“Freedom of Expression” will be the theme for Cornell’s next academic year with the goal of making the entire community better informed on their rights to think for themselves and to share their ideas.
However, Cornell has become a monoculture, with most of its invited speakers coming from a place on the political spectrum that is shared by a majority of its faculty. Hopefully, the theme year will be a chance to break from this disturbing trend.
Adherence to the campus orthodoxy wasn’t always the norm. For example, in 1990, Daniel W. Kops ‘39 and his wife endowed a lecture series on freedom of the press. In 2000, the fund sponsored New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, to address “Privacy in the Age of Media” and drew a large crowd.
Moreover, in fall 2022, the American Studies Department used it to invite a professor from Cambridge University and an indigenous American writer who collaborated on a website linking Morrill Act land grants to indigenous dispossession. The talk was entirely off the subject of press freedom, and they could not fill a 150-seat lecture room.
For the 2022-23 theme year, the ideal Kops Lecture topic should be “Freedom of the press is needed for free expression” and find an A-list speaker to address how the two are related.
A top-notch journalist, like the New York Times columnist David Brooks or the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer-prize winner Peggy Noonan, or the Washington Post’s George Will should be invited to speak on the topic. Each could draw a sizable audience and prompt serious thought about the issue.
As Cornell plans its free expression theme year, the measure of success should be the quality of the activities offered and their impact upon community thinking rather than the quantity of events or the amount of effort consumed.
