A couple of weeks ago, Cornell faculty members started emailing their classes about what was to come that Wednesday—yet another protest, this time in support of #taketheknee. A Facebook event emerged and I could not stop myself from rolling my eyes. Once again, liberal bias was on display among our professors. Honestly, this sort of behavior should come as no surprise by now. Cornell has made it abundantly clear that it is perfectly acceptable for the left-wing professors (read: nearly all of them) to shove their political agendas down their students’ throats.
Now, I think we all know what would happen if a conservative professor took it upon herself to email blast her students about some conservative cause. The criticism would be never ending. Students would get offended, claim unprofessionalism, and likely present a list of demands for President Pollack in regards to this professor—scold her, fire her, draft up a statement condemning the “hate speech” that she is promoting by voicing her beliefs. I mean, who is she to use her platform as a professor to badger her students with offensive political ideologies? There’s a reason high school teachers are strongly discouraged from revealing their party affiliations, you know.
Yet, here we are. Faculty actively and publicly came together to protest on Wednesday (while inviting their students to join in!). This is not the first time it has happened on Cornell’s campus, and it will not be the last. The day after the election last year, multiple professors cancelled class, joined the cry-in, or derailed their lectures in order to talk about the “crushing news.” Three of my professors that day took the time to talk about how devastated and shocked they were. My TA split us up into two sides and had us debate what happened, all the while expressing how disgusted she was with our generation for not preventing Trump from happening. Similarly, we’ve seen administrators support the walkouts and protest marches, issue statements defending DACA, promote liberal events, and denounce conservative ones. More than one Cornell professor attended the protest against Rick Santorum last Fall or bashed his speech in class to their students.
Where is the moral outrage when these liberal professors make their political affiliations known? Liberal faculty members are free to correctly assume that no one will do anything about it when they do, and to wrongly assume that all of their students agree with them. It is quite frankly insulting how little thought they seem to put into what they say to their classes.
Let me make this clear—I believe in the right to free speech. I understand that professors are free to voice their thoughts and support what they want to support. I just think that the extent to which they do, and the open disrespect they show to conservative students, is wrong. I think the hypocrisy of it all is wrong. Cornell students would not be okay with a conservative professor doing these things, or blatantly saying in the middle of lecture that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate. Why should we be okay with liberal professors doing likewise?
It is no secret that conservative students are the political minority on campus. We see almost no representation for ourselves in staff, and there are very rarely campus wide “movements” for the things we value. If we want to see some form of conservative thought on this campus, we have to go looking for it—and often times that very thought is being denounced by our peers and faculty. Cornell is a blatant echo chamber of left-wing ideas, and it is tiring.
We’re outnumbered. We get it. When the liberal students on this campus embrace a movement, we see our peers, publications, administration, and faculty members make moves to get behind it. There is absolutely no reason to make conservative students feel even more out of place and uncomfortable in the middle of lecture.
Leftists seem to understand the importance of representation for minorities in all other situations than this one. I am simply asking that they see the hypocrisy and stop pretending that “diversity” actually matters to them.
