Breaking Biases at Cornell

At Cornell, “biases have a corrosive effect on the sense of community” according to Dean of Students Kent Hubbell. Such was part of the opening remarks at today’s Student Assembly-sponsored event called “Breaking Bias: A Discussion about On-Campus Biases.”

The event lasted about 90 minutes and featured various administrator and student speakers. In attendance were about 100 students.

Administrators, including Associate Dean and Director of Intercultural Programs Renee Alexander ’74 and Diversity & Special Programs Coordinator at Cornell Victor Younger, spoke at length about the nature of “bias” at Cornell, which literature handed out at the event defines as “Prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair” and alternatively as “any intentionally-induced trigger that causes you to feel uncomfortable because of who you are; it’s a trigger that makes you feel uneasy in your own skin.”

A quick Google search reveals the first definition was lifted without citation from any number of websites; the second appears to be the original prose of Student Assembly (SA) members.

Alexander spoke at length about the need to mitigate the “power privilege dynamic” and strive for “authentic engagement” among different groups on campus. Younger’s speech was dedicated to Cornell’s Bias Response Team, which is ostensibly a part of the Department of Inclusion and Workplace Diversity. According to another speaker, last year there were 37 bias incidents reported to the University.

Student speakers took turns sharing their experiences with facing bias on and off campus. One unidentified female freshman spoke about the bias towards first-generation college students. Saim Chaudhary ’17, a Pakistani, spoke about difficulties he has experienced travelling back and forth from the U.S. and Pakistan, and about a time a friend on campus said as a joke, “all Pakistanis are terrorists.” Anonymous student stories were then read aloud. One concerned a graduate student “feeling alienated [and] unwelcome [in her] department” because a professor joked about the difficult of pronouncing foreign names and nicknames but made no similar joke about pronouncing American names and nicknames.

SA Transfer Representative Diana Li ’17 and SA LGBTQ Representative Phillip Titcomb ’17 took the podium towards the end of the event to talk about their jointly sponsored Resolution 33, which according to them calls for a system wherein students can provide feedback about Cornell’s bias response program.

The Facebook event description gives more details:

“Have you ever feel uncomfortable in your own skin? Do you feel like your voice isn’t heard loudly enough? Breaking Bias is the perfect opportunity for you to share your ideas on the subject of of bias on campus, and how to improve the status quo.

Come join us in the much-needed discussion of bias, listen to the stories of those who have stepped up to share their stories, and administrators addressing their concerns.”

The event’s main organizers appeared to be Maria Chak ’18, SA Freshmen Representative, and Shivang Tayal ’16, SA International Representative.

Additionally present were several more SA members, many of whom–including Chak, Tayal, Li, and Titcomb–are running for re-election. Though Tayal and Titcomb are running for re-election uncontested, Chak is running for Minority Representative against Chaudhary (as well as another lesser-known individual) and Li for Undesignated At-Large against several other candidates.

Chak stated, twice, that this event “was not political” in the sense that it was not meant as a campaigning event or an attempt to seek endorsements from various cultural, ethnic, racial, etc. student groups. Perhaps, but that can be left open for debate.

Anyways, I’m still wondering what ever happened to Cornell’s “investigation” into this incidence of “bias”?