Pollack Pontificates on Academic Freedom
While Pollack’s statement fell short of recognizing how desperate the situation is at Cornell, at least she believes in, and unapologetically defends, free speech.
While Pollack’s statement fell short of recognizing how desperate the situation is at Cornell, at least she believes in, and unapologetically defends, free speech.
However, the administration seems to be quickly losing patience with the entire system. Perhaps the day is coming when the Greeks will be sent home.
On the night of Wednesday, November 9th, famed Cornell alumna Ann Coulter ‘84 attempted to give a speech on campus. However, she was prevented from delivering her remarks due to eight students who staged interruptions throughout the event. And yet, the story began well before that night.
Cornell is a centrally planned environment. For more than one hundred years, a single bureaucracy has designed campus with more or less one vision in mind. Yet on this constructed tract of 2,300 acres, Uris and Morrill Halls coexist. One cannot walk five steps without happening upon a new architectural style, sometimes radically so– all designed by one institution. Thirty minutes away, a place that looks more or less the same throughout has developed, quietly and steadily, without a single written rule.
McCarty announced the extension of the earlier suspension of IFC activities through the end of the semester.
Pollack, multiple times, repeated “the students were warned” that disrupting the event would result in consequences. Nevertheless, they persisted.
Joel M. Malina, Vice President for University Relations, said he was “deeply disappointed that attendees at a campus event rudely and repeatedly disrupted” Coulter’s remarks.
New York Republicans fared better than in other areas of the country, perhaps buttressed by a strong showing by gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin.
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