Dear colleagues,
Over the past few weeks, Cornell’s administration has sharply increased its use of disciplinary measures against student protestors. As anthropologists and educators, we write to spread awareness of the threats this escalation poses to Cornell’s core values, the issues motivating student protests and why faculty should take them seriously. And we believe we must heed students’ insistence that the use of University resources to fund weapons development and manufacturing jeopardizes our community.
In addition to the high-profile suspension of a student in Africana Studies and over a dozen more disciplined following the recent Statler protest, two anthropology students were suspended: a graduate student who received a “non-academic temporary suspension” on Oct. 3, and an undergraduate student who received a “full temporary suspension” on Oct. 17. Temporary suspensions exist for exceptional cases in which a student poses an imminent threat to campus safety. This disciplinary category is imposed prior to any formal hearing or investigation, and has been weaponized in the past year as a means of disciplining student protestors without due process.
In the best cases, disciplinary measures like this disrupt students’ access to the basic infrastructures necessary to succeed academically, and undermine our efforts to foster a thriving intellectual community in which these students play a vital role. In the worst, they threaten to unravel students’ lives. See our full letter for some of the effects of these supervisions.
These discretionary acts have increased fear across our campus, and ushered in a new reality where the right to free expression at Cornell belongs only to the most secure among us.
The University’s callousness about the effect of its policies on vulnerable students in Ithaca is mirrored by its investment in industries that destroy the conditions for inquiry around the world. In the anthropology department, we are experiencing this firsthand. The same week one of our students was suspended for opposing Cornell’s cooperation with the weapons industry, another was fleeing Lebanon, the site of their research, which is currently being bombarded with material support from institutions like ours.
This is what a threat to the University looks like: not participating in “disruptive” chants, but sustaining investments that make us complicit in destroying the very worlds that we insist we are trying to create.
Join us in calling on the Cornell administration to immediately rescind all suspensions, heed our concerns about ongoing disciplinary actions, and reaffirm the University as a site of shared governance. Join us in taking students seriously when they ask the University to invest in education, not in war; when they advocate for a global vision built on solidarity and care. This should begin, but not end, with a serious and transparent accounting of Cornell’s investments in weapons technology.
In solidarity.
— Concerned Members of the Anthropology Department
Nerissa Russell is a professor in and chair of the Cornell Department of Anthropology. She writes on behalf of concerned members of the Department of Anthropology. She can be reached at [email protected].
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