New professorship named for Cornell student who died in the Pan Am 103 Lockerbie bombing
Contact: Blaine P. Friedlander Jr.
Office: (607) 254-8093
bpf2@cornell.edu
FOR RELEASE: Dec. 20, 2005
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Seventeen years after Pan American Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, a communication professorship at Cornell University will be named to honor Kenneth J. Bissett, a Cornell student who died in the bombing. The funding for the endowed chair comes from a $3.8 million settlement recently paid to Bissett's mother's estate by the Libyan government.
The Kenneth J. Bissett (Class of 1989) Senior Professorship in Communication was created from the estate of Florence Bissett, Kenneth Bissett's mother, who directed in her will that proceeds from any Libyan settlement pass to Cornell's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), where her son was a student from 1985 to 1988. Florence Bissett died in December 2002, prior to the Libyan government accepting responsibility for the bombing.
Geraldine K. Gay, chair of Cornell's Department of Communication, will be the first to hold the Bissett professorship, the first endowed chair in the department.
Kenneth Bissett, a communication major at Cornell, was returning from a semester in Syracuse University's Syracuse-London Program when he was killed, along with 269 others, on Dec. 21, 1988 -- two days after his 21st birthday. Bissett graduated from Iona Preparatory School, New Rochelle, N.Y., in 1985. He was a jazz fan, a poet and an artist who spent his first two years at Cornell studying engineering. He had transferred into communications in the semester prior to visiting London.
In addition to establishing the Bissett professorship, CALS has used a portion of the endowment to incorporate a community center into the renovation plans for the university's Albert R. Mann Library. The center will provide a high-technology collaborative work space. Also, the funds will pay for establishing 24-hour news transmission to public campus areas, including the Mann Library, the David L. Call Auditorium and the Trillium (student cafeteria).
After the Lockerbie bombing, Kenneth's parents, John (who died in 1997) and Florence Bissett, split the proceeds from their son's life insurance policy between Syracuse University and Cornell. Their gift to Cornell established the Kenneth J. Bissett Communication Award, which annually gives a $1,000 scholarship to a junior or senior in the Department of Communication, and they established the Kenneth J. Bissett Memorial Jazz Fund, which underwrites an annual jazz concert presented by Cornell's music department.
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