Constitution of America, We the People.
Incoming undergraduates have a lot to learn about surviving and thriving on the Cornell campus. New student orientation serves to make a transition to Cornell as smooth as possible.
Some of orientation reinforces the positive things about being a student here, such as the number of activities and opportunities available. Then there is the mundane stuff like learning how to do laundry or sign up for classes or for a CornellCard. Finally, orientation covers the third rails of Cornell – online training on the Student Code of Conduct, Gorge Safety, Title IX, and Academic Integrity – so that students know in advance what could get them in trouble. Many orientation activities could easily fall into all three categories.
Apart from all of the training that must be completed before arriving on campus, the Intergroup Dialogue Project (IDP) conducts a mandatory 2.5 hours of training to “practice skills and tools for communicating across difference both inside and outside the classroom as you learn more about yourself and others” The impact of all of this training is cumulative and can leave a Cornell student intimidated in sharing his opinions and feeling pressured to self-censor. A recent survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) found that more than 80% of college students report engaging in some form of self-censorship. This means that a student could come away from the mandated IDP training afraid of communicating across differences rather than willing to use the tools covered in that training.
The Cornell Review staff has this experience every day. Whenever we write, we try to communicate across the gap that separates us from the majority of Cornell students, and we see Cornell sliding deeper and deeper into cancel culture. On December 8, 2020, the Student Assembly voted to remove two committee members who refused to vote for a resolution to disarm the Cornell Police. Campus activists have also demanded that Cornell fire a conservative law professor and a chemistry professor. The Student Assembly even passed a resolution seeking to cancel Jacob Gould Schurman, Cornell’s longest serving president. These episodes show a fundamental misunderstanding of how a university should operate and the importance of protecting freedom of expression on campus. Although Cornell has adopted sweeping policy statements seeking to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression, students undergoing new student orientation are not getting the message and hesitate to speak out.
Other universities address this problem by including freedom of expression training in their new student orientation. FIRE and New York University have developed one program, and faculty at the University of Chicago are developing another. Given that Cornell designates free expression as a core value, logic would dictate that orientation would cover that topic in a serious way.
Cornell has a lot of talent and instructional resources that can prioritize freedom of speech along with gorge safety and how to do laundry. All are important but only one is ignored. Let’s add freedom of speech to the 2022 new student orientation.
[UPDATE] The director of policy reform for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) wrote university president Martha Pollack asking her “to take action on the request made by the Cornell Free Speech Alliance (CFSA).” According to the letter from FIRE, the CFSA wished “to see Cornell expand on its current freshmen orientation programming to include a section on the First Amendment and academic freedom principles.”
This article was written by a member of the Cornell community who requested to stay anonymous.
