"I don't know what I'm doing. I'm making it up as I go along," said Cornell President David Skorton to members of Cornell's Mortarboard Senior Honor Society during his hypothetical 'last lecture,' April 17. Mortarboard's Last Lecture series asks a professor each semester to speak as if it were his or her last time addressing the Cornell community.
Skorton encouraged audience members to consider that tiny differences often separate the powerful from the powerless, stressing what he called the "non-linearity" or unpredictability of life.