God and Man at Cornell

Rawlings Assails Intelligent Design

By Jim Roberts

Last October, Interim President Hunter Rawlings surprised a Trustee/Council Weekend audience in Statler Auditorium with a bold State of the University address on a controversial issue. Abandoning the typical pronouncements about university initiatives and accomplishments that characterize such speeches, Rawlings took aim at "the challenge to science posed by religiously based opposition to evolution, described, in its current form, as 'intelligent design.' "

By doing so, Rawlings drew national attention to Cornell: the speech was covered by many major media outlets, including the New York Times, and triggered an outburst of commentary, pro and con, on Internet blogs.He also linked himself to the great, if somewhat diminished, American tradition of college presidents acting as public intellectuals, using their positions as platforms for influencing public opinion and national policy. One of the exemplars of this tradition was Andrew Dickson White, Cornell's co-founder and first president, and Rawlings's attack on intelligent design (I.D.) drew him into a longrunning controversy that was also of central importance to White.

In 1896, eleven years after he stepped down as president of Cornell,White published a two-volume work titled A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. He wrote it,White explained in the introduction, "to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us--a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society."

Full article online here:

http://cornellalumnimagazine.com/Currentissue/features/Feature.asp