Cornell wants to ‘express itself’ but ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ are in the way

When I heard that Martha Pollack, president of Cornell University, would for the 2023-2024 academic year, I was delighted.

It seemed like Cornell was turning a corner from its poor record on free expression documented by the organizations such as the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). 

Indeed, just before her announcement, Pollack had given two wins to free expression.

She rejected a she won the Cojones Award from alumnus Bill Maher. 

But when I read what Pollack had to say, I realized that the Free Expression theme was actually a ruse.

Pollack had stacked the steering committee with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) scholars.

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I wrote individually to each member requesting links to their work on free expression —and heard, even up to today — nothing but crickets.

Then the campus paper the Cornell Daily Sun reported that Pollack will defend DEI as strongly as she defends free expression.

This is a tragedy because free expression cannot coexist with DEI. 

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Cornell, the first American Ivy League university, should be a citadel of freedom — particularly for the freedom of thought and the freedom of speech — both of which contribute to the mental change required for intellectual growth. The goal of DEI activism, however, is the antithesis of free expression. Activists tend to believe they already know what is true and demonstrate little need for discussions that can change hearts and minds. They readily say so themselves.

Ibram X. Kendi, the most prominent leader in the DEI movement, for instance, concedes in his seminal book “How to be an Antiracist” — “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change . . . [and the] Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy.”

Unlike the civil- and gay-rights movements, which required free speech to change legislation, the DEI movement requires the cancellation of free speech to influence power and policy. This is because the DEI bureaucrats are activists-in-disguise, at once unable and unwilling to defend their ideology with reasoned arguments based on truth.

This was demonstrated last month in a debate at MIT on a resolution that academic DEI programs should be abolished. None of the approximately 90 people in DEI positions at MIT chose to defend their ideology by participating in the debate. 

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The debate still took place; and interestingly, there was agreement between Pat Kambhampati and Heather Mac Donald who argued for the resolution, and Karith Foster and Pamela Denise Long who argued against the resolution.

They all agreed that the university DEI bureaucrats have gone off the rails.

Foster summed it up like so: “When DEI is done poorly — and let us be absolutely honest, it has taken a left turn — it creates insurmountable barriers of fear, mistrust, vengeance, and indifference.”

In the administrators across Cornell surrendered their mission to seek truth and replaced it with the mission of critical social justice, whose postmodernist foundations deny objective truth. Indoctrination replaced education. 

Cornell used to encourage the search for truth through the discovery of new knowledge but has morphed into something omnipotent, if not sclerotic.

The free thinkers have been replaced by followers who mindlessly speak past each other using platitudes and bromides.

The solutions to every problem are to add more rules and regulatons, and to do what seems expedient at that moment. The bureaucracy does not encourage dissenters and governs by coercion, compulsion, and mandates. 

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un-canceling the bust of Abraham Lincoln, which was removed from a campus library following unspecified “complaints.” 

According to postmodernism, the only self-evident truth is that there is no objective truth.

Without a foundation of truth, there can be no reasoned argument capable of changing the viewpoints of others.

In the pursuit of critical social justice, there is no time to question the DEI orthodoxy or to waver from the thin party line.

The DEI ideology excludes even the slightest diversity of thought.

It is ironic that the front lines of the DEI movement are found in our universities whose mission has always been the open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and civil free expression. 

Except for a small minority of believers, both for or against DEI, fear quashes free expression, and leads to self-censorship among the students and faculty.

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As a result, DEI hurts students most, denying them the opportunity to discover their own truths and the ways it might be used to benefit them and society. 

The sciences that depend on a foundation of objective truth are particularly endangered by DEI.

Through DEI campus initiatives, faculty that teach objective truth-based science are being replaced by faculty who teach that truth is relative and science must be decolonialized.

Free expression and DEI cannot coexist. 

Perhaps the first event of Cornell’s Free Expression theme can be an MIT-style debate on the Free Expression: Even though the activists opted to stay home, the event proved DEI and free expression can coexist when diversity of thought is recognized as the real measure of diversity.  

Randy O. Wayne is an associate professor of plant biology at Cornell University