higher-education – Page 2 – Cornell Chapter of the AAUP

National day of action speeches, Lara Estroff

The April 17 National Day of Action had a great turnout at Cornell. We had speakers from across the university, in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, and the law school. We reprint some of these here.

My name is Lara Estroff. I am speaking to you today as a Materials Science and Engineering Professor.

For longer than any of us has been a student or a faculty member, there has been a thriving partnership between American universities and the United States government, committed to educating and training generations of scientists and engineers who have gone on to impactful careers that have made America a healthier, safer, and more technologically advanced society. This partnership has led to innovations that have resulted in faster, more compact consumer electronics, safer airplanes, life-saving vaccines, and more sustainable energy production.

This educational ecosystem is a shining example on the international stage and we attract students from all over the world who want to come and be trained at American universities.

Today, this partnership is threatened because one of the partners, the United States government, is threatening to withdraw. Disruption to this partnership will hurt not only current students and faculty at this and many other great universities, but it also threatens to damage our future as a country.

Now, I want to help us all understand how the money awarded to faculty in grants and contracts from federal funding agencies is actually used. The budgets for these grants have roughly three parts to them: funds to cover the educational costs for our graduate students; the materials and supplies associated with doing this cutting-edge research; and the indirect costs, called “facilities and administrative” or F&A costs, that go to the university.

These F&A costs are what we’ve heard about both in the news and in the emails from President Kotlikof and Provost Bala in regard to recent illegal actions taken by both the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy aimed at significantly reducing the F&A rate we can include in our budgets. Cornell has played an essential role in helping to halt both of these actions from being implemented through court-ordered injunctions, but the fight is not over!

At the end of World War II, when the partnership between universities and the government was forged, there was a realization that universities, as engines of innovation, were the ideal place to be training the scientists and engineers the US needed to have scientific and technological leadership in the world. But in order to do so, the infrastructure at these universities would need to be expanded to enable and support fundamental scientific and engineering research.

These may not be “sexy things” but they are incredibly important for doing our work: like laboratories with fume hoods and biosafety equipment, libraries with up-to-date and well-curated collections, cleanrooms for microelectronics fabrication like CNF, chemical and biological waste handling and disposal facilities, and state-of-the-art characterization facilities like CHESS. This infrastructure is expensive to develop and maintain; we’re talking about utility bills and technicians to service the equipment. We’re also talking about the administration costs related to ensuring research integrity and ethical performance of studies involving animals and humans, and much more. All of these costs are substantial and necessary; and require a continuous, rather than a one time, investment.

Without these funds coming into the university, our very mission is threatened. We will be unable to train the next generation of scientists and engineers who are going to be at the forefront of discovery in the coming decades; we will be unable to perform the fundamental research that will lead to innovative new therapies for disease, cleaner drinking water, and more sustainable construction materials for our built environment.

My colleagues and I are speaking with one voice. Some of us identify as Republicans, some as Independents, some as Democrats but we ALL recognize that standing up to the Trump administration is going to come with very real economic impact on our labs and our students. We are ready to take on these sacrifices to ensure that our academic freedoms, our ability to hire faculty and admit students according to our values and our educational mission, is not taken away and put under government oversight as we might expect from some other countries but NEVER in the United States of America! Cornell’s founding principal of “any person, any study” has endured and been a guiding light for 170 years. It is worth far more than $1 Billion. It will not be extinguished on our watch.

We are ready to fight and we are ready to make these sacrifices, but we need to do this together.

Lara Estroff is Chair of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry

National day of action speeches, Sandra Babcock

This demonstration is a call to arms for the defense of higher education.

We are calling on Cornell to STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK, because higher education is worth defending.

There are a lot of false narratives circulating these days about higher education.

People say our students are either privileged puffballs or left-wing lunatics.

People say that faculty are either cocooned in ivory towers where they are completely untethered to the day-to-day concerns of ordinary folks, or they are scheming to indoctrinate our students in dangerous and subversive ideologies.

And recently, people have been saying that universities are hotbeds of anti-semitism.

These are all false narratives, and those who promote them are profoundly ignorant of who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

Let’s start with the students. Our 26,000 students are incredibly diverse. They don’t come to us as empty vessels waiting for us to pour our ideological perspectives into their waiting brains. They are smart and they know how to think for themselves. Many of them have experienced economic precarity, others have undergone tremendous hardships, and yes, some come from more elite backgrounds. But whatever their backgrounds, the vast majority are thoughtful and eager to learn.

Cornell’s best students are also deeply principled and empathetic. They care about the world we live in. They care about the suffering of people in Darfur, in Ukraine, in Xinjiang China, and in Gaza. And when they speak out about injustice, and when they make us uncomfortable with their demands, they are doing precisely what students have done for generations.

Our student protestors are human rights defenders who deserve our protection and support under international human rights law. The UN expert on the Rights of Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association wrote recently that the university Palestinian solidarity protest movement demonstrated “the profound sensibility, civic responsibility, and creative potential of youth.” And the UN expert on human rights defenders has pointed out that youth and children “are at the forefront, and often the main driving force, of societal, economic and political change.” We must forcefully resist the false narrative that student protestors are criminals or terrorists—and University leadership must likewise resist the pressure to subject them to ever-more severe disciplinary measures that jeopardize their safety and their futures.

