Over just the last few weeks, Cornellians have suffered through a lot, to say the least. An election with undoubtedly devastating consequences. A report of sexual assault and drugging at Chi Phi that led to the fraternity’s suspension — yet another reminder of this campus’s horrific rape culture. A sophomore’s death. A Cornell custodian charged with second-degree murder. A student left hospitalized after falling in Fall Creek Gorge. A T.A. arrested after being discovered underneath a female student’s bed. And an ongoing, brutal crackdown on activism that is actively singling out student leaders.
As we reach the home stretch of this grueling semester, many of us are limping to the finish line. The Sun calls on Interim President Kotlikoff to give the campus time to heal the rifts driven through our community and declare a community day next Monday.
Students told The Sun this week that they have been grappling with immense stress. One described the administration’s response, which is to send out boilerplate emails whenever tragedy strikes, as “impersonal and perfunctory.” When students are dealing with existential fear and processing trauma, it’s only right to provide relief from an Ivy League courseload. It’s especially easy to give into the despair of a debilitating week and fall even further behind when our administrators appear to be wholly uninterested in addressing our wellbeing outside of an email statement.
In an interview with The Sun on Wednesday evening, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Peter John Loewen said that the administration rejected the idea of a community day. “They’ve done it in the past,” Loewen said. “But they took that decision not to provide it.” We students ask the administration to reconsider its decision and do the right thing. If Cornell’s administration wants to foster any semblance of a community on campus, it must first demonstrate that it cares about its students and not just our tuition money.
A community day is not unprecedented. We did it last year, after weeks of hate and fear on campus culminated in horrible antisemitic death threats. Where’s our empathetic president this year?
At the end of the day, the value of our education at Cornell is contingent upon our ability to take full advantage of it. When the conditions of our country, our town and our campus become too overwhelming, too dangerous to focus, we need to be able to step back and focus on recentering our community. Kotlikoff this semester has deluged our inboxes with more email statements vowing to punish students than promising to help build us up, and that just about sums up the legacy he’s making for himself.