Since 2003, I have been a member of the faculty of Cornell University, whose main campus is in Ithaca, New York. I served two years as Cornell's eleventh president, and since then I have remained a professor of law at the Cornell Law School.
I am currently on leave to serve as the chancellor and founding dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law.
While I was president, the university set new records for fundraising success and for applicant volume. More significantly, it carried out an intensive year-long process of strategic reflection, known as the "Call to Engagement."
As a result of the Call to Engagement process, the university determined to strengthen its identity as a transnational university, forging new relationships with peers in China, France, India, and Singapore. It also committed itself to concentrate its resources on some of the most significant practical challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century: life in the age of the genome, wisdom in the age of digital information, and sustainability in the age of development.
In 2008, Cornell published a collection of my presidential speeches as a book entitled, An Optimistic Heart. Those speeches, and others, may be read here. The website for the book itself is here.
You may read more about the Cornell Law School here.
