Cornell Law School Front, October 4, 2019 (Wikimedia Commons/Axel Tschentscher)
President Pollack recently addressed the student body with a message about the year of “The Indispensable Condition: Freedom of Expression at Cornell.” I applaud the President for highlighting a serious issue on campus and beyond Cayuga’s waters.
The outlined actions in the message are a great first step to help Cornell achieve academic freedom where all ideas can flourish. However, Pollack’s message misses out on a root cause of the directive; a pervasive culture of self-censorship on campus.
With a few common sense additions to the themed year, Cornell can become a beacon of free expression and ideas, a place where students can freely converse in the name of purposeful discovery.
Self-censorship is the real speech problem on campus
One significant issue that Pollack failed to mention is self-censorship on campus. Around 88% of students reportedly engage in self-censorship out of concern for how “students, faculty or the administration would respond to their opinion.” This is a highly concerning number which needs to be addressed. How can we claim to be a university that champions, “Free and Open Inquiry and Expression” when almost 9 out of 10 students censor themselves?
Most if not all of the students, faculty, and administration should be highly interested in making our core value of open inquiry and expression a reality. This would create an academic environment conducive to Cornell’s success as one of the premier universities in the world. Cornell would become a university where students can openly debate the validity of ideas, research is done critically, and ultimately flourish.
Yet this cannot happen when most of our students are afraid to even express themselves. How do we make this ideal scenario a reality while encouraging students to speak their minds? I propose several recommendations, including the following:
- Cornell should emphatically adopt the Chicago Statement
By adopting the Chicago Statement, Cornell makes a strong commitment to freedom of speech on campus. It will allow for individual members of the school community to decide what ideas and speech are right and wrong, and “act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose” (an idea that President Pollack has advocated for in the past).
- Reject the heckler’s veto on campus
It should also be made clear that heckling speakers is unacceptable on campus. This comes from stringent punishments for violating the student code of conduct in order to effectively discourage such action. This also allows the university to take a strong stance on one of its core values. By rigorously enforcing the student code of conduct, Cornell can deter future acts such as what happened with Ann Coulter.
- Bring in a number of guest speakers across the political spectrum to speak on a variety of topics
Having these speakers on campus advances the idea that Cornell is a guardian of free speech, where having different perspectives is welcomed and emphasizes that freedom of expression is truly the “indispensable condition” of nearly every other form of freedom.
The benefits speak for themselves. By adopting the Chicago Statement, ensuring that the heckler’s veto is non-existent, and welcoming speakers of all varieties to campus, Cornell will significantly advance academic freedom and inquiry on campus. This will lead to a more informed, thoughtful and engaged student body, as well as help to reverse the disturbing trend of self-censorship.
The Chicago Statement will guide Cornell in its actions on how to address controversial topics and protests going forward, and severe punishment for hecklers will act as a deterrent to future interruptions. Finally, inviting political speakers from both the right and left will validate Cornell’s commitment to different perspectives on campus.
It is a definitive positive that Cornell is beginning to focus on free speech as an issue. Yet we can do more and do better to protect the “indispensable condition.” Pollack has committed to free expression as a primary issue for her administration going forward. Her goal should be to flip the numbers mentioned above, so that 9 out of 10 students do feel comfortable expressing their opinions freely on campus.
This is the first step to creating academic freedom and inquiry on campus, a lofty goal that is in everyone’s interest. The benefits, as mentioned above, would be enormous for the students and university.
It only makes sense that the administration commits to the fullest extent it can to this core value. We will all be rooting for them to be successful, for the good of Cornell students now, and in the future.
