Cornell’s Academic Freedom Test


By The Editorial Board

Wall Street Journal

04/04/2023 - 06:47 pm


Diversity enforcers have become speech enforcers on many college campuses, but a few schools are starting to articulate some limits. The latest is Cornell University, which has refused to adopt a student resolution that would have required “trigger warnings” anytime an upsetting subject is mentioned in the classroom.


Under the proposal, professors would have been required to warn students in advance about “traumatic” content that touched on topics like self-harm, domestic, racial or transphobic violence and homophobic harassment. Professors would have been even more nervous than they already are that any open-format classroom discussion or debate might wander into trigger territory.


The entire idea of a trigger warning for speech is antithetical to the idea of a university, and in a previous age no one would have taken it seriously. But this is the era of woke censorship, so it’s news when campus leaders push back, as they have at Cornell.


“Learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education: essential to our students’ intellectual growth, and to their future ability to lead and thrive in a diverse society,” Cornell President Martha Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff wrote in rejecting the resolution. Academic freedom, they note, means that professors get to choose their course content as well as how they present it to their students.


In recent weeks, Stanford University and Columbia University have had to tangle with students who felt triggered by exposure to conservative judges. Stanford law students shouted down federal Judge Kyle Duncan while Columbia students have called on the university to take down a social media post that includes members of the school’s Federalist Society meeting with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In both instances, the universities stood by policies protecting free expression on campus.


Cornell’s policy on free speech notes Cornell values “free and open inquiry and expression—tenets that underlie academic freedom—even of ideas some may consider wrong or offensive.” Research has shown that trigger warnings aren’t effective at helping people manage their anxiety, and including such warnings in an academic environment encourages emotional fragility and intellectual cowardice. It also teaches students and faculty to self-censor.


Cornell’s position is good news, but these bad ideas will recur as long as the diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracy governs academia, pushing the notion that honest speech and debate are traumatic. If universities want to reclaim real intellectual openness on campus, they have to help students get comfortable with being uncomfortable.


Cornell’s Academic Freedom Test - WSJ



26 Mar, 2024
Several weeks ago, DFTD started a petition to urge Davidson College to guard students against faculty and staff who seek to inject irrelevant, controversial material into the classroom, or their program areas. Since that petition started, we have received over 300 signatures including: Hundreds of alumni from every decade ranging from the 1950’s to the 2020’s. Numerous former trustees of Davidson College, including a former Chair of the Board of Trustees. Numerous alumni who are faculty at other institutions. Dozens of current students and their parents. Current and former members of Congress. In addition to these signatures, we had many people including current faculty, students, and alumni privately express support for the petition, but said that they were fearful of the consequences from the college if they signed. We believe that such a strong response rate from the small number of people that we contacted is indicative of significant support among the alumni body when they’ve been made aware of our concerns. We hope the college will take this petition to the Board of Trustees and relevant faculty committees for serious consideration. Thank you again to all who signed, and support DFTD. Your advocacy and philanthropy ensures our organization can continue to support students who wish to make Davidson a more ideological diverse campus that welcomes and celebrates robust civil discourse.
12 Mar, 2024
Its First program pushes institutions to hire medical researchers based on their ideological commitment.
05 Mar, 2024
The Justices avoid issuing a judgment on a case against college speech reporting at Virginia Tech.
Show More
Share by: