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2025 Groat and Alpern Awardees

Scott Buchheit, M.S. ’77

A series of experiences during his ILR years helped Groat Award recipient Scott Buchheit build a deeper appreciation for different perspectives.

Scott Buchheit, M.S. '77
Read about Scott

Linda Gadsby ’88

The law, young people and providing educational opportunities are primary passion areas for Alpern Award recipient Linda Gadsby.

Linda Gadsby '88
Read about Linda

Alumni Stories

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Do Women in the U.S. Still Earn Less than Men?

Cornellians
Francine Blau ’66, an alumnae who’s an ILR professor emerita weighs in on the gender pay gap—how it has narrowed, and why it persists.
An illustrated image representing the gender pay gap. Credit: Ashley Osburn / Cornell University
Do Women in the U.S. Still Earn Less than Men?

Cheng-Cimini ’92 Is Ready to “Rewire”

After three decades as a human resources professional, Angela Cheng-Cimini ‘92 has decided to “rewire,” stepping away from her latest role as the senior vice president and chief human resources officer at Harvard Business Publishing.
Angela Cheng-Cimini '92
Cheng-Cimini ’92 Is Ready to “Rewire”

Fateh’s World View Cultivated at ILR

When Christopher Fateh ’13 first entered ILR, he didn’t want to limit his future by choosing a career path. The school gave him a well-rounded education and an appealing philosophy—that he could make a difference in the lives of regular people.
Christopher Fateh ’13
Fateh’s World View Cultivated at ILR

School violence reduction program led by 2007 alumna

Marie Schell ’07 is leading Maryland’s new Statewide Youth Conflict Coaching Pilot Program as project director and executive director of the Conflict Resolution Center of Baltimore County. 
Marie Schell ’07
School violence reduction program led by 2007 alumna

ILR’s EMHRM Program: “Best in Class”

Airbnb Global Talent Director Ruben Ponte says the Executive Master’s in Human Resource Management program emboldened him to help build the kind of company he would like his children to work at.
Portrait of Airbnb Global Talent Director Ruben Ponte
ILR’s EMHRM Program: “Best in Class”

ILRies Learn from NFL Pro

JC Tretter ’13 returned to the ILR School lecture hall Monday where he learned how to think critically, understand others’ perspectives and negotiate – skills he has wielded to help shape the labor-management dynamic in America’s most-watched sport.
JC Tretter '13 speaks in Associate Professor Adam Seth Litwin’s “Introduction to ILR” course in Ives 305.
ILRies Learn from NFL Pro

ILR Donors Make All the Difference

To Do the Greatest Good

The ILR community everywhere is continuing to do the greatest good. Each year, ILR alumni, parents and friends come together to support the ILR School to ensure all students have the resources they need to be successful. Each year, the school recruits and retains faculty who are outstanding educators and leading researchers.

Your gift helps ILR remain the preeminent school focused on work, employment and labor. ILR is proud to be developing the thought leaders and practitioners shaping the future of work, and your gift advances this mission.

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News

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Knowles '87 Helps Lead Ohio State To Football National Title

ILRie Jim Knowles '87 helped guide the Ohio State University to the College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday evening as the team's defensive coordinator. The Buckeyes defeated Notre Dame 34-23 in the championship game in Atlanta to lift the eighth-seeded squad to its ninth national title.
Jim Knowles '87 speaking to members of the Big Red football team during his time as head coach at Cornell.
Knowles '87 Helps Lead Ohio State To Football National Title

“Stories of Belonging” Highlights Journeys of Central Americans

A traveling exhibit highlighting the intersections of racism, dispossession and migration grew out of LR Worker Institute Executive Director Patricia Campos-Medina’s doctoral thesis.
Jose Urias is featured in "Stories of Belonging"
“Stories of Belonging” Highlights Journeys of Central Americans

ILR Panel Discusses Collective Bargaining in Women’s Professional Hockey

A discussion focused on the evolution of, and challenges facing, women’s professional hockey was hosted on Monday by ILR International Visiting Fellow Kelly Pike, ’03, Ph.D. ’14.
Kelly Pike, ’03, Ph.D. ’14, Digit Murphy, CALS ’83, Brianne Jenner, A&S ’15, and David Doorey
ILR Panel Discusses Collective Bargaining in Women’s Professional Hockey

