Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics

College of Arts and Sciences

Professor of Information Science

Bowers College of Computing and Information Science

Larry Blume is a Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Professor of Information Science in Bowers CIS. He has been a member of the Cornell faculty since 1990. He earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and first taught at the University of Michigan for 13 years, two of which were spent on leave in Ithaca. His teaching and research interests focus on economic theory, specifically on decision theory, market equilibrium theory, and game theory. He is a coauthor of Mathematics for Economists (Norton), a textbook for first-year graduate students, and a coeditor the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics 2ed (Macmillan). He has been affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute where he co-directed the economics program and served on the Science Steering Committee. He has held visiting appointments or fellowships in Vienna at the Institut für Höhere Studien and the Wirtschaftsuniversität, and also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Harvard Kennedy School, Northwestern University, NYU, the Stockholm School of Economics, Tel Aviv University, WZB Berlin, and Yale. He currently serves on the advisory boards of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago, and of the School of Humanities, Natural, and Social Sciences at the New Uzbekistan University.
   
Blume’s service at Cornell has included the roles of member and chair of the Financial Policies Committee, member of the University Appeals Panel, Economics Department Chair, Faculty Senator, and Interim Associate Dean for Education in the Bowers College. He is currently the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Information Science and the Bowers CIS Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

Candidate Statement:

In my time at Cornell the distribution of authority within the University has significantly shifted. The circles of information have shrunk, and the circles of decision-making are increasingly closed. Authority has moved from Departments to Deans and from the Faculty Senate to Day Hall. The University is operating in an increasingly difficult environment. Complexity is intensifying, the speed at which decisions must be made is increasing, and the costs of getting it wrong are ever higher. It is unfortunate but not surprising that the Administration are circling the wagons, and that the deliberative voice of the faculty is often not listened to. The challenge for faculty governance is to make ourselves heard.
   
I have been privileged to see University operations up close from many vantage points. I joined the Financial Policies Committee as the current budget model was being developed. The problems we see today were apparent even then, but they have been exacerbated by the creation of new colleges and novel administrative structures like super-departments. As an Associate Dean, I helped create the tenure and promotion processes for the Bowers College and its proposal for Teaching Professor titles. In the course of this work I saw the complexity of the legal environment in which Cornell operates. As Information Science DUS I serve on the CALS Curriculum Committee and the College of Engineering’s College Curriculum Governing Board. Information Science also runs a major in the Arts College. The diversity of management styles, cultures, and identities across Cornell’s many Colleges is large, and the fact that we run twelve (depending on how you count) experiments in solving a common set of problems is an underutilized resource. I hope to engage the shared wisdom of the Colleges to increase the faculty voice in our shared governance.