BY JOHN K. WILSON https://academeblog.org/
…The reasons why the Cornell standard is wrong should be clear. A total ban on controversial matters, even in a slip of the tongue, is extraordinarily broad. And how are faculty supposed to know for certain if controversial material could be deemed unrelated to the course? It’s ironic that Cornell’s administration would announce a complete prohibition on unrelated controversial matters in a self-righteous letter proclaiming the need to protect controversial material.
Cornell sophomore Claire Ting, who co-sponsored the resolution, later told the campus newspaper, “A lot of the headlines online have really mischaracterized this resolution and even [painted] Cornell as a university of triggered snowflakes.” Ting noted that “we completely agree [that] interacting with this difficult material is essential for learning and for growth.”
It’s disturbing that Cornell students were globally denounced as censors for an innocuous resolution that did not infringe upon academic freedom, while the official administration response was universally praised as a defense of academic freedom even though it announced extraordinary new rules restricting the liberty of professors.
Cornell’s leaders need to rescind their poor choice of words and publicly announce that it was a mistake, and then they need to fix Cornell’s policies to protect academic freedom by ensuring that the AAUP standard of “persistently intruding” without any denunciation of controversy will be enacted. And everyone who was so quick to denounce an entire generation of students and praise administrators based on newspaper headlines might want to actually read resolutions and official letters before jumping to erroneous and exaggerated conclusions.
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Thoughts? Agree or Argue?