By Sidney Urquhart/Reported by Andrea Sachs

Not every college orientation week includes a jolting theatrical experience. But this summer CORNELL UNIVERSITY has sent letters to its 3,000 incoming freshmen urging them to attend campus performances of David Feldshuh's prizewinning 1989 drama Miss Evers' Boys. The play is a searing account of the U.S. government's lethally misguided effort to study the degenerative effects of syphilis on a group of rural black men in Alabama. Opening the school year with the play "is an institutional statement that we would like all of the diverse people on our campus to understand," says Cornell law professor Larry Palmer.