The Cornell Outing Club

For almost a century, the Cornell Outing Club (COC) was the primary vehicle by which people interested in sharing the outdoors with one another coordinated their activities at Cornell.

With the rise of Cornell Outdoor Education (COE) and their sock-puppet Outdoor Odyssey / Wilderness Reflections, commercial pressures began to shape the face of the outdoors community at Cornell. COE student employees began seeking leadership roles in COC, sometimes to contribute, but more often to collect resume material (COE encourages students to build an "outdoors resume" externally).

During fall 2007, five club leaders, including several aligned with COE, met with COE's director Todd Miner. Miner outlined a vision in which students attended COE courses to learn skills (at typically $300 per person per activity) and then "practiced" those skills in the club. In this model, the club becomes a private playground in which future instructors of COE practice their training with gear funded by SAFC (to the tune of, as of 2007, about $9k annually), while leading few if any beginner trips for which the gear has presumably been provided.

Outside of single introductory trips in several disciplinary areas, the club has essentially conducted zero beginner-friendly trips between October 2007 and May 2008, with the exception of a single beginner rock climbing trip in April '08.

The major initiatives of the club during this period were event organizing for two visiting speakers and ticket sales for two "co-sponsored" COE fundraising festivals, in which COE received thousands of dollars and the club received nothing.

The 2008-2009 leadership of this organization is mostly different, yet contained none who had ever led a significant outdoors trip for the club. As the club has no philosophical unity, activity base, or sense of purpose, our prediction for 2008-2009 is that after a nominal effort to recruit people with the promise of activities, the few trips that are offered will fill up, most people will not find an open slot, and then the trip count, attendance, and ultimately membership will again plummet. The mailing list will then resume its primary purpose as advertising for other organizations and solicitation for "buddy trips" and car rides, rather than growing a cohesive organization of principled outdoors explorers.

Our solution is to encourage all Cornellians and Ithacans who believe that the outdoors should be for sharing and not selling to join with us in the Free Outing Club and promote our common vision -- by participating in and leading trips to learn more about our natural world and universe.