The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/author/leditor/)
It is not ridiculous to ask the institution that takes my tax dollars to divest from war profiteers. It is not a fundamental misunderstanding to think that Cornell’s administration should not prioritize the speech of weapons manufacturers and the KKK over that of their own students.
In ignoring antisemitic slurs hurled at Jews protesting on behalf of Palestinian lives, while issuing punishments that bar Jewish students from participating in their chosen Jewish prayer communities, Cornell is inappropriately weighing in on Jewish debates about Jewish values and practice.
My comments, in response to a question from a participant in the meeting about the KKK, were made in the context of my being challenged on why Cornell is allowing some hurtful speech to take place and to illustrate Cornell’s deep commitment to free expression. In retrospect, it was a terrible analogy that was posed, and a false equivalency, and I should have said as much in response. To be clear, the KKK is abhorrent by any standard, and Cornell University would never invite a representative of the KKK to campus. Any speaker invited by a faculty member or student organization is reviewed by the University Events Team and is only allowed to come to campus if the safety of all in our community can be assured.
The only logical conclusion is that the University has a responsibility to take a firm stance against Joel Malina’s welcomeness to offering platforms to hate groups to speak on campus in which all identities and orientations of Cornell’s student body and faculty will be threatened.
In his comments at Hillel, Joel Malina appears entirely confused about the scope and meaning of academic freedom. In his focusing on the case of pro-Palestinian activists, Malina suggests that the administration’s expressive activity policy is not content-neutral but is motivated by pro-Israel parents and donors.
I thank the members of Cornell’s faculty who reached out to me to express understandable concern.
As the Cornell University administration continues to threaten Black graduate student Momodou Taal with de-enrollment and deportation we, as organizations representing Black students, want to reiterate that Black students do not feel safe at Cornell.
After more than 20 years in the classroom, from graduate school through my time at Cornell, I have learned that if students feel that their teachers are scrutinizing what they say, the result is silence. If students feel trusted to explore ideas, the result is education. And when professors — as we surely will after this morning’s Sun story — teach from a place of fear rather than trust, the result is generalized apathy at best, widespread paranoia at worst.
Any true union with teeth and a material commitment to justice would recognize this patterned behavior as systemic violence, and as union busting, as evidenced at Cornell’s peer institutions including Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California system and Duke University.
The University’s claims about using plant-based materials and PFAS-free turf are questionable. Evidence shows that many so-called “plant-based” solutions still pose significant health and environmental risks. The safety of these materials is far from proven, so what standards are actually being used to evaluate them?