the wages of fear
The State of Freedom of Expression at Cornell
The Cornell Administration is engaged in calculated efforts to instill fear among the Cornell community.
The varieties of fear vary depending on your position, but they are all preventable — by the administration — and symptomatic of authority under threat — that of the administration.
The corporate university creates the structural conditions for fear through authoritarian governance and donor-driven policies.
The true context of fear is planetary and humanity-wide: none of us can afford to be silenced into inaction and “opting out” of our accountability.
We condemn Cornell’s repressive expressive action policy.
The context for each statement is outlined below.
These statements are offered October 11, 2024, and may be revised.
The wages of fear
The Cornell administration is engaged in calculated efforts to make the Cornell community live in the grip of fear. As evidence mounts that the most fearful possibilities on our collective horizon stem from inaction rather than action, the Administration responds with fear tactics designed to enforce a narrowly individualistic lens: individuals will be punished for exercising freedom of expression and peaceful protest. The administration is currently using selective prosecution, targeting the unprotected, and intimidation to suppress expressive activity.
At the very moment that the Cornell Administration’s fear tactics intensified, the Global Climate Legal Defense called on democratic institutions to protect protesters: “In order to address climate change and climate injustice, we need to defend climate defenders.” So far, on matters of climate and societal injustice, Cornell is doing the opposite. The fear that the Administration instills comes in several varieties, whose intended sway over you depends on your position. The only feature these fears have in common is that all of them are preventable — by the administration — and all of them are symptomatic of authority under threat — that of the administration.
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The varieties of fear
If you are a student, you may fear — in this past year more than ever before — being suspended because of your exercise of free speech and the right to peaceful protest. A case in point was the two-week suspension, without due process, of Momodou Taal, a graduate student accused of disrupting a career fair (thereby inconveniencing war-profiteering corporations that by rights should be banned from any college campus). Cornell administration’s relative tolerance towards the Gaza genocide protests last spring was revealed as mere calm before the storm, allowing it to put in place an “expressive activity policy” that would not shame a totalitarian regime.
If you are a staff member, a student worker, or non-tenure-track faculty, you may fear being fired over any action or expression — including individual expression on social media — that your boss or the university administration dislike or object to. No just cause is needed: Cornell is an at-will employer, with all the workers’ anxiety and potential for injustice that this abominable practice implies. Our Alliance Partner, Just Cause Employment, is working to change that.
If you are a tenure-track faculty member, you may fear that your eventual application for tenure will be denied in retaliation for your behavior in the classroom or outside it. Fortunately, the standard for tenure is protective of free expression: tenure deliberations must be limited to the work at hand (publications, teaching, service). In all the department deliberations that we and close colleagues have been a part of, that standard was adhered to. This is not to say that other considerations could not implicitly enter the outcome of final decisions by deans or provosts, but to introduce any extraneous considerations explicitly would be to open the institution to a lawsuit if tenure was denied when the academic record was strong. It remains true that the final and unappealable stage of the tenure process at Cornell is the Provost’s decision (its subsequent approval by the Trustees is de facto automatic). The Provost’s decision is normally based on the prior stages’ outcome (i.e., the decisions of the department and dean) and in consultation with the Faculty Advisory Committee on Tenure Appointments (FACTA) that advises the Provost. However, the Provost is not obligated to accept the recommendations received from the dean and from FACTA and can in principle decide to fire the professor at will -- a power that, even if it remains unexercised, may be legitimately perceived by some as threatening.
And if you are a tenured professor, you too may fear retaliation for displeasing your bosses. A recent dangerous precedent is the firing of Maura Finkelstein, a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College, over an Instagram repost of “pro-Palestine speech”. This action by Muhlenberg is particularly insidious because tenure, as conceived by prominent 19th century educators such as the Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White, is intended to protect academic freedom especially in those cases where the university bosses — the administration and ultimately the Trustees — are inconvenienced by it. (At Cornell, as elsewhere, it is the Trustees who have the power to remove tenured faculty.)
