The wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes.
Earlier this week the Cornell Daily Sun reaffirmed its dearth of journalistic integrity and acumen by blindly reporting as fact recent historical revisionism crafted by the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly’s (GPSA).
The revisionism is found in this Sun article, “In Response to Skorton Column, GPSA Discusses University’s Effect on Free Speech.” The article describes a recent GPSA meeting where president Richard Walroth asked members to discuss Skorton’s late-September op-ed in the Daily Sun about free speech on campus.
Read this excerpt from the Sun article:
Replying to questions about what prompted Skorton to issue this statement, Christine Yao grad cited a recent nationally reported controversy that she said pitted civility against freedom of speech.
The controversy Yao goes on to cite? The Steven Salaita controversy. Salaita is an English professor whose offer of employment at the University of Illinois was rescinded after the university was made aware of his anti-Israel tweets. This situation justifiably lead to an intense national debate about free speech on college campuses.
Regardless of one’s opinions about Salaita, the real issue here is that Skorton’s column was not about Salaita. It was about the Julius Kairey flyers. Though Skorton doesn’t reference either outright, he does write extensively about free speech on campus, an issue considerably more pertinent to the flyers than to Salaita’s tweets. Further, Skorton wrote about “civility and free speech,” which again is an issue more pertinent to the vilifying smear campaign against Kairey.
By the way, do readers remember the Julius Kairey flyer controversy, which the Cornell Review pushed to national headlines?
In the controversy’ aftermath, only the Review cared to cover what was up to then the biggest news story on campus (still only rivaled today by the announcement of university’s next president). Sun senior editors wrote but a short letter obliquely referencing what happened. Ten days after the Review first reported the story, and after it made national headlines, and after Review inquiries to numerous Cornell departments–including Bias Reporting and Media Relations–went unanswered, President David Skorton penned an op-ed for the Sun entitled “Civility and Free Speech: Are They Incompatible?” Like the Sun editors’ letter, this piece barely qualified as a response to the flyers.
Basically, what we see here is the Sun either being duped by or actively colluding with the GPSA to change Skorton’s intentions with the op-ed in order to fit their own political views. Skorton was not defending Salaita, he was weakly condemning the flyers and the students who made them. Yet, readers of this article who are unaware of the flyers–because the Review, after all, only reaches a small portion of campus and the Sun certainly did nothing to report on them–will now go on believing this warped version of recent campus events.
