The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/debate/)
The candidates vying for the role of student-elected trustee touched on basic needs for students, mental health and their policy plans at Wednesday’s forum.
Two members of the Cornell Speech and Debate Society placed first at the North American Universities Debating Championships held in early April.
The candidates for Student Assembly president and executive vice president discussed free speech, Cornell’s administration and their qualifications at a Q&A-style forum on Tuesday.
To the editor:
We would like to thank the Cornell community for welcoming our debate on climate science and
greenhouse gas emissions this past week. We appreciate the coverage by Sun reporters Sofia Rubinson and Eric Reilly but would like to clarify a few points made in their article.
The pre- and post-debate audience poll results were displayed on a large screen on stage in Call Auditorium during the event but did not yet include the number of polling participants. The final poll results, including number of polling participants, may be viewed at steamboatinstitute.org.
Following new state and county guidelines on masks, students weigh in on whether they believe the University should shed its mask mandate.
Candidates for Student-Elected Trustee discuss their plans for addressing mental health issues, affordability and other critical issues for the University in their debate.
Tuesday’s debate featured nine candidates running for S.A. College Representative for their respective colleges.
The Student Assembly elections held their first set of debates on Thursday, April 8. The candidates discussed the need to reduce financial burdens for students, improve infrastructure and provide resources to support student wellbeing.
There was a time when I loved to debate about politics. Whether it was making idealistic points like a low-budget Aaron Sorkin wannabe while dressed to the nines as a high school debater, casually arguing with friends while eating Louie’s well past midnight or participating in the web of countless cordial and sometimes less than cordial debates which make up Cornell’s political discourse — I loved it all. But these days, I’m not sure that I still do. And I don’t think I’m alone in that feeling. I am still fervently dedicated to politics.
In the aftermath of President-Elect Biden fulfilling his oft cited campaign promise to beat Trump “like a drum” in the 2020 election, there has been an outpouring of rhetoric from the political middle for unity — a term which has grown increasingly difficult to be uttered unsarcastically in recent years of American political life. Biden himself has thus far stayed true to his desire to “lower the temperature” amidst appointments of qualified, long time civil servants to cabinet positions (doesn’t that just give you goosebumps?) and his recent Thanksgiving address in which he called for Americans “to put away the harsh rhetoric” and “give each other a chance.”
These calls to action are responsible, prudent action in this brutally polarized time. To call it responsible and prudent sounds like rather bland praise, but in juxtaposition to our current president’s brand of reckless authoritarianism, it’s actually the most deeply adoring praise I can write. Yet as the glow gradually fades from the realization we have finally restored a person who actually takes the custodianship of our democracy seriously, we are left with a profoundly difficult question posed to each of us as individuals: How do we “give each other a chance”?
Centrists in both parties have made their strategy clear through a steady deluge of op-eds calling for Biden to act during these crisis stricken times with restraint and bipartisanship — a strategy which may sound familiar to anyone who has ever attempted to put out a raging fire with an empty fire extinguisher. Progressives receive this refrain with a groan, describing the notion that a potential McConnell led Senate will be even mildly cooperative as laughable and casting an eye back to what they deem as the failures of the Obama administration in its various legislative compromises: failures which eventually led to the efficacy of Trump’s nativist, populist message in 2016.