On April 17, Cornell Faculty released an open letter to the Board of Trustees as a part of a national campaign to gather faculty signatures for similar letters. Nearly 5,100 faculty have collectively signed these letters on what the American Association of University Professors has called a Day of Action for Higher Ed. This is a collaborative effort independently organized by faculty across four universities – Professor Ryan Enos from Harvard University; Professor Gerry Leonard from Boston University; Professor Brian Cleary from Boston University; Professor Daniel Laurison from Swarthmore College; and Professor Dan Hirschman from Cornell University – to encourage leadership at higher education institutions to stand up and fight back against the anti-democratic attacks of the federal government. The full letter reads as follows:
Dear Members of the Cornell Board of Trustees,
Ongoing attacks on American universities threaten bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and inquiry. In light of this unprecedented assault, we urge Cornell’s leadership to do three things:
1. Continue to publicly condemn attacks on universities.
2. Legally contest and refuse to comply with unlawful demands that threaten academic freedom and university self-governance. Freedom from political interference has allowed American universities to lead the world in scientific, medical, and artistic innovation, as well as humanistic and social scientific research, from which our entire country benefits.
3. Work with other universities and Cornell’s own alumni networks to mount a coordinated opposition to these anti-democratic attacks.
Signatories include:
- Peter Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies
- Michael Dorf, Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law
- Sidney Tarrow, Professor Emeritus of Government and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Rachel Beatty Riedl, Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Brooks Center on Global Democracy; Government Department and Brooks School of Public Policy
- Tim Ryan, Tri-Institutional Professor, Weill Cornell Medicine
- Robert Howarth, Atkinson Professor of Ecology & Environmental Biology
- Nelson Tebbe, Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law
- Kelly Musick, Professor of Public Policy and Sociology
- Roald Hoffmann, Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus, Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- Steven Strogatz, Professor of Mathematics; Member, National Academy of Sciences
- Philip Lewis, Professor Emeritus of Romance Studies and former Vice-President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
- Ken Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government
- Chantal Thomas, Radice Family Professor of Law
- Calum Turvey, W.I. Myers Professor of Agricultural Finance, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
- Frederick Maxfield, Professor of Biochemistry, Weill Cornell Medicine
- Jason Frank, John L. Senior Professor of Government
- Shannon Gleeson, Edmund Ezra Day Professor, ILR
- Alyssa Apsel, IBM Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
- Praveen Sethupathy, Professor of Physiological Genomics, College of Veterinary Medicine
- Jeffrey Rachlinski, Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law
- Maria Cristina Garcia, Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow
- Harry de Gorter, Professor, Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
- Jonathan Victor, Fred Plum Professor of Neurology and Professor of Neuroscience, Weill Cornell Medicine
- Steve Jackson, Professor of Information Science and Science & Technology Studies
- W. Bradley Wendel, Edwin H. Woodruff Professor of Law
- Lawrence Blume, Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor of Economics and Professor of Information Science
- Susan C Pannullo, Professor of Clinical Neurological Surgery, Weill, and Adjunct Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University; Chair, Board of Trustees, The Washington Center
- Thomas Pepinsky, Walter F. LaFeber Professor of Government and Public Policy
- Paul McEuen, John A Newman Professor of Physical Science Emeritus, Member, National Academy of Sciences
- Valerie P. Hans, Charles F. Rechlin Professor of Law
- Lara Estroff, Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry and Department Chair of Materials Science and Engineering
- Corinna Loeckenhoff, Janet and Gordon Lankton Professor of Psychology, Cornell University; Professor of Gerontology in Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine
- Stephen Hilgartner, Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Science & Technology Studies
- Suzanne Mettler, John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions
- Neil Lewis, Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences and Associate Professor of Communication, Medicine, and Public Policy
- Paula Cohen, Professor of Genetics, College of Veterinary Medicine
- Ryan Chahrour, Ernest S. Liu Professor of Economics and International Studies
- Ritchie Patterson, Helen T Edwards Professor of Physics
- Keith Green, Jean and Douglas McLean Professor, Human Centered Design; Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
- Corrie Moreau, Moser Professor of Entomology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
- Olaf S Andersen, Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, Director Emeritus Tri-Institutional MD-PhD Program, Weill Cornell Medicine
- John Hoddinott, H.E. Babcock Professor of Food & Nutrition Economics and Policy, Division of Nutritional Sciences
- Esra Akcan, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Architecture
- Helena Viramontes, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in English
- Maurine Linder, Professor of Pharmacology, College of Veterinary Medicine
- Muna Ndulo, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of International and Comparative Law
- Christiane Linster, Professor, Neurobiology and Behavior and former President of the Organization for Computational Neuroscience
- Claudia Fischbach-Teschl, Stanley Bryer 1946 Professor of Biomedical Engineering
- Andrew Yen, Professor of Pathology, former Director of Graduate Studies Environmental Toxicology, College of Veterinary Medicine
The full list of signatories is available here. Thirty faculty signed with their names redacted out of 529 total signatures.
Neither the Cornell Administration nor the Board of Trustees have issued a response to the letter. While Stanford opened its letter to student, staff and alumni signatures, the Cornell letter has been limited to just faculty.
