Once again, the Student Assembly (SA) has landed itself, and the university at large, on the front pages of national news–as an embarrassment to the university.
The SA’s unanimously approved Resolution 31, imploring the university to mandate trigger warnings in classrooms, was the subject of a stern letter from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). President Pollack’s strong rejection yesterday was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, The Hill, The Daily Caller, and Newsmax.
In fact, this is not the first time the student body has considered trigger warnings. In 2015 the Sun examined the evolution of the practice organically. Before now, nobody has attempted to implement trigger warnings by fiat. The fiat in question comes from Cornell’s Student Assembly, an elected body of student representatives that makes suggestions to the administration for university policy.
Frankly, Resolution 31 is an embarrassment, particularly for students. In fact, this debacle is only an embarrassment for Cornell insofar as how poorly it reflects on the caliber of Cornell students. Cornell students, if the Student Assembly is to be believed, would give up their freedoms—to learn, listen, speak and engage—to avert even the slightest discomfort.
Hiding from ideas is no less than intellectual cowardice. It’s exactly the opposite of what this country needs. We’re at a critical juncture where no one feels they can talk to each other, and the SA’s solution is to hamstring any potentially uncomfortable discussion that is occurring in classrooms.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Benjamin Franklin
The sheer idiocy of such a proposition is astounding. It allows our elders to present our generation of students as one that knows nothing of the American tradition of open inquiry and free discourse. As a generation that’s too soft for freedom, a generation that cannot sustain the rights they have. Maybe they’re right: every member of the assembly voted for the resolution, and the vast majority of the student body lifted nary a finger in protest.
While we at the Review applaud President Pollack for taking a strong stand on this issue, we are even more concerned that her ideas are not self-evident. In the halcyon days of the university’s past, presidents had no need to explain the importance of academic freedom and open discourse to Ivy League students.
Make no mistake: this is a major free speech issue. The SA’s measure would have placed sanctionable limitations on what is and is not acceptable to utter in the classroom. That many in the Student Assembly believe curtailing others’ rights is wise, let alone desirable, is evidence enough of the institution’s worthlessness. Something is deeply wrong at Cornell if those who should be most devoted to the idea of open discourse and free expression—those in student government—are seeking to constrain it.
There’s something disconcerting about students, especially at Cornell, asking to not be taught. When the SA requests not only warnings, but excuses for content students find disturbing (as SA Res. 31 would have required), we are left to wonder: why go to school at all? If not to be exposed to different, uncomfortable ideas, what are we all paying for?
The SA asks that we institutionalize the university as a mere credential. “I attended for four years, I paid tens of thousands of dollars, I got a fancy piece of paper.” No longer is the academy a place of rigorous thought and intellectual experimentation. Now it’s a box to be checked en route to a big white-collar paycheck.
Even if the SA is to be taken at its word—that trigger warnings are necessary to assuage the suffering of PTSD victims—the literature is, to say the least, divided. The therapeutic merit of trigger warnings is a subject of inquiry, but many studies have returned mixed, if not negative, results. Some researchers, like a psychology expert at Harvard, have found that trigger warnings only reinforce trauma as part of a victim’s identity.
The debate on trigger warnings is a legitimate one– we at the Review are for discourse, after all. However, the SA did not seek discourse or debate. They attempted to use the bureaucratic might of the university to force their project on thousands of students and faculty.
Who gave the SA license to do this? Interest in the Student Assembly has declined year over year, now reaching only 10.55% eligible voter turnout. Now, a body with anemic interest from the student body has seen fit to open a national conversation not a soul at Cornell requested.
And yet they embarrass the student body—on a national scale—time and time again. In aggressive displays of naivete, the SA has previously attempted to endorse Boycott, Divest, and Sanction, disarm the Cornell University Police Department, and even censure Cornell’s own former presidents.
In each case, Cornell’s administration was forced to step in and dismiss the SA’s recommendations. With each letter from President Pollack explaining why the SA’s latest proposal is a terrible idea, the idea of student self governance is further delegitimized.
Administrators chiming in on matters of “student self governance” reveals the system for what it really is: adults correcting the actions of wayward children. Cornell’s system of shared governance only works with mutual trust. The students must trust the SA to accurately convey their feelings to the administration. The administrators must trust the SA to be a liaison between thousands of undergraduates and the bureaucracy. That trust has completely broken down.
We at the Review are left to ask: where now? Thankfully, this proposal has been coldly slapped down by the administration, but we still worry. Of the myriad issues facing our beloved alma mater, the declining interest in open discourse could be an existential threat to not only journalism, but the very idea of liberal education. If students no longer want to engage with difficult material, for how much longer can the academy endure?
