On Sunday, August 20, President Martha Pollack delivered her address at the New Student Convocation. As with the past few years, she spoke in favor of free expression and how it is under attack at Cornell and across the nation.
Without naming names, she spelled out the dispute between the Cornell Free Speech Alliance that attacks Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs as hurting free speech with those who want to limit free speech by labeling it as “hate speech.” She see both viewpoints as a false dichotomy and instead outlines an important principle:
Curtailing the ability to speak freely, making rules about what we can teach, what we can learn, or what questions we can ask, threatens the bedrock on which our academic excellence is built—and on which our democracy depends. Because if we ever accept limits on what we can say, and what questions we can ask; if we ever give anyone the right to make those decisions for us—we also allow them to decide what we are allowed to learn and to know.
In my experience, the most complex challenges are those that arise when two deeply held values—in this case, our core Cornell values of free expression, and being a community of belonging—can sometimes be in tension with each other. But we are a community of scholars, and these are complex, messy, and deeply felt ideas that we can and must explore. And that is what we will do, in the year ahead: engage in discussion and debate, openly and with respect for each other.
Time will tell whether Cornell’s theme year programming without further policy changes will succeed in resolving this tension.
