Saul Gitlin
College of Arts & Sciences
Tell us about what you're doing with your life
After graduating in Asian Studies with a focus on China and Chinese linguistics at, I ended up getting two more degrees – an MA from Yale in East Asian Studies, and an MBA from Columbia. Since then, I have spent my entire career working China, and more broadly in Asia. After three decades in the commercial world including 8 years as an expat in the PRC, I was recruited by the not-for-profit Mount Sinai Health System in New York where I am now Executive Director for Mount Sinai International – a division in which I establish and lead long-term clinical consulting engagements between Mount Sinai and hospitals in Asia. These days, my primary focus regions are China and India, both to which I still travel heavily. I have several other personal projects to which I devote my time, most importantly as an author. In 2020, my first children’s picture book introducing China and Chinese language was published. Titled “Tee-Dog and The Magic Globe: China.” The book introduces 4-10 year olds to China and the Chinese language. Interested classmates can check it out on Amazon (link above) to read the story synopsis and the growing number of reviews.
As for home (my most important achievement!) I’m married 30 years to my wife, Aviva, who is a psychotherapist in private practice, and we have two successful children - a son 29, and a daughter 26.
What is your favorite memory of your time at Cornell?
I decided to major in Chinese during the beginning of my freshman year in the Fall of 1980, barely one year after the USA and China formally established diplomatic relations, and a time when China was still very much an “underdeveloped” country. At that time, almost all my classmates and dorm-mates thought I was literally NUTS! When they asked me what my major was and I told them, almost all of them immediately responded, “What are you ever going to do with that??”…or “Your parents let you spend your tuition on that??” Most often, they would continue to joke that, at least when I graduated, I would be able to order dinner properly in Chinese restaurants! Of course, by the time I finished my MA at Yale in 1985, China was in the steep growth curve of its “Era of Reform and Opening,” and I found companies lining up to hire me solely based on my fluency in Chinese. Flash forward to today, when new acquaintances ask me how I attained my fluency in Chinese and I tell them that it is because I majored in Chinese 44 years ago, they all look at me with pure admiration and say, “Wow…you were such a visionary then!” But I still always vividly remember being made fun of each evening in Donlon as I practiced writing Chinese characters for hours! To be honest, I did not major in Chinese because I had any thought about how useful it might be for my professional future. Rather I simply chose the major due to my pure love of languages, and my interest to try learning what I thought was a really difficult language!
Finally, another focal Cornell memory was my junior year of 1982-1983 when I became one of the first three undergraduates at Cornell since 1949 to study for a full-year in Mainland China - at Fudan University in Shanghai. That experience, at such an early stage of China’s modern development, has always continued to impact my personal and professional development.
Which Cornell classmates do you keep in touch with?
Unfortunately, I rarely get to see any of my classmates from Cornell. However, with the rise of the internet, I have managed to maintain, or renew contact with some of my classmates who I count as important friends. These include: Lindsay Liotta Forness and her husband, Bob, who my wife and I spent some great time with in Bermuda about 5 years ago; and my great friend - Wendy Lecker - who I first met in our freshman dorm, and with whom I ate breakfast with at Willard Straight almost every single day during our senior year. There’s also Eric Harwit who studied Chinese with me in our freshman year, and went on to be a professor of Chinese Political Science at the University of Hawaii. In the last few years, I have also reconnected with a few other friends, including David Goodman (who had also been a high school classmate of mine), and Beth Schlegel – one of my earliest friends at Cornell who was also a fellow in Donlon-ite my freshman year.
I have also gone out of my way to stay in-touch with some Cornell faculty who both taught me, and were role models for me, thereby significantly influencing my subsequent personal and professional development. These include John McCoy and his wife, Stella Fessler who led the Chinese linguistics program in Morrill Hall, Claudia Ross – Professor of Chinese who, most recently, has led the Chinese program at the College of the Holy Cross, and Professor of History, Sherman Cochran, who is now retired in Ithaca, but who I sincerely hope to see during the upcoming Reunion weekend!
What advice would you give to a student starting at Cornell this year?
No matter how focused you already are in your academic or social scene, make sure to use your time at Cornell to “step out of your comfort zone.” That type of self-exploration is really what university is all about! Just one of my own examples from my time at Cornell:
Starting day-1 of my freshman year, I was a “die-hard liberal artsie” majoring in Chinese studies and linguistics. But during my sophomore year, I decided to take a one-semester science course in entomology (the study of INSECTS!!) in the Ag School which was taught by the famous professor, Edgar Raffensperger. That course had absolutely nothing to do with my core studies, nor was it anything that my friends at Cornell chose to do. But the class was great, I did very well, and in retrospect, I would not have traded that experience for anything else!
You can easily “taste new things” with the freedom you have at university. Of course, you should continually strive to do so later in life, even though it becomes logistically harder as you embrace more personal and professional responsibilities that may constrain you.
What does being a Cornell alumnus mean to you?
Although the academic portion of my resume says “Cornell, Yale, and Columbia,” Cornell remains light-years ahead of the other two in my self-identification. Ask me where I went to school, and I will always first say “I’m a Cornellian.” There are several reasons why I feel this: the beauty of Cornell and its environment (versus the other two), the experience of my “coming-of-age” at Cornell as an independent young adult, Cornell as the place where my academic interests and expertise first took root, and of course, the intensity of the friendships and relationships I forged at Cornell.
What are you most looking forward to at Reunion 2024?
There is no better place to be in early June than in Ithaca on the beautiful Cornell campus! It’s been years since I was last there, so I can’t wait to sit in the Arts Quad, walk around to see my old dorms and study areas, and re-discover - or even just think about - all of my other favorite “haunts”…some of which may either no longer be there, or have already “morphed” into something new (like the Temple of Zeus in Goldwin Smith Hall). But since I have never been to a single Reunion in the last 40 years, just the experience of being at the event, rediscovering people I I haven’t seen in so many decades, and hopefully, forging new contacts and friendships, is what I am looking forward to most of all!
Of course, I can’t wait to share it all with my wife who, over our 30 years of marriage, has only been to Ithaca for two very brief visits!
What a great and interesting story you shared. Fascinating!