After unanimously passing the Student Assembly more than a week ago, the Student Assembly’s trigger warning resolution has been rejected by university president Martha Pollack.
SA Resolution 31, “Mandating Content Warnings for Traumatic Content in the Classroom,” would have required that professors provide so-called “trigger warnings” for “graphic traumatic” content. Sponsors claimed that, without warnings, sufferers of traumatic events would be harmed by displays of graphic course materials. The proposal went so far as to ask professors to excuse students from learning the objectionable content in question.
SA Res. 31 immediately drew fire from free speech advocacy organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). That organization sent a letter to Pollack and published an editorial imploring Cornell’s administration to reject the proposal. Among other things, FIRE argued that the resolution would infringe on professors’ academic freedom and free speech. FIRE requested a response from Cornell by April 5th.
Now, Pollack has rejected SA Res. 31., for it “would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, and [its requirements] are at odds with the goals of a Cornell education.”
The administration’s statement, which is cosigned by Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff, seems to endorse FIRE’s concerns and expand upon them. The throughline is academic freedom.
Such a policy [as SA Res. 31] would violate our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach, preventing them from adding, throughout the semester, any content that any student might find upsetting. It would have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea. And it would unacceptably limit our students’ ability to speak, question, and explore, lest a classroom conversation veer into an area determined “off-limits” unless warned against weeks or months earlier.
President Pollack and Provost Kotlikoff
Pollack and Kotlikoff are clearly concerned about censorship, for they argue that Cornell professors have the absolute right “to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it,” contingent on professional ethics.
The statement closes on the requested exemptions for students uncomfortable with topics under discussion. Mirroring her request to the incoming Class of ‘26, Pollack stated that:
Learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education: essential to our students’ intellectual growth, and to their future ability to lead and thrive in a diverse society.
President Pollack and Provost Kotlikoff
This decision comes as faculty across the country are becoming increasingly concerned about freedom of expression on campus. In response to the disruption of a federal judge’s speech at Stanford Law School, the law school’s dean released a long statement about the “chilling effects” on freedom of expression.
Stanford’s case, while not about content warnings, similarly warns of the potential degradation of academic freedom on campuses. Stanford’s policy encourages the “[e]xpression of the widest range of viewpoints …, free from institutional orthodoxy and from internal or external coercion.” Cornell is struggling to maintain such an environment. Notably, last November, conservative pundit Ann Coulter was shouted down by protestors, effectively implementing a heckler’s veto. Cornell has yet to announce if it pursued disciplinary action against the disruptors. This time, it seems, President Pollack is taking a stronger stance.
UPDATE – FIRE’s Director for Campus Rights Advocacy Alex Morey responded to President Pollack’s rejection of SA Resolution 31 in a statement obtained by the Review:
Higher education gets students ready to solve our world’s biggest problems. Elite students with Cornell degrees have unique opportunities to study with some of the world’s best professors in furtherance of that mission. But the Cornell Student Assembly’s initiative would have undercut faculty’s ability to teach effectively.
Faculty at schools like Cornell that promise academic freedom, are allowed to choose whether or not to provide trigger warnings, cannot be compelled to provide them, and certainly cannot be given the impossible task of anticipating and warning, under pain of punishment, against everything any particular student might find “triggering.”
The President and Provost’s quick and clear rejection of this proposal was really heartening. We often see administrators equivocate in statements like these, but not Cornell. They articulated the importance of academic freedom, wide open debate, and sent the message that academic freedom and open debate is at the core of a Cornell education.
Schools like Cornell can certainly provide disability accommodations, and accessible mental health resources for students. What universities cannot do is sanitize the university environment and threaten professors who don’t bubble wrap their syllabus just in case a student might get upset.
If students are dealing with trauma, that’s legitimate. But censoring faculty is not the way to resolve it.
Alex Morey, FIRE Director for Campus Rights Advocacy
