On March 26, President Pollack and Provost Kotlikoff wrote a letter to the Cornell Daily Sun regarding the Coalition for Mutual Liberation’s recent protests of the new Interim Expressive Activity Policy. I am a tenured faculty member, and while I am not a particularly active part of CML (many others have given much more time and effort), I have signed several of its letters and statements. My purpose here is to address two claims in the March 26 letter from the president and provost.
First, the president and provost claim that the faculty who support CML’s activities are “calling for the administration of Cornell to ignore disruptive protests and disregard enforcement of rules.” That is not accurate. In fact, the opposite is the case. Disruptive protests are asking to be noticed and engaged, not ignored. Arresting protesters is certainly one way in which authorities may pay attention to disruptive protests, but is that really the kind of attention that an institution of higher learning should be paying to peaceful demonstrators? On the enforcement of rules, the issue continues to be not a disregard for rules but the lack of a clear enforcement mechanism or a sense of what the disciplinary consequences for violating the policy will be. The policy was applied, in other words, before procedures for enforcement were created. This is a hasty administrative failure that creates a climate of fear and mistrust.
Second, the president and provost pose what they clearly see as a provocative question: “…who makes the decision about which causes are sufficient to accept disruption of the rights of others? And in all cases, how much infringement on the rights of others is acceptable?” The premise of this question is flawed. The protest by the CML does not infringe upon the rights of others; it helps ensure them. If teaching and learning are “rights,” as the president and provost assert, surely those rights cannot be separated from the right to free expression. After all, freedom and rights are not abstract concepts, but active practices. The premise of the president and provost’s question, in other words, is that the right to apply knowledge in a world beset by war, ethnic and racial discrimination, climate change and many other things is somehow entirely separate from the right to produce and share knowledge in the ivory tower. If that is the case, then we do not deserve to call ourselves a university.
But I don’t think that the President and Provost really believe this is the case. Or perhaps they haven’t thought their question through.
Let me offer a comparative example for illustration. In 2018, students in Nicaragua, where I do anthropological research, led a mass protest against rising domestic authoritarianism. (It is worth noting that the authoritarianism there emanated from a nominally “left-wing” government). Though the students and thousands of other citizens made a valiant effort to defend democracy and freedom of expression, hundreds were killed or jailed. In the wake of 2018, retribution has been visited on the universities themselves. By the end of 2023, at least 27 independently operating universities in Nicaragua had been taken over by the government. A Nicaraguan student or professor still has the “freedom to teach and learn,” but not to raise their voice in public to reflect the insights they have gained. Despite the repression, dissidents in Nicaragua are still galvanized by the refrain that emerged in memory of those killed or disappeared: “They were not delinquents. They were students.” A fundamental principle of the struggle for free expression in Nicaragua was that protest and education were freedoms that could not be divided from one another.
Of course, the right to teaching and learning is already under assault in the United States: by the House Ways and Means committee; by the white nationalists who marched on my alma mater, the University of Virginia, in 2017 and by those across the political spectrum who would remake universities as nothing more than delivery devices for technical knowledge.
In light of these very real forces, Cornell’s current administrative approach to protest could be seen as an act of self-preservation. If we don’t curb protest, the argument goes, we may face a loss of federal funding, or worse. As I ponder this possibility, I think of my Nicaraguan colleagues: veterinarians, hydrologists, doctors, political scientists and Jesuit priests. They could have aided and abetted the suppression of dissent, but when repression came, many stood with their students, at great risk to their institutional positions. Theirs was not a losing battle, even though many are now in jail or in exile. By their example, they are helping keep the freedom to teach and learn alive for a little while longer.
Alex Nading is a medical and environmental anthropologist, and professor in Cornell’s Department of Anthropology. He edits for Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Professor Nading can be reached at [email protected].
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