As for our faculty – let’s talk about some of the life-saving, transformative work that we’re doing in communities in New York, around the United States, and throughout the world. Many of our faculty may lose their jobs under the government’s threatened funding freeze.

At the Cornell Medical School, the faculty who are most vulnerable to job cuts carry out life changing medical research, take care of you and your families when you are sick, and educate future generations of researchers and doctors so that someone will be around to take care of your children and grandchildren.

At Cornell Law School, the most vulnerable faculty are those who, together with law students, are helping low-income taxpayers in rural Alaska fill out their tax returns so they can receive government refunds, or those who are training students to obtain justice for women in the military who are sexual assault survivors. The most vulnerable faculty at the Cornell School of Agriculture and Life Sciences are involved in educating small farmers in Central New York about how they can mitigate the impact of climate change and grow crops that supply regional food systems.

These are just a few examples of what we call RTE faculty – faculty who lack tenure, who work on short-term contracts with little job protection. There are over 1,300 of us working across Cornell. Our work is more vital than ever as government programs are cut and communities lose access to resources. But without job security, we—together with the staff who keep many University programs running—will be the first casualties of federal funding cuts. We need greater pathways to tenure and more job security—and for that, we need the support of our tenured colleagues and the administration. This is a moment where we should stand together to strengthen our institution, not weaken it.

When we stand together, we are STRONG.

When we read about “Cornell University” in the news, those stories are often referring to the actions of our President and Cornell’s Board of Trustees. But they are not Cornell. We who are standing here today are Cornell.

Our librarians ARE CORNELL.

Our staff ARE CORNELL.

Our faculty ARE CORNELL.

Our extension workers ARE CORNELL.

Our students ARE CORNELL.

And we want the Board of Trustees and the President to HEAR OUR VOICE. We are Cornell, and we will not be silenced.

Sandra Babcock is Clinical Professor of Law, specializing in international human rights litigation, access to justice, death penalty defense, international gender rights, and the application of international law in US courts.

President by fiat

Cornell AAUP chapter member Eric Cheyfitz has a fantastic piece in the Daily Sun, putting recent university developments within the longer history of the evisceration of meaningful faculty and shared governance at Cornell.

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2025/04/cheyfitz-president-by-fiat

“By fiat, the Board of Trustees has just appointed Interim President Michael Kotlikoff as the 15th president of Cornell University. For the first time in my 22 years here as a tenured member of the faculty, there has been no national search for the university presidency. Such searches typically include faculty. So this suspension of a search is one more sign of the decline in faculty governance, which has been declining rapidly at Cornell … The increasing decline of faculty governance nationally has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the corporate university, which, over a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen recognized in his 1918 book The Higher Learning in America. Today, by and large, university presidents play the role of CEO, taking their agendas largely from boards of trustees and donors rather than faculties. President Kotlikoff fits squarely in this mold at a time when the corporate model has become particularly toxic with the Trump administration’s assault on liberal education with its foundation in free speech and academic freedom. “

Read and share!

Resources from the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom – AAUP

The director for the AAUP Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, Isaac Kamola, is sharing resources for the fight:

The cruelty of the new administration’s attack on democracy and higher education has been staggering, from arbitrary cuts to research funding to the malicious misrepresentation of our work to Linda McMahon’s unwillingness to say that teaching African American history is still legal.

Fighting back requires understanding the threats we face as well as developing the tools necessary to convey the value of higher education to a wide audience. In this context, the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom has recently published a number of resources that we hope will be useful in the fight ahead:

Academic Freedom on the Line is a weekly Substack edited by CDAF fellow John Warner. This newsletter examines questions around academic freedom, its role in a democratic society, and what is lost when academic communities face politicized attacks on institutional autonomy and shared governance. Check out posts on CDAF’s mission, the risks of obeying in advance, advice for college and university boards, and reflections on the recent “Dear Colleague” letter.
Executive Power Watch is a series of short handouts that offer analyses of education-related executive actions, including executive orders that target diversity, equity, and inclusion; weaponize antisemitism; and target transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people. These resources offer concrete suggestions about what you can do to fight back.
Action Reports are short studies that offer concrete analysis and guidance on how to respond to particular threats to academic freedom, such as

Future Action Reports will examine the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and strategies for using collective bargaining agreements to resist post-tenure review laws.

AAUP litigation against unlawful executive orders

Yesterday evening, the AAUP, along with the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education and other partners filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s unlawful and unconstitutional DEI executive orders, which threaten academic freedom and access to higher education.The lawsuit, which can be read in full here, argues that Trump’s orders exceed his legal authority, are overly vague, and fail to define such terms as “DEI,” “equity,” and “illegal DEIA.” Without any definitive criteria or information, the orders open academic institutions to the risk of lawsuits for policies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.The AAUP has long advocated for diversity in higher education, including a diverse faculty and student body. The Association’s recent statement On Eliminating Discrimination and Achieving Equality in Higher Education focuses on diversity in faculty employment within an integrated understanding of how to move toward the broader goal of inclusion and equality in higher education.