The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/opinioncolumns/page/2/)
We, the undersigned Cornell faculty, staff and alumni, strongly support the student activists who have disrupted business as usual to protest the University’s conduct amid the horrifying, ongoing assault on Palestinian populations.
While I wholeheartedly condemn the (denied) proposal to CFI’s executive board of rape as a spectacle and the organization in and of itself, I further understand that there needs to be more support for the Israeli victims and survivors of rape.
In his farewell address, George Washington famously said that Americans should set aside their “violent lines and dislikes of foreign nations,” adding that it would let our passions control us and make us slaves. Washington was totally correct, but we’re too deep in the woods to get back home.
It may seem wild to think that the Luddites might have had a good point, at least academically, but hear me out here. Give academic Luddism a try and let me know how it goes for you.
Dear students,
We write in response to the issues you raised, and to say that we share your concerns about Cornell’s “Interim Expressive Activity Policy,” which places significant limitations on political speech across our campus. This policy also prescribes disciplinary action for members of our community who exercise the very rights to “free expression” that the University administration has asked us all to celebrate this year. At a moment that demands that we care more, not less, about each other and the world around us, the fact that the administration seems intent on intimidating students, staff, and faculty and discouraging us all from exercising basic rights is deeply troubling.
The administration claims to support protest as long as it does not “disrupt” university operations. There is an absurdity to this claim, given that the purpose of protest is precisely to disrupt — to disrupt routinization, to disrupt apathy, to foreground a problem. A non-disruptive protest is no protest at all.
A terrifying home invasion showed me a what’s important at Cornell.
There are times when I just want an honest assessment of how attractive I am. Beauty may be subjective, but it’s clear that our subjective opinions on it tend to follow the same basic principles. After all, generational sex symbols very much exist and their widespread appeal suggests that our tastes are not as unique to us as we might think. The mass availability of information in the modern world shrouds our understanding of beauty in even more confusion. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know what the upper echelon of beauty looked like, but spending any amount of time on social media makes that impossible.
Editor in Chief Gabriel Levin sat down with Prof. Richard Bensel, government, to talk about the controversial Interim Expressive Activity Policy and the administration’s political pratfalls throughout its free expression academic theme year.
It would truly enhance the student experience.
Akwe:kon reflects a valuable community space and it’s extremely disheartening that more universities don’t provide a space like it.