On Sept. 2, Opinion Columnist Henry Schechter wrote in response to Opinion Columnist Yihun Stith’s piece highlighting reports that Cornell University was negotiating with the Trump Administration over its federal funding. Though Stith was wrong to be absolutist about Cornell “bargaining away its values,” Schechter is equally wrong — not only about how negotiation works, but also about how policy is made.
Since then, Cornell University struck a negotiated deal with the administration to release $250 million in funding. But the true cost is far greater than the $30 million the University will “invest” in agricultural programs. Cornell has also agreed to survey students on campus climate and to provide anonymized admissions data to the Trump administration.
While the deal ends the Office of Civil Rights investigations into Cornell, it does not end the ongoing class-action lawsuits Cornell has joined against the Trump administration.
Schechter’s thesis is that Cornell must play by the rules of the “game” by lobbying and negotiating with the administration to maintain its competitive edge. But his definitions collapse on contact.
Lobbying and negotiating are not interchangeable and Cornell has been using each as two separate tracks of action. When Cornell lobbies state and federal governments, it is spending money to enhance its presence and favorability in Albany and Washington, D.C. Their lobbying is often not directed at the executive branch. Cornell’s expenditure reflects costs including labor, food, resources and other things to support the lobbyist's education of lawmakers.
Negotiation, by contrast, is when you have conflicting interests with another party and engage in a back-and-forth dialogue in pursuit of a mutually acceptable agreement. It almost always involves those who have decision-making power over the outcome. You use each of these things for different situations, as Cornell has been doing.
Policymaking
“The spaces in American politics where policy actually gets formed are often not the public squares,” says Schechter. In reality, policy is not a quiet process. This romanticization Schechter has of true back-room decision-making may occur, but it is a rarity. To get enough support for a piece of legislation, which is not what he’s talking about here, requires grassroots support, buy-in from hundreds of members of Congress and cooperation among thousands of staffers.
Even when negotiations start behind closed doors, they often spill out into the public as each side pressures the other to accept their demands. Take the recent negotiations to end the government shutdown: Each party held daily press briefings to frame their counterparts’ arguments and pressure them to make concessions in public.
Schechter's reference to “iron triangles” misses the mark. Those describe the relationship between congressional committees, interest groups and regulatory agencies (in both the legislative and executive branches) that allow for the formation of legislation. It has nothing at all to do with withheld funding and Office of Civil Rights allegations, which is what Stith and Schechter are actually debating.
Lobbying isn’t a donation or a bribe, but it can involve taking Congresspeople to thousand-dollar lunches. It can be informally selling one’s relationships. It can be expressing interest in future projects pursued at the university. It can be messy as hell.
Negotiation
Schechter’s next mistake is assuming that progress is only ever made “when it comes to lopsided power dynamics.” The opposite is true. Power imbalance is shown to make the party with less power far more defensive and unlikely to cooperate. It causes entrenchment. If an agreement is reached, it is often deeply unfair and inefficient. Schechter should read the Melian dialogue, when, in ancient Greece, a power imbalance negotiation led to the destruction of an entire city.
Cornell’s power in a negotiation comes from its “best alternative to a negotiated agreement.” If the University had better alternatives to recoup its $250 million shortfall due to the Office of Civil Rights allegations, it either would have taken those routes or used those routes to achieve more favorable terms. Cornell had bad alternatives, and spending more money on lobbying wasn’t making them better.
Schechter is correct that it’s not pretty how the sausage gets made. But there is a good way and a bad way to ‘play the game,’ even if it is factually not a game. Negotiators can be deceptive and uncooperative or they can secure the best agreement possible even with terrible options.
While we’re all busy blaming Kotlikoff and Cornell leadership, it bears repeating who created this predicament in the first place: the Trump Administration.
Paul Caruso is an Opinion Columnist and a second year MPA student in the Brooks School of Public Policy and the Founder of the Cornell Negotiation Student Society. His column, Caruso's Compass, focuses on politics, international affairs, and campus life. The column seeks to identify issues with the status quo and provide solutions to them. He can be reached at pcaruso@cornellsun.com.
