Administration
Cornell Board of Trustees Chair Makes Millions off Weapons Manufacturer He Helps Direct
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Cornell Board of Trustees Chair Kraig Kayser MBA ’84 has directed and invested in weapons manufacturing company Moog for decades.
The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/divestment/)
Cornell Board of Trustees Chair Kraig Kayser MBA ’84 has directed and invested in weapons manufacturing company Moog for decades.
Cornell is finally signaling a willingness to move on from the attention-sucking disruption from a minority of students.
Student Assembly members voted to indefinitely shelve a resolution calling on the Board of Trustees to cut financial ties with nine weapons manufacturers and called into question the Spring 2024 divestment referendum results.
Over 100 pro-Palestine protesters confronted Boeing at the Human Capital and Human Relations Career Fair, “charging” the company with “aiding and abetting human rights violations, war crimes and genocide.”
How far protesters should go to achieve what they think is right has been a recurring question at Cornell, from the Straight takeover of 1969 (and before) down to this past semester.
The movement pushing for Cornell to divest from companies engaging in “morally reprehensible activities” in Gaza was a central theme of the Spring 2024 semester.
“Yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to have the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever. May we trust that this blessed ship is bound for some better shore, some undrowned Lemuria, risen and redeemed, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire.” — Thomas Pynchon ’59
When Cornell’s encampment is uprooted tonight, green and yellow patches of deadened grass will remain on the Arts Quad for some time — subtle discoloration indicating that at some point, something was here. After a few weeks at most, the grass will be mowed and grown anew, removing this temporary imprint. In three years, virtually all of the undergraduates who experienced life within our Liberated Zone will have graduated. Soon enough, our story will be reduced to the same vague murmurs of disquiet that eventually subsume all student protest movements.
Winter is tenacious in upstate New York. It endures far longer than it should, and brings with it a darkness that makes you bury your head and pray for spring. I thought of our long, dark winter when the editors of The Sun asked if I would jot a few lines about the encampment on the Arts Quad. And I thought about Emerson, who spoke at Boston’s Masonic Temple in 1841, and whose remarks I have edited for space:
The two parties which divide the state are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. Conservatism is always apologizing, pleading a necessity; it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success.
I implore you to view the students’ uprising as a genuine call for a ceasefire and divestment, a position which in my view is the most humane for both Gaza and the hostages who were abandoned by their government.
And what he can teach you too.