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.
We are humans first and foremost. Or, as the bus driver would have said it, “earthlings.”
On February 2nd, several Cornell student groups will be hosting Nico Perrino, executive vice president at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
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.
All told, it was an eventful year at Cornell, with many developments that will prove to have a long-term impact.
On December 6, 2022, Cornell announced that President Martha Pollack appointed a Task Force on Undergraduate Admissions that held its first meeting on November 21.
Cornell should follow the example of Bethe and other brave faculty of the 1950s to fight such attacks on academic freedom. If we continue to recklessly cancel people for ideological nonconformity, who knows? Perhaps it will take another 70 years before our successors can reverse our costly mistakes.
We lose a lot when we assume everyone is acting with ill intent. And indeed, shutting down those who act in bad faith is often the very action they desire.
This organization is a registered student organization of Cornell University