With the recent announcement of the Presidential Task Force on Institutional Voice, I couldn’t help but pause. Voices, especially for Deaf folks like yours truly, are complicated. “Having a voice” is a metaphor that propels us straight into the 19th century with its rampant colonialism, race science and eugenics. It leads us, as Douglas Baynton emphasizes in Forbidding Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language, to a place in which ‘[t]he value of speech was, for oralists, akin to the value of being human. To be human was to speak.” Oralists, put briefly, were hearing people who didn’t want deaf people using signed languages. And so they forced deaf people to speak, making puppets out of bodies in an attempt to create familiar — oral — voices. As a result, Deaf people were silenced, wronged, traumatized and trapped in our own bodies, and so goes yet another history of harm and violence. But for those of us navigating both the Deaf and Hearing world, we often find ourselves reflecting on voices. And speaking. And the relationship between voices and speaking. (But I guess the “Presidential Task Force on Speaking” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.)
What is this committee? Who makes it up? We don’t (and likely won’t) know. The committee members will be privately and quietly appointed (loud people unwelcome) and it will be co-chaired by one of our highest-ranking administrators. As someone whose (literal) voice was targeted and disciplined by this administration (“unreasonably loud behavior” was one of my formal charges when I was temporarily suspended last Spring — I swear it’s true), it seems the height of irony that these same administrators would now oversee a committee on institutional voice.
So sure, this committee will develop conditions under which the university will make statements qua University — that is, with the force and power of Cornell’s name behind it — all the while paying close attention to how this booming, institutionally-approved voice impacts the individual voices of Cornellians. And to be clear, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we might even want the university to think through best practices around statements. But look closely and you’ll see that within the mandate of the committee is the question of exercising institutional voice “at the level of colleges, departments, centers, academic sub-units and other faculty, staff or student groups.” When a privately appointed committee takes on the mission of telling student groups how they ought to use their voice, we should all worry. What exactly is the political vision here? That undergraduate groups won’t denounce the university’s material ties to genocides? That departments won’t condemn administrators flagrantly violating academic freedom? That faculty members won’t condemn the cowardice of removing explicit commitments to gender-affirming care for the trans community?
Maybe, then, the moral of this story is that we should feel for the mysterious members of this committee who are now tasked with solving longstanding problems in political philosophy. Or maybe, the moral of the story is that we have an administration that will silence dissent (voices, remember). The story of a university uninterested in thoughtful, love-filled, loud voices proclaiming that “Palestinian people should have equal rights and be able to return to their homeland,” or “Trans people must be protected and guaranteed equal access to healthcare,” or “Jewish people deserve political leaders that don’t reward Nazis salutes.” The story of a university uninterested in voices that embolden our university to stand up for things in addition to the National Institute of Health’s funding cuts. (No one, and I mean no one, likes budget cuts.) And the story of a university uninterested in voices that grow into a community with the courage to speak, learn and share knowledge and stifled histories.
But maybe, the moral of the story is that while our university declares conditions under which we speak as a collective, we must remember that care-full and considered disagreements require recognizing that we do not come to these conversations as equals. Sometimes we aren’t granted appropriate standing as knowledge producers. Other times, our bodies and identities are weaponized against us, justifying disregard for the content of our speech. So we must proceed cautiously as we reflect on what (and who) speaks for all of Cornell. Voices might be signs or signs. Voices might look unfamiliar, disquieting or even uncomfortable. Our voices look (and sound) different because we understand that some voices are being drowned out. And if you somehow find yourself needing more evidence of this simple fact, consider this:
How many Palestinians do you know at Cornell?
Bianca Waked is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Sage School of Philosophy. They can be reached at bmw237@cornell.edu.
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