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.
I can’t tell you how heartening it is to see so many of you here today. And to know that we are just one of hundreds of rallies being held across the country as part of our national day of action.
In addition to being VP of the Cornell chapter of the AAUP, I’m also a political scientist who studies democratization and its reverse – the decline into authoritarianism. The attacks on higher education we’re seeing today are unprecedented in this country in their scope and severity. But they are not new. They are taken straight from the authoritarian playbook, from Russia, to Hungary, to Venezuela, to Turkey to Florida and now to the federal government. For many of our international colleagues, what they’re seeing now is terrifying but entirely familiar.
Authoritarians have always targeted universities. Why? I often hear that it’s because an uneducated population is a compliant population. I don’t think that’s quite right. I think there are two fundamental reasons:
(1) Attacks on universities are part of a broader assault on civil society. Suing CBS or ABC because of their coverage, or threatening to strip them of their broadcast license; going after law firms that worked for causes you dislike; threatening to punish businesses and organizations that step out line. Authoritarianism cannot tolerate a robust and independent civil society.
In today’s competitive authoritarianism, where elections still happen, rigging the playing field of civil society is essential to securing authoritarian rule. Universities are part of that.
(2) the second reason is more fundamental. The pretext for attacking universities has changed – anti-communism, anti-DEI, anti-woke – but the goal has stayed the same: to frame the University as an anomalous space outside the mainstream of American life, a topsy-turvy inversion of social hierarchies, where people are supposedly promoted on the basis of DEI rather than merit, where faculty can’t be fired and in fact are supposed to govern, where students are free to pursue their interests, to disobey, with consequences for sure but with consequences calibrated to the idea that the university exists precisely in order to give students and researchers and teachers the freedom necessary to discover.
The authoritarian story about universities works to naturalize and justify social hierarchies by creating a fictional version of the university where these are inverted.
But it has this kernel of truth to it: The standards of excellence in a university are in many ways not the same as they are elsewhere. The standards are not how much money you make. They are not how well you convert knowledge into commercial applications. That might happen, might be encouraged, might be a good thing, but the goal is the knowledge first and foremost.
But it isn’t even the knowledge that is most threatening to authoritarians. It’s the practices and protections of academic freedom – the institutional guarantees that allow us to pursue understanding and knowledge and to merit them for their own sake – that are threatening to them. And like all bullies, they threaten in turn that which threatens them.
So what’s our strategy? How do we respond?
Well, first off we can only respond collectively. What’s the song say? “For what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?” The first step, the one we’re taking today, is to come together and stand together!
This is not going to be easy. We’re here today in force. But what about tomorrow, when the Trump administration says that it might restore funding if this program is axed, if these students are expelled and deported, if these courses are shut down?
We know their strategy. It’s to divide us, or to keep us divided. They count on us turning against each other – treating this program as expendable, this person as disposable. They target the sciences, hopeful the sciences will turn on the humanities or that the humanities will look the other way. They target international students in order to silence all students. They hope that tenured faculty will see untenured colleagues – staff, RTE faculty – fired and turn away.
One of the big lies of authoritarianism is that they will oppress one without oppressing the other; that they can cut out one person – the immigrant, the climate scientist, the transgendered student – and leave the rest intact.
But it’s a lie.
“Any person any study” might be a motto or a principle. But it’s also a basic truth: you are not really free to study at all if you are not free to study all and to go wherever your studies take you.
So in coming together today, let us pledge to each other that no part of the University is expendable. No person at the University is disposable.
Second: The resistance to authoritarianism is going to come from below. And it’s going to work in part by making it clear to our organizations and institutions that we will not accept rolling over. We need to give our leadership and our allies the courage of their convictions.
So I want to thank Mike Kotlikoff for joining two national lawsuits. As he put it, Cornell cannot compromise on its core mission, “to do the most good,” or its core values of “any person any study” and academic freedom.
I want to thank him for throwing our hat in the ring. But it’s also going to take a lot more than those two hats!
University leadership has talked about how they want other universities, public universities in red states for example, to take the lead, because the ivies are too unpopular. Now, when those universities were under attack, the ivies said, well it wouldn’t do them any good for us, who are so unpopular, to come out in their defense.
We can’t accept that. If we won’t lead, no one will. Harvard has now set an example. And that’s really got to burn. But they do so after making huge concessions already, when they realized that no amount of conceding would provide protection. That lesson needed to be learned, but as of now there is no excuse for not having learned it.
Our leadership also includes the board of trustees. There’s been a lot of fear among the trustees, a belief that the university needs to get as close to Trump administration as possible, that doing so will protect us. But that’s not how this work. You cannot protect us by sacrificing who we are! You cannot save the University by demolishing it.
And our allies include New York State officials. Cornell is New York State’s public land grant college. It is one of its flagship institutions. It is state law that establishes the University Faculty at Cornell as the people responsible for setting education policy. It is state law that has established our majors and minors. It is state law that determines most of our diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. State law and authority are threatened by the federal assault on higher education and academic freedom. Cornell is one of the economic anchors of our region. And yet our state officials have so far been silent. They cannot be silent any longer.
Our potential allies include the Democratic Party in Congress. At some point the government will need to be funded – they should do everything in their power to demand a complete end of the assault on higher education and the reversal of those unlawful policies, as well as any stray lawful ones, that constitute this assault.
Finally – it is on us to hold the line. In our organizations, on campus and off; in our institutions of shared governance; in our committees; in our public and private advocacy.
When someone says, we’d better scrub our diversity, equity, and inclusion principles from the website. No. We hold the line.
When someone says, we should comply with this order, despite its being contrary to our values. No. We hold the line.
When the federal government sends its version of the demands it sent to Columbia or Harvard, demanding this or that program be dismantled or put under new leadership acceptable to the federal government. No. We hold the line.
That’s the strategy. We stand together in solidarity. We pledge to each other, that no part of the university is expendable, no person disposable. That we – and not would-be, and if we don’t stop them, will-be authoritarian bullies – determine the educational policy of the University. We support our leadership in fighting back, and push them to do more. We hold the line.
David Bateman is vice president of the Cornell chapter of the AAUP, and is an associate professor in the Government Department and in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
Cornell Chapter of the AAUP 