The following op-ed first appeared at:https://cornelliansunited.org/opinion-honor-the-spirit-of-the-kops-lecture/ and is reposted here with the permission of the author.
Scholarly or academic institutions control and administer some of our most coveted honors. For example, the Nobel Prizes and mathematics Fields Medal have developed a public recognition and reputation, not because a generous donor provided a lot of cash, but rather due to the care that goes into the selection process for the honorees. Each Nobel laureate gives a lecture as part of receiving the award before a packed audience in a large auditorium.
In journalism, Columbia University administers the Pulitzer Prizes that recognize top journalists and writers. Columbia organizes a hundred jurors to select the winners in its various categories. The whole process works because everyone involved makes an honest effort to recognize merit rather than to steer cash to an acquaintance as cronyism. The public respects the honorees because the selection process respects objective merit.
In 1990, Daniel W. Kops ‘39 and his wife Nancy gave a sizable donation to Cornell. Although this gift was not so large as to support an endowed professorship, it was more than sufficient to endow an honorarium for an annual lecture that is comparable to the cash awarded with the Fields Medal or the Pulitzer Prizes.
The stated topic of the Kops Lecture was “freedom of the press.” Freedom of the press is a particularly timely subject because former President Trump had declared the mainstream media “the enemy of the people.” Several Presidents have sought to prosecute cases of leaked “state secrets”, and the Biden Administration’s recently adopted Title IX rules that would allow student journalists to be punished for covering Title IX cases. Also, Congress is proposing to require moderation of social media content and require disclosure of people who fund issue advocacy.
Past Kops lectures included New York Times columnist Tom Wicker, addressing “Privacy in the Age of Media” in 2000; Annenberg School Dean Kathleen Hall Jamieson discussing “Advocacy Advertising and the First Amendment” in 1998; Juan González, New York Daily News columnist discussing “How Long Must We Wait? The Struggle for Racial and Ethnic Equality Within the American News Media” in 2004; and Gail Collins, the editorial page editor of The New York Times addressing “How Women Got Their Voice” in 2002. These talks, from a variety of viewpoints, all addressed the issue of press freedom.
The Kops annual budget is sufficient to pay the fee of almost any top speaker. The criteria should be to pick a speaker that:
- Has a recognized body of work on freedom of the press,
- Has interesting ideas and is sufficiently articulate to deliver them in a good lecture, and
- Will write an insightful new lecture about freedom of the press for Cornell, rather than just redeliver his prior lectures.
Selection as the Kops Lecturer should be an award that the journalists, lawyers and scholars working on freedom of the press should aspire to receive.
Cornell has assigned the administration of the Kops Lecture to the American Studies Program, which has drifted away from the required freedom of the press topic. The 2024 Kops Lecture was delivered on Sept. 10 to an audience that drew only 16 people The speaker, Kenneth Atsenhaienton Deer, founder and former editor of The Eastern Door newspaper, did not have the stage presence to command the audience. In addition, the American Studies Program did not allow the lecture to be livestreamed to interested alumni or journalists, further limiting its impact. For the fourth year in a row, the Kops Lecture did not address freedom of the press.
The bottom line is that Mr. Deer’s Kops Lecture was so lacking in every dimension that the Cornell community deserves a re-do. The American Studies Program should reimburse Cornell for whatever it spent to bring Mr. Deer to Cornell, and the Dean of the Arts College together with the Provost should arrange for a replacement 2024 Kops Lecture on Freedom of the Press.
