Columns
EDITORIAL | Cornell Administrators Must Advocate for their Marginalized Students
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Earlier on Thursday, the Young America’s Foundation — a conservative youth group that has been criticized as a white supremacist group — published a column and social media campaign attacking Cornell Student Assembly representatives.
The inaccurate shpiel of the YAF disseminated this morning is nothing more than a diatribe that attacked young adults with marginalized identities for having the gall to think differently.
In the opinion pages of this newspaper, cited in the YAF piece, The Sun has tried its best to trust the intent of different perspectives; we’ve advocated over and over again for students to disagree on policy, not personality. But it is impossible to model or facilitate discourse when off-campus agitators attack our peers for having the audacity to advocate for a disarmament resolution that seeks to make this campus safer. For all the hoopla attributed to members of the S.A. for their admittedly unconventional approaches to student governance, the power structures at play in this moment are clear: Students of color attempted to make change in the sphere of their own University, with democratic support of their community, following the institutional procedures that permit accountability. Rules were not broken. Policies were followed.