The corporate university creates structural conditions for fear
The unnecessary fear that the Administration wants us to feel reflects two factors. The first and enabling one is the maximally authoritarian nature of the university governance (in this regard, as in all others), which creates a possibility for Cornell to retaliate against workers on the basis of considerations that have nothing to do with the university’s educational and research mission. Justice requires that no individual or entity within the university be invested with such power as long as even the slightest possibility of its misuse exists.
The second factor is rather simple: it is donor money, which may be withheld if the potential “philanthropist” has personal or political reasons to dislike this or that aspect of the university’s policies or actions. Administrators whose institutions experience financial insecurity (for instance as a result of an unaffordable expansion and building spree, as may be the case with Cornell) are particularly exposed to such donor pressure. The indefensible symptoms of their fear are now evident for all to see. When the Administration irresponsibly acts on the basis of their own fear, it sows fear all around, making everyone lose.
Perhaps not surprisingly, well-established avenues for exercising inappropriate pressure exist, for instance in the form of meetings between “concerned parents” and university administrators. At one such recent meeting, Cornell VP for Public Relations Joel Malina promised to “scrutinize” the activity of a newly hired Black professor who had posted “troubling” pro-Palestine content on her social media. On the other hand, when asked whether or not Cornell would allow the Ku Klux Klan on campus, Malina’s response was “If there were a faculty member that invited a KKK representative to speak or a student group that invited a KKK representative to speak, yes, we would allow that.” (One wonders whether Malina ever considered scrutinizing the KKK’s online [or real-life] activity.) While Malina understands that according to the First Amendment the KKK is allowed to speak freely on campus, he envisions situations where pro-Palestinian advocates would not be accorded the same rights. The contrast here is especially egregious, given that the two faculty explicitly named for “scrutiny” are Black.
Cornell's authoritarian governance and money-motivated policymaking run counter to the exalted language in its own policy documents and public relations materials and are incompatible with the principles of academic freedom and free speech in general.
The true context of fear
There are some fears that are, or should be, common to all humans. These fears come from the realization that the greatest threat to life on this planet is inaction and the greatest threat to our collective conscience is passivity in the face of war crimes. The appropriate response to the Administration's attempts to instill fear-based silence, on all fronts, is to stand up together as a collective focused on preserving our common humanity on a livable planet.
We must remember the true context of our struggle. Advocacy work is unevenly distributed according to one’s structural position in high-intensity versus low-intensity struggles. As outlined by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in Hospicing Modernity, low-intensity struggle occurs in affluent societies that “have benefited the most and still enjoy the protections that modernity offers, as they fight to change things within or beyond modernity” (p. 52). They can afford to treat climate justice as an "optional" activity. They can choose to engage or not engage, to continue reaping their carbon-intensive perks or not, as their personal considerations dictate. By contrast, high-intensity struggle is borne by those whose lives “subsidize the comforts and securities that we enjoy” (p. 53). They often have no way to "opt out" of their struggle. The stakes may be life and death.
These two groups are not separate: those with the privilege to opt-out of low-intensity struggle are implicated in imposing suffering for those involved in high-intensity struggles. The Administration’s fear tactics are designed to scare us into “opting out” of our low-intensity struggle, and thereby abandoning our interconnectedness with, and accountability to, those engaged in high-intensity struggle.
Our position on Cornell’s expressive action policy
We condemn Cornell’s repressive expressive action policy. It is a serious obstacle in the way of mass mobilization of our community for the most important challenge of our times. Its practices are especially vexing in view of the accelerating climate catastrophe. Given the scope of the crisis and the lack of national, state, and university leadership in this vital matter, only concerted action from below can make a difference during this crucial window for climate action.
The first step towards undoing its damage is for Cornell leadership to declare climate emergency — a key demand that Cornell on Fire has been voicing for the last year. In this critical window of time for action on climate, with the university administration sleepwalking into disaster, none of us can afford to be silenced into inaction by threats of individual sanctions. The more of us realize this, the more powerful and persuasive a collective force for change we will become.