and Love said they both support student advocacy, but also had to balance campus safety and productive dialogues.

“It was the day after Slope Day, so I think we were both in a little bit of a different mindset,” Lombardi said. “I always appreciate student activism and advocacy for things that are passionate to students. It’s not always the most pleasant thing to have a camera stuffed in your face when you’re otherwise just trying to help students have a good experience here. So sometimes, some of those elements might not have felt the best in the moment, but certainly we appreciate student advocacy.”

“Activism is a part of the college experience,” Love said. “But I think also, you all of a sudden have a building where you usually don’t have as many bodies. My thought also is about safety, and how we can keep folks safe, and what safety looks like in those situations. And to navigate the right to protest with also our need to make sure that folks stay safe.”

On July 31, the University decided against renewing its contract with Starbucks when the current contract expires in June 2025. This came after a National Labor Relations Board ruling found Starbucks guilty of violating U.S. labor laws in its treatment of employees across unionized locations in Ithaca and in the permanent closure of the Collegetown Starbucks location

on July 6.

“The institution has decided to move on and select a new vendor, we are going to do that at the end of our contract. And we wanted to take this process on thoughtfully — you can imagine the University goes through a lot of coffee. So this isn’t just a flip the switch kind of thing,” Lombardi said. “Even though we are under a relationship until ’25, we still do also need time to make some transitions not only to find a vendor or vendors, frankly, who can support us at the volume of coffee that is consumed on this campus, but also that we’re going to feel good about going forward.”

Lombardi told The Sun that the University is working on a timeline of full transition by

“It’s not always the most pleasant thing to have a camera stuffed in your face...”

Ryan Lombardi

2025, and that the effort to find and implement a new vendor is starting this fall. He said that initial conversations have occurred between Cornell Dining and the Student Assembly Dining Committee.

Reflecting on the student effort to rid Starbucks from campus, Lombardi said it all circles back to the academic year theme of freedom of expression.

“We’re not always going to agree about things. We’re not always going to see things the same way… It’s not a very rich place if that’s the case,” Lombardi said. But I think what I would hope that we could do is when we do find those moments of tension or disagreement, that we also at the same time don’t dehumanize each other.”

Love added: “We have to embrace everything and do so in a way that’s thoughtful, that lends to conversation and dialogue.”

To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com.

Sofa Rubinson can be reached at srubinson@cornellsun.com

Aimée Eicher can be reached at aeicher@cornellsun.com

03.25.2021

Food Cultural

Appropriation: It’s Personal

By MERIDEN MACH Former Sun Staffer

Iam first generation Chinese-Vietnamese. Both of my parents immigrated to the United States as a result of the Vietnam War. My closest connection to my Vietnamese culture, like many children of immigrants, is food. Food is part of my identity. Food is personal.

Unfortunately, many Asian Americans remember childhood experiences of feeling ashamed after being told that their food was gross or that it smelled weird. As a result, seeing non-Asian chefs successfully sell misrepresentations of the food that we were made fun of for is disrespectful and offensive. When making another culture’s food inauthentically, we fail to respect the culture it originated from, reinforce stereotypes and thus, contribute to oppression known as food cultural appropriation.

I distinctly remember when I started at a new school for first grade; my dad had bought me my favorite lunch — bánh mì from Bánh Mì Chè Cali in Little Saigon, Orange County (please support them if you are ever in the Westminster area of Southern California, they are the best). Bánh mì is a Vietnamese baguette sandwich packed with a variety of meats and pickled vegetables, French pâté and various other condiments. My excitement to eat my lunch quickly turned into shame; I received disgusted glances and was told that my sandwich didn’t smell good like normal sandwiches. That day, I told my dad that I didn’t want him to pack me food anymore. Rather, I wanted to buy food from school to be like the other kids. Looking back, I feel more shame about this than during that one lunch.

Now, I am seeing restaurants not owned by Vietnamese Americans selling “bánh mì” and modifying it to have American cold cuts or pork belly rather than the traditional meats from Vietnamese cuisine and the French pâté. When restaurateurs take cultural foods and modify them, they disrespect the culture and those that were ostracized for it.

Chinese food has especially been a victim of cultural food appropriation. Many Chinese American restaurants have changed their menus to appeal to the fried food that mainstream American palates are used to. For example, orange chicken was a dish that was invented by Andy Kao in the United States.

