“Don’t try to understand ’em, just rope, pull and brand ’em.”

So goes the theme song to the classic early television show Rawhide, about a seemingly endless cattle drive through the Old West, which included a young Clint Eastwood as drover Rowdy Yates.

A maverick, of course, is a term originally applied to an unbranded cattle, or a person unbought, unbossed and unbeholden to anyone but his or herself. The term dates to Sam Maverick, a 19th century Texas rancher, and his decision to buck tradition and leave his cattle unbranded.

Prof. Jeff Rachlinski, law, and Greg Parks, law ’08, discussed the role of unconscious race and gender biases in the presidential race yesterday in Sage Chapel. Such implicit biases affect the voting process, they said.

“Although some Americans certainly are explicitly biased when it comes to race and gender, such individuals constitute a very small percentage of voters and it is our view that implicit or unconscious bias is the far bigger problem,” Rachlinski said.

Rachlinski explained that there are two types of voting — rationally and intuitively. “Whereas rational voting seems to override unconscious bias, intuitive voting is usually in line with it,” he said.

By Tia Hicks and Zachary Murray

The discussion has shifted and now we’re talking about “intellectual diversity.” We’re talking about providing “robust discussion” instead of preventing bigotry; we’re talking about the politics of diversity instead of outlining concrete efforts to achieve diversity and equality; we’re talking about how the University can protect itself from being criticized instead of responding to groups that alienate and denigrate.

The issues that minority students face at Cornell transcend the racism of articles by The Cornell Review, whether people have the right of free speech and expression, and the feelings of conservatives that they have no voice on this campus.

My column today was motivated by a current controversy on our campus and by the larger issues it represents. Articles in the Cornell Review’s orientation issue have once again put issues of civility, diversity, and free speech squarely before our campus community and the greater Cornell family. The views as expressed in the Review articles — one focused on minority students and one satirically linking Muslims to terrorism — were clearly at odds with the values of our university.

The current controversy raises three broad issues:

1. How should we as a campus respond to writings and other forms of speech that target certain groups within our campus community in ways that many find offensive?

In a split second, a basketball referee has to make a call: to foul or not foul a player. In a recent study done by a former Cornell graduate student, it was found that these quick decisions are affected by more than just the game.

Joseph Price PhD ’07, who studied economics, worked with Prof. Justin Wolfers, Wharton, to examine nearly 13,000 National Basketball Association games between 1991 and 2002 to find evidence of an inherent racial bias in referee calls.

Price became interested in racial biases after reading a book on the topic as an undergraduate and from there went on to study the NBA.

Late last month, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report revealing that more than three times the number of black Americans live in prison as in college dorms.

The news is not shocking to black student leaders at Cornell, who along with the rest of the country have seen the number of black prisoners increase dramatically since the 1980s.

“The study seems like a complete oversimplification of the issue — in light of all the current cases of discrimination we have seen in our local community, this shouldn’t be a surprise,” said Kalisa Martin ’08, senior advisor of the prison activist coalition at Cornell.

Race is a painfully awkward topic in architecture, while culture remains the go-to book for, uh, copying. David Adjaye, the Ghanian architect born in Tanzania, said in an interview with New York Magazine in 2007, “If a Japanese architect talks about Shintoism, everyone goes, ‘Wow.’ If an African architect talks about an African village, it is somehow weird in the Western context. I find that hilarious. What’s the difference?” Adjaye, a prodigiously talented architect who last week won the Smithsonian commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is unfortunately a good example of how uncomfortable the architectural discourse is with race.