Faculty Notified of Recent Cornell DEI Moves

An email sent to Cornell faculty on Thursday renews controversy about key Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at Cornell.

In Summer 2020, an outside pressure group called “Do Better Cornell” as well as others campaigned for drastic changes in light of the public outrage over the killing of George Floyd.  President Pollack referred their demands to the University Faculty, which has jurisdiction over “questions of educational policy which concern more than one college”.  

The next spring, the Faculty Senate (which represents faculty), held a heated debate and took a series of votes that left unclear whether they favored mandatory DEI training for faculty.  The faculty voted to approve the idea of establishing a new “anti-racism center” but did not want to see it divert funds from other academic programs. 

Additionally, new anti-racism classes would be left to individual colleges rather than being taught centrally by the new anti-racism center.  The debate and votes placed the status of DEI at Cornell under a spot-light of campus-wide and national attention.  It drew lobbying from outside groups such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).  However, since then most of the student leaders of Do Better Cornell have graduated.  The 2021 Faculty Senate votes were taken at the end of Charles Van Loan’s term as Dean of the Faculty, who played an active role in bringing the proposals to a vote.  The current dean is Eve DeRosa, who describes herself as “a first-generation, African-American, female neuroscientist,” and is the first female or African-American to hold that post.

All follow-ups on these votes were left on a low-key basis with steps seemingly taken outside of public scrutiny, and the faculty left the next steps in the hands of the President and Provost. As Prof. Richard Bensel noted at the time, “These results indicate that a near majority of the Faculty Senate supports neither a mandatory course requirement for undergraduates nor any kind of ‘training program’ for faculty.”  On Sept. 29, a faculty-wide email provided an update on what happened.

The email, signed by Avery August, Deputy Provost; Marla Love, the Dean of Students; and Sonia Rucker, Associate Vice President for Inclusion and Belonging, announced the current status of these controversial projects.

Cornell will proceed with establishing the new anti-racism center which has been officially named the “Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures.”  A search committee will select a new Center Director, although no outside funding for the center has been announced. It also seems that funding from the center will not come from tuition income associated with teaching a university-wide lecture class, contrary to what was initially proposed to the Faculty Senate in 2021. The resolution adopted by the Faculty Senate required “broad, transparent consultation with the faculty must attend any decision to implement a [center] recommendation.”

Despite the vote favoring a college-by-college approach for mandatory student anti-racism training, a new committee was established to “develop a process for implementing an educational requirement on racism, bias and equity for students. The goal of the committee is to ensure that this requirement is implemented in a way that all Cornell students experience the same learning goals, allowing each college to incorporate their own local contexts.”  This raises the prospect that the central administration will dictate what orthodoxy will be preached to all students, regardless of who is teaching the course in each college.  Opponents of the proposal view this as a threat to the academic freedom of the teaching faculty as well as the long-standing expectation that Cornell teaches students to think for themselves rather than pressing them with dogma or propaganda. At the time, Prof. William Jacobson warned that the proposals, if implemented, would have a “terribly chilling effect on free expression on campus.”

Despite the push-back on mandatory faculty DEI training, the email announced that ”an advisory group, which includes representation from the colleges and schools, [is working] on the development of a faculty education program that would engage faculty from across the university.”  A trial version was implemented in the fall 2022 training for new Cornell faculty. On this same point, the College of Engineering previously announced that its faculty is working with Intergroup Dialogue Project (IDP) to develop six hours of  DEI training for Engineering faculty.

The email also reported, “the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) announced the appointment of eight new faculty and two faculty fellows whose scholarship will advance social justice, inclusion and equity in architecture and city and regional planning.”  It is not clear what the opportunity cost of these hires was – did AAP turn away stronger candidates by prioritizing this DEI focus over other faculty hiring needs?

The email also reports that Cornell’s non-academic staff had to complete a mandatory Advancing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion course by September 15, 2022.  There is no indication how many employees refused to take the course or whether they found that it had value.

The email also reported that the Dean of Students’ Community Response Team (CRT) that reacts to alleged bias incidents has been moved to the Division of Public Safety and that a search is looking to hire a new Director for the CRT.

While the merits of DEI and anti-racism continue to be debated throughout higher education, this email demonstrates that the political forces unleashed in the summer of 2020 continue to press ahead at Cornell.  Cornell has been making strides in the area of non-discrimination and race relations since the 1960s.  Each change has impacts that take decades to be fully manifest. Day Hall’s position, as evidenced by this email raises the question of why it is grabbing the initiative from the Faculty Senate and other shared governance bodies and whether it is taking extreme steps that could lead to unforeseen consequences.

Leadership and persuasion is one thing, taking drastic actions without transparency or collegiality is something else.  The email, coming after President Pollack’s new student convocation extolling free expression and academic freedom, is quite puzzling.

This article was written by a member of the Cornell community who requested to stay anonymous.