In 2019 a non-Asian couple opened up Lucky Lee’s and marketed the restaurant as “clean” and less “icky” Chinese food. This fed into the racist stereotypes that Chinese food is unhealthy, cheap and dirty. Furthermore, it dismisses the oppression felt by Chinese Americans that made them adapt their food to Western tastes and the discrimination experienced by Chinese Americans because of the food they eat.

It is important to understand why there are so many Chinese American restaurants in the United States, and why these restaurants serve affordable food. In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which suspended Chinese immigration into the United States and made it difficult for legal residents to re-enter the country. However, there were exceptions to this legislation. Some Chinese business owners were allowed to get special merchant visas to travel to China and bring back employees. Restaurants were a part of this exception, and as a result, there was a Chinese restaurant boom. Many of these restaurants had to operate in dense city centers and on tight budgets which contributed to the stereotype that Chinese food is cheap and dirty.

The United States has only been exposed to a certain type of Chinese food. Chinese food is one of the most sophisticated cuisines on Earth and has been around longer than many other cuisines in the world. Additionally, Chinese food is not a monolith. There are many regions within China, and each religion has its own cuisine.

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Gabriel Levin

Gabriel Levin is a second-year student in the College of Arts and Sciences. His column Almost Fit to Print spans issues in science, social justice and politics. He can be reached at glevin@cornellsun.com.

Cornell's Rocky Relationship with Student Press

As President Pollack put it, “Free expression is the bedrock of democracy…” I should remind the administration that there is no free expression without a free and informed press. At Cornell, student journalists face every obstacle in pursuit of the truth — namely from the Media Relations Office.

Last February, I reached out to Vice President Ryan Lombardi to request a live interview about Cornell’s mediocre mental health services. (The University invested in multimillion dollar suicide nets beneath campus bridges but doesn’t have a single psychiatrist on campus!)

Dr. Lombardi seemed interested and copied Rebecca Valli, the Director of Media Relations, who in turn asked for a prewritten list of interview questions. Any journalist knows that handing over questions prior to an interview goes against best practice. But refuse Media Relations’ every whim and say goodbye to the possibility of getting any answers. So I played their game — something I will never do again.

I relented, sending seven straightforward, punchy questions. Dr. Lombardi ignored my request for a one-on-one discussion and responded with an email that dodged half of my questions and answered the rest incompletely. It was clear to me that his letter was either manufactured by a lawyer or a P.R. henchman, though Ms. Valli denied that allegation when I last spoke to her. By the time Media Relations gets involved, talking to a brick wall is a better use of a student journalist’s time.

A few weeks later, I was on to my next story, an exposé on how Cornell Housing price gouges dorm room key replacements. I try to represent both sides fairly, so I called Brandi Smith-Berger, who helps oversee lost key claims, for comment. She was helpful and gave some useful quotes. She said she wanted to get down to the facts as much as I did. So we scheduled

Media Relations Office found out about our meeting, they immediately canceled it. “They told me not to answer any more of your questions,” she said. They also told her they would reach out to

an in-person appointment for later that week. She promised to give me a tour of the office where maintenance requests are processed and answer all of my questions. I trudged through the snow and showed up to Robert Purcell Community Center early and eager. ‘Finally, some transparency and accountability around here,’ I thought.

After a while, out came Ms. SmithBerger, surprised to see me. She explained that she wanted to help me, but when the

tell me they had kiboshed our meeting. They never did. So I showed up under the impression that nothing had changed. The conclusion is the Media Relations Office lacks both honesty and professional courtesy.

The next morning, Ms. Valli sent me an email complaining of my “feistiness.” That could be Media Relations doublespeak for journalistic due diligence. She left her number after the closing salutation. I called it. ‘Maybe she’ll understand my frustration,’ I hoped. The sense I got from her after a lengthy talk was that she’s just trying to do her job, and student journalists keep getting in the way. At one

point in the conversation,

Ms. Valli accused me of regularly asking uninformed questions. “I shouldn’t have to lecture all of you!” she exclaimed, referring to Cornell’s many student journalists.

Well, Media Relations, I shouldn’t have to lecture you either. If Cornell wants to advertise itself as a cheerleader for First Amendment rights, let’s not forget about one of them: freedom of the press.

Going forward, I want full transparency: no more breaking up interviews, no more lawyerly non-answers, and no more sidestepping real issues that students have a right to know about. Maybe Media Relations has forgotten this year’s campuswide theme is freedom of expression.

