What does it mean to live because other people are dying? A friend posed this question at Cornell Students for Justice in Palestine’s vigil Tuesday night, describing the agonizing cognitive dissonance of living a “normal life” while your country carries out imperialist ethnic cleansing across the globe. How can you know that your tax dollars and tuition are bankrolling an ongoing genocide that has likely already killed upwards of 180,000 people and not spend every waking hour attempting to wash the blood from your hands? How the hell can you apply for a job at Boeing?
Most Cornell students live simultaneously in two realities: one where they are aware that American missiles are being used in one of the most repugnant acts of ethnic cleansing in human history, where every day brings new stories of mothers forced collect the scattered remains of their infant children in plastic bags; and another where they are pursuing a lucrative career that will allow them to live comfortably in the most powerful nation on Earth after graduation. It is time to recognize that these realities are not only simultaneous, but deeply connected — your comfortable life in the imperial core is predicated on violent dispossession and occupation in the rest of the world.
On Wednesday, students disrupted the ILR School’s Human Capital and HR Career Fair, which featured recruiters from weapons manufacturers Boeing and L3Harris. Students organized with the Coalition for Mutual Liberation successfully shut the event down using pots, pans and noisemakers in Statler Hall until both employers left the building. They also delivered an indictment to Boeing and L3Harris recruiters finding both companies guilty of aiding and abetting human rights violations, war crimes and genocide.
This action has significantly altered incentive structures at our university. For the administration, it has been made clear that inviting arms manufacturers to our campus after 70 percent of students voted to sever ties with them will also invite the risk of a negative student response. For students, CML has made it clear that you cannot passively support Palestine or understand the role of American weapons manufacturers in the genocide in Gaza and also make the personal decision to work for genocidaires — your friends and peers are watching and will hold you accountable for facilitating genocide with your labor.
Even when left implicit, the only real argument students make in defense of working for such repugnant firms is that their personal well-being matters more than the survival of Palestinian civilians. Cornell students are a part of the 4 percent of the world population that lives in the United States, and a part of the roughly .079 percent of the American population that attend a university with an endowment in excess of $10 billion. Regardless of your background, attending Cornell allows you to join the global hyper-elite — and even if students believe that they have earned that class position through hard work and merit, they will be faced with countless prime opportunities to perpetrate unspeakable harm towards working people in the Global South. You will likely become, and in some ways already are, immensely powerful. You alone are morally responsible for how you choose to wield your power over others — and you can almost certainly find a job that doesn’t involve constructing missiles that kill children.
But change cannot rely on people collectively deciding to act ethically against their own interests — the underlying incentive structures that shape the role of genocidal firms in our universities must first be shifted. Our university should not be a recruitment pipeline or a corporate partner for companies that profit from ethnic cleansing and imperial violence. Given the Cornell Board of Trustees’ refusal to even hold a vote on divestment from arms manufacturers — University leadership elected to arrest 24 students, graduate workers and staff members instead — it seems inevitable that students would at some point intervene and push this campus forcibly in the direction of humanity.
Wednesday night, VP Joel Malina announced that Cornell will target students who disrupted the career fair with “immediate action including suspension.” This represents Cornell’s own attempt to alter incentive structures for speaking out about our university’s complicity in genocide, making it even easier for students to justify their individual complicity. Cornell should not suspend its students of conscience — but as with the first two rounds of suspensions last spring, suppression tactics would likely only fuel the further growth of CML and its member organizations.
In the ivory tower, it is not just easy to ignore the suffering of colonized peoples around the world — it is a necessary precondition for participation in university life. Wednesday’s disruption may have inconvenienced some students, including plenty that never intended to approach the Boeing or L3Harris tables. But in doing so, they made our university’s role in facilitating an ongoing genocide impossible to ignore — and made visible a strong stigma against working for arms manufacturers. Until Cornell does the right thing and breaks ties with firms engaged in genocide profiteering, life on campus may be uncomfortable — but that is a price we should all be willing to pay.
Nick Wilson is a third year student in the New York State School of Industrial & Labor Relations at Cornell. His biweekly column Interim Expressive Activity provides a perspective on goings-on on campus from those who believe that Cornell should act less like a hedge fund and more like a responsible stakeholder in the Ithaca and global communities. The column does not intend to facilitate, engage in, participate or assist in any violations of University policy. Nick can be reached at [email protected].