The meeting had been originally planned to consider the draft Final Expressive Activity Policy, but the drafting of that policy is taking much longer than expected. Accordingly, the policy at hand will be discussed at the November 12 UA meeting.
The same draft will be discussed in November at meetings of the other shared-governance groups.
In terms of Committee reports, the Campus Codes Committee, which has the closest relationship to the Expressive Activity Policy, will have its first meeting of the year next week. The Campus Planning Committee has had extensive discussion of the proposed Meinig Fieldhouse project and the Maplewood II graduate student housing development.
The open discussion period turned to the Interim Expressive Activity Policy. By way of background, Cornell had a Campus Code of Conduct and judicial system which operated for over fifty years under UA control until the Trustees repealed it on December 10, 2020. This was in response to pressure from minority groups that felt that the system should limit alleged “hate speech” and that the system should be more educational and less legalistic.
The old Campus Code of Conduct had many provisions addressing the time, place, and manner where expressive activities could occur, and Cornell’s VP & General Counsel Donica Thomas Varner circulated charts showing how many of these provisions were carried forward into the Interim Expressive Activity Policy.
Conduct was the exclusive province of the faculty until 1969 when it was transferred to the University Senate and later the UA as a shared governance body. Day Hall is now seeking to make the time, place, and manner limitations exclusively a matter for the central administration with the UA and other elected groups having only an advisory role.
Once the draft Final Expressive Activity Policy is distributed to the shared-governance bodies, it is not clear if the bodies will be allowed to vote on it or if they will have any veto power, as the UA did over the Campus Code of Conduct. One UA member said that each university policy has a “responsible executive” for implementing it and asked who would be the responsible executive for this policy.
Former Trustee Robert C. Platt ‘73 expressed concerns about this procedure. Platt contends that for a code of conduct to be viewed as legitimate, it should be adopted by an elected shared governance group. Platt believes that if a student, a faculty member and a staff member all protest together, each should be subject to the same standards of conduct. He also noted that the Cornell Graduate Students United is seeking to engage in collective bargaining over the rules that govern protests by its members as well as the consequences of one of its members being suspended for violating the interim rules.
In response, an employee member pointed out that the new Student Code only applies to students. So, a policy governing time, place, and manner restrictions on expressive activity must be a separate document to include non-students. She also noted that the committee conducting the drafting of the final policy includes representatives of each shared governance body and that Dean Colleen Barry, the committee chair, has conducted over 30 listening sessions. Because New York is an at-will employment state, an employee can be fired for any reason, so there is no guarantee for equal treatment of students, faculty and staff who jointly engage in a protest.
Dean of the Faculty Eve De Rosa referred Platt to a story about the task force in last summer’s Cornell Chronicle. That article described the approval process:
“After these consultative steps [with shared governance bodies], the committee will send the policy and report to Kotlikoff for finalization in accordance with the university’s policy review process.”
Platt also raised the requirement that Cornell’s Board of Trustees must adopt Rules for the Maintenance of Public Order and when Cornell filed its current rules with Albany on June 26, 2024, it included the Interim Expressive Activity Policy as a part of its filing. He questioned whether that meant that the final policy would require Trustee approval or just approval from the Cornell Executive Policy Review Group.
As a second concern, Platt raised the problem of the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (OSCCS) not issuing and publicly sharing annual reports showing caseloads and processing times. Platt claimed that if the UA were the Board of Directors of Jiffy-Lube, it would get detailed reports about customer counts and wait times. The Student Code Procedures mandates that OSCCS issue annual reports to VP Ryan Lombardi, the Student Assembly, and the Graduate and Professional Student Assembly, but the OSCCS refuses to provide copies of the reports to anyone else.
Dean De Rosa claims that she had read the detailed reports from OSCCS.
The UA is planning to meet with President Kotlikoff on November 26, which is the meeting following its meeting on the final policy.
