The news hit like a one-two punch. Just weeks after Momodou Taal learned that his student visa wouldn’t be terminated after all, the presidential election went to the candidate who promised “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” Then a faculty colleague reported to an email list that the University — its bureaucratic wheels rumbling on their own time — had just evicted another Statler protestor from on-campus housing. Unable to bear the election postmortems, I distracted myself with the draft report of the Committee on Expressive Activity.
Reading the report in the wake of the election, I was especially struck by its list of basic principles. These are not mere window-dressing: they express the values and concerns that animated the committee as they worked. And they matter. The policy that grows out of this report will only enjoy legitimacy — that is, it will only be able to guide Cornell’s culture of expressive activity from the inside, minimizing the need for coercive enforcement — if the people to whom the policy applies can see their own values and concerns represented in it. Otherwise, it will further polarize the campus and entrench conflict with the administration. Yet the report remains troublingly silent on three essential points of principle.
Tightly focused on the question of when and how to regulate expression, the report implies that expressive activity will thrive wherever it is not restricted by university rules or intramural interference. But expressive activity is also affected by forces arising from beyond Cornell, including the threat or reality of investigation and repression by the state or private watchdogs. There is now more reason than ever to worry about politicized state aggression toward academia, and about organized vigilantism targeting students and faculty whose politics make them persona non grata under the new regime. The report says nothing about Cornell’s obligation to protect expressive activity against outside interference, and to resist pressure to coordinate its own authority with the demands of the state, including, when necessary, by refusing to comply with patently unjust laws.
Centered on the principle that the regulation of expressive activity should remain neutral, showing no favor or disfavor to specific opinions, the report likewise fails to acknowledge that under some circumstances controversial political events are sufficiently relevant to the mission of the university that Cornell itself cannot and must not remain neutral about them. (Even the University of Chicago’s much-lauded Kalven Report acknowledges this.) If the University’s leadership isn’t outspokenly and forcefully non-neutral when the academic and/or expressive freedom of the university’s members comes under direct political threat, Cornell’s professions of neutrality will be dismissed as ideological cover for institutional self-subordination to whatever the powers that be happen to require.
A final, subtler problem lies in the report’s definition of “disruption,” which is said to occur “when members of the Cornell community are inhibited in their ability to teach, conduct research, study, provide health care or other critical university services, or access or make use of university facilities.” This is a broad definition: it can refer to everything from a brief inconvenience to a sustained pattern of conduct that makes some activity difficult or impossible over a longer term. But the real problem is that the report uses the term too narrowly.
Among the things that can “inhibit” the ability to teach, learn and research are global events that might — at first, or from one perspective — seem quite distant, but which are vitally important to some Cornellians. The seeming indifference of those who are not immediately touched by those events, or who have other priorities, or who are affected by them deeply but see them differently, can seem like an affront and an inhibition of the ability to experience Cornell as what the report calls a “community of belonging.” This is one source of the disruptive energy that animates some expressive activity, as speakers and organizers try to break through the calm of business as usual in order to make it known that, for them, business as usual has already been disrupted in ways others don’t acknowledge.
Some people find this kind of activity childish or hypersensitive. I see it instead as reflecting an intensity of concern for the world and its future for which we should be grateful. But whatever you think of it, in an era of protracted and severe political conflict, it’s not going to go away. And the results of the election should put us on notice: the volume is only going to go up. What would it mean to acknowledge this in Cornell’s expressive activity policy?
The report draws a sharp line between “nondisruptive” civil disobedience, for which it recommends “tolerance,” and “disruptive” activity, for which it recommends “progressive disciplinary sanctions” proportional to the severity of the disruption. But the right not to be “inhibited” in your work does not amount to a right never to encounter inconvenience or disruption. That’s why Cornell also has an obligation to take the larger circumstances behind a disruption into account, and to extend “tolerance,” too, to on-campus disruptions that are proportionate to the larger disruptive events in the world to which they respond. Content-neutral cannot mean content-free.
That idea doesn’t sit well with the aspiration to craft rules and definitions that can be applied to controversial cases with mechanical precision. But that aspiration is always a fantasy, and a disavowal of the responsibility to exercise imagination and understanding in making judgments. It was true before Tuesday, and it feels even truer now: no one has ever achieved the difficult task of doing justice under circumstances of conflict — or of sustaining a community strained by disruptions from inside and out — by burying their head in the sand.
Patchen Markell is Associate Professor of Government in the College of Arts and Sciences, where he teaches political theory. He can be reached at [email protected].