IDEA Cornell Traditions
For most of the semester we try to do it all at once– be full time students, taking the most difficult classes, and at the same time be conscientious IDEA’ers. We work through our homeworks, prelims, lab reports, and at the same time try to answer all our challengers and detractors, explain our position to whoever asks, and in general attempt to do our part of "representing intelligent design on campus".
But at the end of the year, when study week and finals come around, we give up on the balancing act and, for just a few weeks, pretend we’re ordinary students who never challenged any status quo. We shut down our listserve, excuse ourselves from ongoing arguments, and sometimes put vacation notifiers up in our emails– and then we shut down our computers and move into the library. For a few weeks we pretend we never dreamed of discussing anything else except what is intrinsically relevant to our classes: the Church-Turing thesis or the undecidability of second-order logic, what transition state theory tells us about the kinetic isotope effect, or the intricacies of genetics.
So it’s that time of year, and according to tradition, we will all be disappearing. Since no-one will be able to watch over this website, comments will be temporarily disabled, beginning tomorrow; apologies if that inconveniences anyone, but it can’t be helped. In a few weeks, finals over, we’ll pick up where we left off.
