Part I identified the college faculties as the key in deciding Cornell’s new admissions policy following the fall of affirmative action. This part covers the related debate of what requirements should be imposed on students to learn about race relations after they arrive on campus. Part III will cover the proposed anti-racism center and the battle over diversity course content.
In a long-delayed response to the murder of George Floyd, Cornell is reallocating financial resources away from existing academic instruction to create new for-credit classes in “anti-racism.”
At the May 10 Faculty Senate meeting, Deputy Provost Avery August gave a progress report on each college’s efforts to meet the 2024-25 implementation deadline. The interim report raises serious questions about who benefits financially from the program and threats to the academic freedom of faculty who teach the required classes.
Background
In the summer of 2020, after the killing of George Floyd, an ad hoc group called DoBetterCornell built a website and organized a petition recycling various DEI demands from 2015 and 2019. Similar demands were made across the country by left-wing students at other universities.
President Pollack, aware of Cornell’s shared governance model and distribution of powers to the individual colleges, asked the university faculty to consider a proposal for a new anti-racism center, faculty training, and a new student course. Aside from these three DoBetterCornell requests referred to the faculty, Day Hall ignored their other demands.
The Dean of the Faculty then appointed and chaired three task forces that included DoBetterCornell students to work on the center, faculty, and student proposals (the “WG-S” for “Working Group–Students”). The Dean kept generating new drafts and asked task force members for comments rather than bringing any report to a final up or down task force vote.
Cornell has a complex formula for allocating its tuition dollars. Basically, each academic department shares tuition based upon the total credit hours it teaches. So, the more credit hours taught, the larger the budget to hire faculty and support graduate teaching assistants.
The early DoBetterCornell plan was to create a centralized Anti-Racism Center and have it teach a large lecture class that would be required for all students. This would allocate millions of tuition dollars annually for the center, which would then hire black teaching assistants, postdocs, and anti-racism community organizers.
However, it would also divert those tuition dollars from the colleges where students would otherwise be taking their elective courses.
Although the university faculty approved an anti-racism center in April 2021, it split on the idea of a mandatory anti-racism class. The university faculty voted 58-41-7 to go forward with a college-based menu of human diversity classes so long as all classes in the menu met a centrally imposed “requirements framework.” Approval was conditioned upon “broad, transparent consultation with the faculty” on implementation.
Meanwhile the political passions of the Black Lives Matter movement have cooled while the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision has undercut much of the professed legal basis for the BLM movement. So, if Cornell were to teach about race relations in 2023, the subject has evolved away from what Ibram Kendi espoused in 2020.
Each College Has a Separate Implementation Plan
Avery August reported to the Faculty Senate on actions taken by each college to offer anti-racism classes.
AAP has designed a single course for both architects, city planners, and art students entitled “Creating Justice: The World We Make” as the college reports: “Meeting university-wide learning objectives and creating synergies for cross-college efforts already underway, the course is set to launch next fall co-taught by faculty across departments and with an anticipated enrollment of nearly 150 students.”
The Brooks School of Public Policy will require a new course called “Race, Racism and Public Policy.” A faculty position has been posted to be hired for this course.
The Hotel School has been offering a 1.5 credit hour class since fall 2020. The course, HADM 3960: Seminar in Leadership, Diversity, and Inclusion, is expanding to 3 credit hours. It is “designed to build both a theoretical and practical understanding of how to manage the ever-evolving needs for D&I programs in the global hospitality industry.” David Sussman, a white male, is teaching the course.
Beginning in 2020, ILR students must take either the Intergroup Dialogue (ILRID 2610) or Foundations of Diversity Dynamics (ILRID 2510).
CALS and the Arts college have a pre-existing requirement to take one class from a menu of classes. Arts & Sciences, now requires all of its graduates to take a class in “Social Difference: and CALS in “Human Diversity.” However, the Arts College Scholar Program exempts its undergraduates from all distribution requirements, and August did not address this important exception.
Human Ecology, other than Brooks, has a number of relevant classes but is currently revising its curriculum and is planning on a single required core course.
Engineering and the Bowers CIS are not teaching any relevant courses, so it will require students to take a class from the Arts College menu.
Graduate and professional programs will “take up the requirement” after the undergraduate requirements are in place.
Although the faculty has made great efforts on this to date, many details can only be resolved after Cornell decides whether content control will be centralized or left to the individual faculty teaching the courses that meet the requirement.
Part III will cover the proposed anti-racism center and the battle over diversity course content.
