Faculty Senate Vote Leaves Anti-Racism Requirements Muddled
On May 18, the Faculty Senate announced its votes on competing resolutions addressing proposals for a student and faculty anti-racism training. As a result, the proposals next go to the President and Provost to regroup and then to the faculties of the individual colleges. When the Faculty Senate asked President Pollack on May 19 what direction she would take based on the votes, she said that there would be a new center, but that she had not had time to study the specific votes.
Background. A year ago, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, an ad hoc group called DoBetterCornell built a website and organized a petition recycling various demands from 2015 and 2017. They criticized the racial climate on campus and demanded mandatory training for faculty and a required for-credit course for all undergraduate and graduate students. This mirrored similar demands made 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 demands referred to the faculty, their other demands, which include disarming the Cornell Police and firing a tenured Chemistry faculty member, were ignored by Day Hall.) 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 Dean kept generating new drafts and asked task force members for comments rather than bringing any report to a final up or down vote.
Both the draft and final task force reports were subject to online comments and debate at a series of Faculty Senate Zoom meetings. A series of resolutions were then sent to the Faculty Senate members along with a text box where Senators could submit written comments. The entire package is now submitted to the President and Provost to interpret. Here is an analysis of the tea leaves left behind and a prediction of how this ends.
Anti-Racism Center. The students proposed this as a funding mechanism outside existing channels. It would take tuition associated with teaching a large 5,000 lecture class and then distribute it to support scholarship and political activism. The students proposed that the Center be governed by a 51-member Internal Governance Council consisting of 25 students selected from BIPOC-related organizations, 8 administrators and 16 faculty. The Center “must advocate for full BIPOC representation in all academic units and decision-making bodies.” It is not clear how “full BIPOC representation” is measured, but the Dean of the Faculty downplayed this task, and the Center was approved by a vote of 101 to 12.
Prediction. Cornell has been down this road before and established the Africana Studies and Research Center (ASRC) under the Provost in 1969. It was later quietly transferred to the College of Arts and Sciences. If new funding can be located (from foundation grants and gifts), the Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Outcomes will operate under the Provost, and then after about 5 years be merged into the College of Arts and Sciences where it will compete with ASRC for future funding. Cornell will never allow a Center to be governed by a board consisting of a plurality of undergraduate students.
Student Course. The faculty never debated the scope or content of the proposed student course. Instead, they disputed who would teach the course, and how it would be taught. The WG-S Task Force pushed the idea of instructional videos that could then be incorporated into a “menu” of classes taught within each student’s home college. Last summer, President Pollack listed eight centers that could be involved in anti-racism education. In January, the Dean invited the Directors of six of those centers to become involved in the planning, and the Jewish Studies Program and the Near East Studies Center, although listed by Pollack, were mysteriously dropped from the plan. After the Faculty Senate debate, the six Directors issued their competing report advocating one large lecture class that would be team-taught by the six centers combined with small discussion groups led by graduate students from those programs. This prompted the WG-S Task Force to amend its report to support either the Director’s central lecture course or the “menu” of anti-racism classes approach.
The Directors’ central lecture proposal got the most votes with 61 to 36 with 9 abstentions. This includes a request to add two new tenure track faculty to each of the six departments. The faculty ballots included comments like “not thought to be manageable” and “I disagree that the most doctrinaire amongst us are well suited to creating a non-indoctrinating course.” But the Directors are willing to put up with future controversies so long as they get their expanded faculty and grad students.
A competing resolution that would require a “course addressing race, indigeneity, ethnicity, and bias” but would leave implementation to the individual colleges also passed but with a 49-44-13 vote. Comments noted “I like that this resolution builds on existing courses and expertise” and “I have major objections to the ‘six units’ proposal which would require that group to be the linchpin of implementing a university-wide requirement. They are too inflexible, dogmatic, and ideological to do this right.”
Finally, the resolution adopting the modified WG-S report which would allow both the six Director’s class as well as college-based classes to go forward so long as all classes in the menu met a centrally imposed “requirements framework” also passed by 58-41-7 vote.
Because the votes were cast online without any provision for run-off votes, the interpretation is left to the President and Provost, who declined to address how they would handle the case of all three resolutions passing the Senate. While the Provost would control whether extra Day Hall funding will be available for a large lecture class, ultimately educational policy and degree requirements are in the hands of the colleges. For example, although the University Faculty requires two semesters of physical education, the Arts College does not count those classes toward its 120 hours needed for a BA degree. It will take about 2 years to develop the courses and impose a new requirement. It is impossible to predict how the colleges will ultimately implement these competing proposals.
Faculty Training. The most controversial aspects of the DoBetterCornell demands were dropped regarding the firing of tenured faculty who refused to take the training and the use of DEI statements in contract renewals or tenure decisions. Rather a proposal to support decentralized development of faculty educational material passed 54-44-9. Comments included, “Almost any training material coming from offices like OFDD are practically useless — the Title IX training we were required to complete in the fall did not contain any useful information and I found it insulting that the faculty is suggested to do it.”
Another resolution received one more vote (55-46-5) that would approve the WG-F report as “worthy of careful consideration by the President and Provost” but the comments that describe the report as “Orwellian” indicate the depth of faculty opposition to a requirement. Finally, the other competing resolution to make the proposal voluntary also passed (49-48-10). Among the comments was, “near universal celebration of critical theory is the academic equivalent to pithing, a neurophysiological technique used to separate the spinal cord from the brain, so that simple reflexes that do not depend on the brain can still occur.”
Prediction. Given that a majority of the Faculty Senate voted to make the training optional, I predict that Cornell will develop faculty training materials but not require faculty to complete them. The scope of the training will be defined over time, and there are many vocal opponents of Critical Race Theory who will speak out if the materials move beyond cultural background education. Because of the close working relationship between faculty and their grad students, extending the student course requirement to all graduate students is also unlikely.
The debate has now shifted from the Faculty Senate to the President and Provost as well as to the college faculties. The diffused structure of Cornell prevents the university from responding to short term political pressures or demands. Hence, any ultimate results will reflect faculty attitudes rather than virtue signaling. Ultimately, each Cornell college and graduate field makes an independent decision, and the “anti-racism” instructors will face a backlash if their materials have low value to their audience.
This article was written by an anonymous member of the Cornell community.
