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The Corne¬ Daily Sun Vol. 142, No. 19 Features
Lifestyle
Science
Super Bowl style
Jacket joust
Lakefront lectures
Hayley Paige Gutman ’07 talks about designing the dress featured in the halftime show’s iconic wedding.
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16 Pages – Free
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2026 n ITHACA, NEW YORK
The ever pressing question of what jacket to buy is answered in this battle between two heavyweights of winter warmth. | Page 9
PHYS 1205: “The Physics of Sailing” gives students a hands-on experience with physics by taking them sailing.
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Students Frustrated With Cornell’s Prof. Joe Halpern Dies Promotion of Border Patrol Jobs After 30 Years at Cornell By SOFIA LOAYZA Sun Senior Writer
Feb. 19 — Cornell Career Services continues to advertise U.S. Customs and Border Protection recruitment opportunities despite backlash on campus, prompting concern and fear among students. The issue comes amid heightened national scrutiny of federal immigration enforcement, as large-scale operations have intensified in cities across the country and drawn criticism over aggressive and unconstitutional conduct by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and CBP. Scrutiny intensified following the killings of two U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis in January. The incidents sparked nationwide protests and outrage, including an ICE Out protest on campus on Feb. 4. The Sun first reported that Cornell Career Services shared multiple positions at the Department of Homeland Security on Handshake in August. Since then, Cornell Career Services has promoted six virtual recruitment events by CBP scheduled in February. Four of the events have
already occurred — on Feb. 4, Feb. 5, Feb. 10 and Feb. 11 — with two more on Feb. 18 and Feb. 26. Prof. Monica Cornejo, communication, argued that Cornell’s continued promotion of federal immigration enforcement careers is a political stance in itself. “All I see is [the administration] choosing a side and then turning around and claiming that they are for ‘any person, any study,’ Cornejo said. “That is really sad, and that is their choice.” Cornejo’s research explores the barriers that undocumented students experience in college and has been cited over 300 times. Her research found that undocumented students often live with constant anxiety about detention or deportation — both for themselves and their family members. This stress negatively affects students’ academic performance, focus and sense of safety.
To continue reading this article, please visit www.cornellsun.com. Sofia Loayza can be reached at sloayza@cornellsun.com
By CORAL PLATT and EVERETT CHAMBALA Sun Staff Writers
While he was a member of the computer science department, Halpern’s work intersected a wide range of fields. “I once gave a talk in the economics department at Princeton where I described myself as someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who calls himself a computer scientist, and is giving a talk to economists about a subject mainly studied by philosophers,” Halpern wrote in his biography. “That’s probably the best one-sentence description I can give.” Halpern also had a passion for travel and learning about new cultures, having visited over 80 countries in his lifetime and speaking 5 languages. While traveling, he spent two years as the head of the math department at Bawku secondary school in Ghana before starting his Ph.D. Halpern also loved music and the outdoors, being an avid hiker, mountaineer and songwriter.
Feb. 17 — Prof. Joseph “Joe” Halpern, computer science, died on Friday at age 72 in Ithaca following a battle with cancer. Halpern had served as a professor in computer science at Cornell since 1996. He was the chair of the Department of Computer Science from 2010 to 2014 and was named the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Engineering in 2017. Throughout his career, Halpern received the Gödel Prize, Edsger Dijkstra Prize and the Allen Newell Award. At Cornell, Halpern taught several courses in computer science and mathematics, and researched “the interface between game and decision theory and computer science,” as well as “reasoning about knowledge and uncertainty, and on causality,” according to his biography for the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. To continue reading this article, please “Watching Joe in action was to see his visit www.cornellsun.com. own mind pursue knowledge in an uncertain world: In his work, he was a creator of beautiful abstractions,” said Prof. Jon Coral Platt and Everett Chambala can be reached Kleinberg, computer science, in an inter- at cplatt@cornellsun.com and echambala@corview with the Cornell Chronicle. nellsun.com.
IVY LEAGUE CHAMPIONS Men’s, women’s hockey secure Ivy League titles during long weekend By JANE McNALLY Sun Senior Editor
Feb. 17 — At this moment, Cornell is the best hockey school in the Ivy League. It took the help of out-of-town results, but the men’s and women’s hockey programs — both ranked No. 11 in the nation — earned their respective 2025-2026 Ivy League championships this past weekend. The pair of titles brings the total to 45 earned between the two programs, dating back to 1966. This year marks the eighth time both the men and women have won the championship in the same year. The women’s program secured the title on Friday, the final weekend of the regular season. Cornell had just defeated St. Lawrence, 4-3 in overtime, before checking the PrincetonYale score from its locker room in Canton, New York. A 2-0 loss for Princeton clinched the program’s 18th — and third consecutive — Ivy League title. “We needed some help here in the last week, but we did our part,” said women’s hockey head coach Doug Derraugh ’91. “I’m proud of the girls to be able to get the Ivy League Championship this year. It was a lot of teams that were competing for
that and it was a real close run right until the end, and so for us to come out on top is huge.” The men’s pro- g r a m took a slightly different path to its 27th I v y League championship and f i r s t since 2024. Still w i t h another Ivy game t o play — at Princeton o n Saturday — and two weeks left in the regular season, a bevy of clinching scenarios were at play this past weekend. Neck-andneck with Dartmouth, the Red needed the nationally-ranked Big Green to collect fewer than three points against middling Yale and Brown teams to secure the championship outright. A Dartmouth shootout win over
Yale on Feb. 13 (two points), coupled with Brown’s upset regulation win over the Big Green (zero points) the following night, clinched the title for Cornell on Feb. 14, despite the Red falling 4-1 to Union that same evening. The championships for both the men and women are notable because of the Ivy League’s parity this season — since the COVID-19 pandemic, Ivy League programs have struggled to return to their former prominence before the age of fifth-years and recruiting troubles. Until this year. The Ivy League has four teams — on both the men’s and women’s sides — with winning records (above .500). The race to both crowns saw an unprecedented amount of competition, levels not seen since before the
CYNTHIA TSENG / SUN STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
2019-2020 NCAA season was cut short. On the men’s side, the Ivy League has not seen more than two of its teams achieve winning records in a single season since 2018-2019 (three), and four Ivies have not been above .500 in one campaign since 2015-2016. This season — though there are still some games to play — looks to change that, as four squads (Cornell, No. 14 Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton) boast winning records heading into the final two weekends of play. The numbers are eerily similar on the women’s side — the four Ivy League teams above .500 at this season’s conclusion (Cornell, No. 8 Yale, No. 9 Princeton, Brown) are the most since the 2019-2020 season. It is the pursuit of the title — what it takes to get there — that makes the end result all that much more worth it. “I don’t think [the Ivy League] has just returned to form. I think it’s taken another step from where it was,” men’s hockey head coach Casey Jones ’90 told The Sun earlier this season. “I think there are not only good teams, I think some of them are very good teams. That’s the exciting part.” Jane McNally can be reached at jmcnally@cornellsun.com.