"Freedom of expression is the bedrock of democracy"

No more sidestepping real issues that students have a right to know about.

By the time Media Relations gets involved, talking to a brick wall is a better use of a student journalist's time.

Fill in the empty cells, one number in each, so that each column, row, and region contains the numbers 1-9 exactly once. Each number in the solution therefore occurs only once in each of the three “directions,” hence the “single numbers” implied by the puzzle’s name. (Rules from wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sudoku)

Bear with me

Cornell Students Engineer Trash Bots In NYC To Encourage Garbage Pick Up

By TENZIN KUNSANG Sun Science Editor

Robots may be the solution to New York City’s trash problem. In fact, Cornell Tech Ph.D. student Frank Bu and his team engineered trash barrel robots — human controlled trash cans that pick up garbage — in New York City this summer in order to study how people interact with robots in public spaces and how this can be used to encourage trash pick up.

He first worked on this project 11 years ago with his faculty advisor at Stanford University where he engineered a trash can on a rumba. After noticing a dire need for trash pickup in the city, Bu and his team contacted Village Alliance, a leading advocate for the Greenwich Village community, in Astor Place, NYC to launch this machine in a public space.

It’s no secret that NYC has a waste problem. Streets can often be seen lined with trash bags full to the brim.

According to the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, the metropolitan region produces 14 million tons every year, much of which lands in landfills or incinerators, or pollutes sidewalks and waterways.

To tackle the issue on a larger scale, Bu repurposed used hoverboards, in lieu of the rumba, and created two different garbage cans instead of just one. “[Hoverboards]

are more powerful and faster so you can give the robot more expression of capability,” Bu said. “It can move faster and it can wiggle. Also it carries more weight since hoverboards are meant to carry adults at ten kilometers per hour.”

Bu also mentioned that using hoverboards was a more cost effective method because it was cheaper than buying the two motors and battery separately. Bu and his team of three under - graduate required two wiz - ards and an interview conductor.

The two “wizards” — engineering student JiaYing Li ’25 and Cornell Tech Human Robotics Interaction Researcher Melina Tsai — controlled the robot from the back end.

“Since I’m a human, I know where to not go out of limits,” Li said. “If there were people waving at the trash can, I would come over to them and they would throw the trash.”

Afterwards, Nicole Sin ’26 conducted interviews with users of the robot to learn about their opinions on the trash bot.

“Their reaction to [the bot] was mostly positive and they wanted to see more of it. I would ask them if there’s anything they would change and they said ‘we need more of this and this is very convenient for people with disabilities,’” Sin said.

“Another point that they really liked was that the trash can stayed within a radius of

the park. It wouldn’t go out to the streets and it would just be confined to one space. They felt safe with it.”

The researchers then analyzed the videos to look for covert and overt human gestures used to signal the bot.

“There would be strikingly positive interactions where people would motion to the

trash can or wiggle their trash in front of it and our wizards would drive it over,” Sin said. “But some of them were more subtle in that they just finished eating and you just had to pick up on it.”

The team also observed different reactions to the trashbot in Astor Place, Manhattan than in Albee Square, Brooklyn,

attributing it to different borough demographics.

“In Astor Place, it’s mostly tourists — NYU and Cooper Union [students]. The demographics are definitely different from Albee Square, which has more local people who feel more ownership to the place,” Bu said. “They’re like it’s a New York thing — this is a New York City rumba.”

Some bystanders even thought that the bot was an art piece, mistaking it for the Astor Cube, a prominent sculpture in the Manhattan neighborhood.

On the other hand, Bu said that Albee Square residents have found a historical significance with the bot. He recalled an interview with a truck driver who talked about his previous job cleaning the streets of Albee Square a decade ago.

“Ten years later, I still hang out here and it’s nice to see this development happening through time.”

Bu and his team are using these interviews and videos to program different cues into the robot so that the robot can act in socially acceptable ways in public spaces without the need of a wizard.

“In the future, we can have a more self-exercising model to decide when to provide the service or come close to a human based on how long they’ve been here, are they eating, do they have trash,” Bu said.

COURTESY OF NOEL HEANEY / CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Green gadgets | Automated trash bots have been put around different bouroughs of New York City not only to decrease pollution but study human-robot interactions in public.

COURTESY OF SREANG HOK / CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Ingenious engineers | Third-year doctoral student Frank Bu and his team have worked to create automated garbage robots with improved capability at the Cornell Tech Campus based in New York City.