Interim President Kotlikoff’s February 21 message to the Cornell community concluded with the assurance that "Cornell follows the law. … We will continue, as well, to work to ensure that our principles are consistently maintained and to advance our mission in ways that comply with existing federal and state law." This promise should put all of us on a high alert. It pledges unconditional anticipatory obedience to a legal system that had been corrupt to begin with (presided over by several dishonorable “justices” who guarantee their handlers a majority in the nation’s supreme court) and that is now being further subverted by the lawless rampage of the felon-led executive branch. Worse, it roundly ignores the long history of atrocities perpetrated under the aegis of the law, such as the genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of this country and of Jews and other undesirables in Nazi Germany.
For me, as a Jew who happens to be a Cornell employee, the latter example is particularly poignant. The 1933 Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service led to an entirely legal purge of Jewish faculty from German universities; those among the purged who did not manage to escape Nazi Germany perished in very legal death camps. In promising unconditional obedience to the current regime in Washington, Cornell has violated the first rule of resistance under a fascist takeover of a country’s political system: not to obey in advance. Cornell seems to be promising to fire — when the law requires it — those whom the regime fears: dissenters, Jews, gender-nonconformists, immigrants, people of color, women.
In an email response to Kotlikoff’s statement, I called on the university leadership “to commit to doing the right thing now — or else, when the fascists are kicked out (as they’re bound to be), to discover that it has misplaced its allegiance when it mattered the most.” Kotlikoff’s reply was disappointing: “While some seem to want me to make a critical political statement on behalf of the university, my role is to ensure Cornell continues to hew to its values and mission.” The point, of course, is that Cornell’s hewing to its values requires that its president make a political statement at this critical juncture in US democracy (such as it is). As Cory Doctorow observes in this week’s post on his blog, “you can't save an institution by betraying its mission.”
It is important to realize that attributing the leadership’s morally questionable stance to a seemingly understandable wish to preserve Cornell’s federal funding is as reprehensible in itself as it is likely to prove futile. Writing in today’s Guardian, Professor Emeritus Sheldon Pollock called the White House ultimatum to Columbia (along with similar demands put to dozens of other universities, including Cornell) a ransom note: Giving in to such threats empowers the mobster and degrades the victim — without, however, guaranteeing that further extortion would not happen. Moreover, even if funding can be obtained at the price of giving up Cornell’s principles, it would be blood money — akin to the university accepting fossil fuel funding or even reparations (if the ecocidal oil barons ever decide to rehabilitate their reputations by supporting good causes).
What should Cornell faculty, staff and students do in the face of craven “leadership”? Organize, fight back, win.
Shimon Edelman has served as professor of psychology at Cornell since 1999 and is a faculty fellow of Cornell on Fire. He can be reached at edelman@cornell.edu.
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