![]() ![]() Yet every “colorblind” event, mechanism, and process at the university - from new faculty orientations to selection of endowed positions - perpetuates racial disparities and reinforces an unjust status quo. As an institution Cornell aspires to the highest principles of civic duty. It must also mean serious intellectual and policy work over the long term. If the suddenly-popular term “anti-racism” is to mean anything at all, it must mean redistributive justice and the dismantling of white supremacist norms and conditions. “Black Lives Matter” is a call not just for reflection or dialogue, but for genuine reallocation of resources and power. What we demand of Cornell is substantive action rather than the performance of racial innocence or enlightenment. ![]() Meanwhile, on campus, Black people, Indigenous people and people of color (BIPOC), remain marginalized and underrepresented in the ranks of faculty, students and staff (including waged employees). To name just one example, the university is the major driver of the soaring housing prices and other forms of gentrification that have disproportionately affected local communities of color. Like many wealthy institutions, Cornell is complicit, in countless ways, in the reproduction of white supremacy. In this historic moment, we must grapple more urgently with Cornell’s relationship to racial inequality. They also led to widespread reflection on the deep-seated racism that continues to shape social life and institutions. The protests underscored the failures of our society to confront the profound violence of anti-blackness. The demonstrations in all 50 states, territories, and in many parts of the world that erupted in late May in the wake of the Floyd killing were unprecedented in scale and are ongoing. However, in this moment of national reckoning prompted by the horrific murder of George Floyd, Cornell as an institution must do much more. President Pollack’s recent announcement of plans for a Center for Anti-Racism in response to student demands is promising. The intellectual, social and emotional effects of that order have contributed to Cornell’s failure to retain many faculty of color. While the university faithfully performs the liberal rituals of “diversity,” such practices have proved to be largely symbolic and therefore empty they long ago became alibis for the maintenance of an unjust social order. It is not enough to continue to cite the legacy of abolition (Underground Railroad) and suffrage (Seneca Falls Convention) in Upstate New York without upholding the values of ongoing struggles toward freedom.Ĭornell remains a site of entrenched racial disparities, mirroring, in many ways, the larger failings of the nation as an interracial democracy. Civil War but by no means the end of white supremacy, is in no small part derived from Indigenous dispossession and the afterlife of racial slavery. The wealth of the university, an institution founded at the close of the U.S. Moreover, the Morrill Act of 1862 provided almost a million acres of formerly Indigenous lands to Cornell in 15 other states. The Ithaca campus occupies the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ (the Cayuga Nation), and Cornell’s other campuses and properties are in the traditional territories of likely every Indigenous Nation in the state. We can no longer ignore the land and the labor at the core of the foundation of Cornell University’s endowment. The institution has fallen far short of its democratic ideals in the past and must pursue them much more aggressively in the present and future, particularly in the arena of racial justice. ![]() It is easy to recite the motto “any person… any study,” but easier to forget that the price of that vision of equal educational opportunity was the legacy of forcible Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement, compounded by increasing imperialist expansion and interventionism in the Americas and beyond. Archival Photograph of Student Protest at Cornell University, Ithaca, NYĭear President Pollack, Provost Kotlikoff, Deans and members of the Cornell University community,Īs a university founded in 1865 upon an egalitarian vision of education, Cornell has set for itself high standards of social responsibility.
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