HAGOPIAN | Third Time’s a Charm

The Cornell Daily Sun

I have a job at a campus eatery called Temple of Zeus. “Zeus,” as it is colloquially known, closed early on Thursday because of an event in Klarman Hall. During my shift that morning, my boss informed me that the event was a send-off for Interim President Hunter Rawlings. Rawlings has been president of Cornell twice before; he first occupied the position from 1995 to 2003, stepping in again in 2005 after the resignation of Jeffrey Lehman. One mordant customer told me, “I won’t begrudge Hunter his retirement party… for the third time.”It does seem a bit, as the kids are saying these days, extra. While stocking the shelves of Zeus with coconut water and gluten-free Larabars, I heard a few notes of music from across the hall. Not a melody, but a distinctly inharmonious sequence of notes. Eventually I realized that a piano had been brought into the building, and that the piano was being tuned.
I’ve met President Rawlings briefly at Zeus; he seems like a nice guy. I’m sure he’s cognizant of the silliness of the situation. Maybe he’ll even make some jokes about it in his speech to the trustees — “Third time’s the charm, right gents?” Yet the event’s still happening while the graduate student union is being denounced, a student grocery store that was envisioned to combat food insecurity is kept from getting off the ground and a “mental health week” is paraded in front of architecture students that sleep ...

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