The familiar green screen and white lettering precede each movie trailer. Before the main attraction can scroll across the screen, the designated rating and following justification first greet the audience. While many viewers choose to ignore the warning, few question its significance. And this makes sense; a second-long movie rating is hardly an inconvenience, yet it presents conscientious viewers with the opportunity to avoid potentially disturbing or inappropriate content. The movie rating is considerate and unobtrusive, constructive and nondescript.
By now, Cornell’s most recent Fox News incident is old news. Jesse Watters and his camera crew came, recorded some ambush interviews of students and cut and pasted a segment together to support their foregone conclusion: that Cornell as an institution is a hotbed of some sort of thought-crushing “liberal indoctrination.”
Many people will also remember Cornell’s last brush with right-wing pseudo-journalism, when an undercover “reporter” from Project Veritas (an organization with less journalistic credibility than Fox News) pulled off his own feat of ambush journalism to make it appear that Cornell would welcome a group which materially supported ISIS. And now Project Veritas has released yet another video, this time portraying Cornell as anti-Constitution. The video follows the same tactics used to obtain the ISIS video: a reporter poses as a student and puts a university employee in an awkward and unrealistic situation; a “gotcha” video is then recorded. Much has been made, especially in the wake of the Fox News incident, of the issues of journalism and what rights the press should have on campus: the journalistic practices were bad, the journalistic practices were bad but the university was wrong for trying to stop the interviews, the university was in the right for following their previously established policy on unannounced campus interviews, etc.
On Sept. 11, 2014, Hannah Dancy’s ’17 chemistry professor demonstrated the chemical reaction that occurred in explosions during the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers. Dancy, who is from Manhattan, said she felt uncomfortable with the in-class demonstration and said she thought “people in that room who might have lost someone” might have felt even worse. “My mom and dad watched the towers fall,” she said. “My mom still has really bad [post-traumatic stress disorder] from it.
A lot of discussion has taken place recently about the merits of “trigger warnings” in academic environments. We can see that students, professors and administrators are all now part of an important conversation which deals with trauma and its role in the classroom. Some are fans of trigger warnings. Others, like President Elizabeth Garrett (to reporters at the Cornell Club), say that “there shouldn’t be any limits on the substance of freedom of speech at a university.”
And on a tangential note, any casual observer of the Cornellian social media scene will also see that a related division of opinions has happened on the oh-so-exciting “Overheard” group. The typical incident usually goes like this: A makes a joke in poor taste.