Events

The Country and the City Graduate Conference

Why do we see the country and the city as intrinsically different spaces and ways of being? Almost 50 years after Raymond Williams (1973) argued that this contrast is “one of the major forms in which we become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society,” we continue to see agrarian economies and life as relics of an idyllic past, dissolving at the hands of the forward-marching cities. Against perspectives that saw the development of capitalism as an urban/industrial set of forces slowly gnawing away at rural/agrarian harmonious and simple living, Williams saw industrial capitalism as intrinsically connected to feudalism and agrarian capitalism, the urban to the rural. Rather than reflecting a historical reality, he argued that this spatial and ideological binary was constructed in direct response to the growth of capitalism and imperialism. Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas—but agrarian livelihoods and lives are not merely withering away. The country-versus-city binary continues to govern our efforts to find solutions to the grave crises of our times. Contemporary solutions, such as agroecology as an antidote to industrial agriculture or green energy as a foil to fossil fuels, invoke the return to a pristine, sustainable past. This conference will showcase graduate student papers that explore how the country and city constitute each other and investigate how capital, labor, imaginaries, and sentiments flow between the two. 10-11:30 am - Constructing Nature Presentations by: Michael Cary, Jessie Mayall, Suraj Kushwaha and Finn Domingo Discussant: Nataya Friedan Constructions of nature, Williams reminds us, often contain veiled arguments about people, societies and social relations. This panel asks what kinds of social arguments are embedded in ideas of environmental instability and what kinds of politics emerge from them. We begin in England, where romanticized understandings of ‘the countryside’ underlie contemporary visions for landscape ‘optimization’ for food production and carbon sequestration. We then move to the remote Siachen glacier, where representations of the world’s highest battlefield by the Indian Army mediate public consent for militarization through appeals to martyrdom and national pride. From there we move to the aftermath of wildfires in Los Angeles, where the financial mechanisms and socio-economic effects of homeowners insurance are exacerbating an already unaffordable housing market. Finally, we turn to Paraguay, where the infrastructures of defense from destructive floods—and the politics of blame for when they happen—shape the relationship between an expanding city and neglected countryside. 12:30 -2pm - Morality of Improvement Presentations by: Yui Sasajima, Maria Paula Espejo and Allen Huang Discussant: Paul Kohlbry These four papers examine the construction of rural spaces and urban fringes, paying attention to the flexible ideas of home that often lie behind the creation of certain spaces as desirable or ideal. At the heart of this question is the issue of improvement, which Raymond Williams points us to as a driver behind the subjection of tenants and the landless.Drawing on varying methodologies, these papers examine how rural and urban spaces are bridged—or thought to be bridged—through social reproduction, how home is made in new spaces, and who benefits from the drive to “improve.” 2:15-3:45pm - Structures of Feeling Presentations by: Liam Greenwell, Georgia Koumantaros , Andrew Colpitts and Grace Myers Discussant: Katharine Lindquist Raymond Williams invites us to investigate the dialogic relationship between the rural and urban through the unspoken, shared, and historically contingent “structures of feeling” that emerge from cultural texts. This panel examines Williams’s contribution in relation to the moral, symbolic, representational, and material assemblages by which the rural is imagined. In doing so, we ask how the country and the city become sites of imagined dystopia and utopia alike by which people reimagine life in generative ways. These papers track imagined promises of the countryside—from a site for family values, national becoming, future imagination, and self-actualization—in contexts from rural evangelicalism in New York, queer reckonings with both limitation and thriving, folklore and placemaking in coal country, and the contradictions of village life in Greece. The unclear lines between utopia and dystopia trouble the position of the figures involved and promise—or threaten?—collective self-fashioning.

Localist event image for The Country and the City Graduate Conference
The Country and the City Graduate Conference

Labor Economics Workshop: Joseph Mullins

Joseph Mullins Designing cash transfers in the presence of children's human capital formation This paper finds that accounting for the human capital development of children has a quantitatively large effect on the true costs and benefits of providing cash assistance to single mothers in the United States. A dynamic model of work, welfare participation, and parental investment in children introduces a formal apparatus for calculating costs and benefits when individuals respond to incentives. The model provides a tractable outcome equation in which a policy’s effect on child skills can be understood through its impact on two economic resources in the household – time and money – and the share of each resource as factors in the production of skills. These key causal parameters are cleanly identified by policy variation through the 1990s. The model also admits simple and interpretable formulae for optimal nonlinear transfers in the style of Mirrlees (1971), with novel features arising when child skill formation is accounted for. Using a broadly conservative empirical strategy, estimates imply that optimal transfers are about 20% more generous than the US benchmark, and shaped very differently. In contrast to current policies, the optimal policy discourages labor supply at the bottom of the income distribution due to the costly estimated impacts of work on child development. The finding underscores the importance of reconciling results in the literature on the developmental effects of maternal employment. Finally, a counterfactual model exercise suggests that changes to the welfare and tax environment after 1996 had negative average effects both on maternal welfare and child skill outcomes, with a significant degree of redistribution across latent dimensions.

Localist event image for Labor Economics Workshop: Joseph Mullins
Labor Economics Workshop: Joseph Mullins

21st Century Business Models and the Protestant Work Ethic

Elizabeth Anderson, the John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, will deliver ILR's 2025 Milton Konvitz Lecture. The public is invited to attend in person or live online. Please register if you plan to join us online.
Hand manipulating a marionette
21st Century Business Models and the Protestant Work Ethic

Labor & Trade Economics Workshop: Jessie Handbury

Jessie Handbury Demographic Preferences and Income Segregation We study how preferences over the demographic composition of co-patrons affects income segregation in shared spaces. To distinguish demographic preferences from tastes for other venue attributes, we study venue choices within business chains. We find two notable regularities: preferences for high-income co-patrons are similar across racial groups, and racial homophily does not vary by income. These demographic preferences are economically large, explain much of the cross-group variation in exposure to high-income co-patrons, and correlate with movers’ neighborhood choices.

Localist event image for Labor & Trade Economics Workshop: Jessie Handbury
Labor & Trade Economics Workshop: Jessie Handbury

Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Eric Chyn

Eric Chyn

Localist event image for Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Eric Chyn
Labor & Public Economics Workshop: Eric Chyn

Poverty Wages, We're Not Lovin' It': Gender, Race and Inequality Rising in the 21st Century

Please join us for the 2025 Alice Cook-Lois Gray Distinguished Lecture. Our honored speaker is Annelise Orleck, professor of history and co-chair of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College.
Brooklyn fast-food workers, New York, NY (2015)
Poverty Wages, We're Not Lovin' It': Gender, Race and Inequality Rising in the 21st Century

Meet our Team

Jennifer (Sellen) Dean

  • Assistant Dean, ILR AAD

Harlan Work

  • Gift Officer

Penny Lane Spoonhower

  • Assistant Director

Amanda DeLee

  • Program Assistant

Alyssa Cooper

  • Gift Officer