Cornell: A Bigger Center for a More Sustainable Future

A few months ago, Cornell received a commitment from David Atkinson to add $80 million to the endowment of the Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future. Wow, that is a lot of money!

The Wall Street Journal described how Mr. Atkinson (a graduate of both Cornell and Wharton Business School) gave a smaller, $3 million gift in 2007, to test what Cornell could do with his help. He sought the help of an outside group of scholars and organizations to evaluate the results and clearly felt they were good enough to make a further investment worthwhile.

With the support of the faculty and Mr. Atkinson’s help, Cornell’s Center has now pulled together a group of 232 faculty and researchers from 55 departments, to work on sustainability issues. It is an admirable effort to explore, study, and understand sustainability issues.

Do Cornell’s undergraduates appreciate this unique approach? 

Keep reading about sustainability at Cornell and other universities.  

Bahar Gidwani is a Cofounder and CEO of CSRHUB. Formerly, he was the CEO of New York-based Index Stock Imagery, Inc, from 1991 through its sale in 2006. He has built and run large technology-based businesses and has experience building a multi-million visitor Web site. Bahar holds a CFA, was a partner at Kidder, Peabody & Co., and worked at McKinsey & Co. Bahar has consulted to both large companies such as Citibank, GE, and Acxiom and a number of smaller software and Web-based companies. He has an MBA (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School and a BS in Astronomy and Physics (magna cum laude) from Amherst College. Bahar races sailboats, plays competitive bridge, and is based in New York City.

CSRHUB is a corporate social responsibility (CSR) ratings tool that allows managers, researchers, consultants, academics and individual activists to track the CSR and sustainability performance of major companies. We aggregate data from more than 90 sources to provide our users with a comprehensive source of CSR information on about 5000 publicly traded companies in 65 countries. CSRHUB is a B Corporation. Browse our ratings at www.csrhub.com.

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