His great-great-great grandfather founded the school in 1865, and he has long been in line for the hereditary trusteeship reserved for his family. Thus, on his 21st birthday this week, Ezra Cornell IV becomes the first student trustee in Cornell University's history. He has already made it clear that he takes the job seriously. "Last year's demonstrations by armed black militants are still on my mind," he said. "I'm still trying to think about what the Negroes really want. How can we help them the most? How can we help ourselves? I don't have any answers, but I'm concerned."

For a young ballerina, it was an object lesson in precision and prerogative. Too intent on one of her moves in Giselle at Trieste's Teatro Verdi Opera House, 20-year-old Giovanna Mariani accidentally touched down on the slipper of the ballet's star, Rudolf Nureyev. Instantly, so gracefully that he did not miss a step, the temperamental Russian slapped her full across the face. Giovanna fled in tears but returned after five minutes and finished the performance. Next day she set out to teach Nureyev an object lesson of her own --by filing assault charges against him in a Trieste court.

Rumors of romance have been trailing Gina Lollobrigida for months. Suggested suitors have ranged from Matador El Cordobes to Heart Surgeon Christiaan Barnard. But this one is for real, says the Italian beauty. The fortunate fellow is George S. Kaufman, a wealthy Manhattan real estate executive who met Gina in New York two months ago. No kin to the late playwright, he likes to toss off lines like "My first and greatest present to Gina is my love." In Rome, where they announced plans to marry, the pair was mobbed by the press. Photographers followed them everywhere--even on the plane from Geneva to Rome, and that proved too much for the lovebirds. Gina grabbed a bottle of champagne, shook it up and squirted it at one of her tormentors. "You and your stinking ancestors!" she shouted.

During a New Year's Day broadcast last January, Canada's bachelor Prime Minister lamented that 1968 had passed without allowing him "to make the kind of deal I would have liked. This year." he added, "I'll be taking initiatives." Pierre Elliott Trudeau was still working at that resolution last week; he flew to New York for two weekend dates with Singer Barbra Streisand. There was dinner and dancing on Friday night, the Polish Lab Theater on Sunday, and a barrage of questions from gossip columnists. How serious was it? When newsmen asked that question, the swinging Prime Minister merely grinned, turned to an aide and said, "Arrest that man."

From all reports it was quite a confrontation. There in her Washington studio stood the venerable Mrs. Lloyd Shippen, eightyish, matriarch of Mrs. Shippen's Dancing Class for the past 37 years and one of the capital's most autocratic social arbiters. Up stepped Mark Roosevelt, 13, great-grandson of President Theodore and a young man who already seems to know his mind. Why, asked Mark, were there no black youngsters in her classes? Mrs. Shippen's reaction was immediate. "She really gave it to me for about five minutes," relates Mark. "She talked about mixed marriages and trash." She also proceeded to give Mark the boot, which saddens the determined civil rights activist. "If I'd stayed, I could have kept the pressure on her," says he. "Now I can't."

At the windup of his two-week tour, Soviet Cosmonaut Georgy Beregovoy announced that New York was strictly Endsville: "Saturated. Tense. Not fun at all." But the burly general was not all that bored. At a reception in Washington, he was approached by a Soviet official who wanted to introduce him to NASA Administrator Dr. Thomas Paine. Beregovoy, lost in contemplation of a braless blonde's plunging neckline, barely managed a curt "how do you do." "Georgy," growled the official, "this is the constructor of the American Apollo." Beregovoy did not even look up. The official led Paine away, then went back and pried his hero loose with some strong words. "You see," he explained later, "we also have a swinger among our cosmonauts."

Preparing for his 70th birthday, Master Farceur Noel Coward made it clear that one of the blithest spirits of the age is still blithe. Defending his lack of an Oxbridge education to London newsmen, he said: "It is of little help at the first rehearsal to be able to translate Cicero." What of T. S. Eliot's complaint that Coward had never spent an hour in the study of ethics? "I do not think it would have helped me," said he. Had he ever tried to enlighten his audience instead of just amusing them? "I have a slight reforming urge," he replied, "but I have rather cunningly kept it down." He does occasionally think about serious things. Take protesting youth, for instance. "I think all this sitting down is rather a mistake. It is a languid posture and achieves little."

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