A Voice for Freedom

For those who don't know, I spent my first year of college at Cornell University, a place with 25,000 students and about six and a half Republicans spread amongst the loony majority. And I mean loony - Ithaca, New York, which contains both Cornell U and Ithaca College, is the only community in the entire United States which returned a Green Party majority in the 2000 federal election.

Anyway, today, I found a very interesting article online, which was published in the Cornell Daily Sun which was published not long after I left Ithaca in 2004. The Daily Sun is generally a centrist newspaper (the Cornell Review and Cornell American are conservative, while the other twenty-five-plus student publications are liberal). The article, reproduced here on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a response to a challenge to send in "concrete examples" of anti-conservative discrimination in academia. Amusingly, within two days of this challenge being issued, the Student Assembly attempted to defund the aforementioned Cornell American. This action was spearheaded by the Student Assembly vice-president, who also happened to be president of the Cornell Democrats. Hmm...conflict of interest much?

A few lines from the article tell us things we shouldn't be surprised by:

96.8 percent of presidential campaign contributions made by Cornell faculty went to John Kerry

To [Professor Arthur] Bellinzoni, the incarnation of evil is George W. Bush.

When Wells [College, Aurora, NY] Republicans last year published their study on the faculty's political makeup, Prof. Jonathan Vawter responded with a campus-wide e-mail labeling Republicans "stupid," and calling for "lobotomies" for all Republicans. Shortly thereafter, Wells' version of the SA denied the Wells Republicans' request for recognition as an official club, which would have qualified them for funding.

However, the article also revealed some things that even I, your cynical and chronically jaded host, find shocking:

At Ithaca College, faced with the evidence that there was not a single Republican in the politics department she chaired, Prof. Asma Barlas boasted "we have a range of progressive views in our department." Apparently for Prof. Barlas, intellectual diversity means spanning the spectrum from liberal to Maoist.

In 1997, when some students took issue with articles in another conservative publication, The Cornell Review, they stole and burned hundreds of copies of the newspaper. The administration meted out no punishment for such blatant trampling of others' free speech. To the contrary, as former Sun columnist Joe Sabia has noted, the only official reaction was an attempt by the Student Assembly (notice a trend here?) "to defund the Review, ban it from campus, and send all of its editors to the Judicial Administrator for sensitivity training."

At Ithaca College, Time Magazine recently reported ("The Right's New Wing," Aug. 22, 2004) that "you don't have to spend much time at the college to see that liberals run the place. It posted a website after 9/11 devoted almost exclusively to critiques of the U.S. The site includes the text of a talk by Professor Asma Barlas, who chaired the politics department last year, in which she blames 'Jewish groups' for 'introducing modern forms of terrorism into the Middle East' and suggests that capitalism 'provided the breeding grounds for much of modern day extremism.'" When Time asked politics professor Charles Santiago whether he assigned conservative thinkers, "he responded, completely without irony, 'I am teaching Hitler.'"

An exposition of blatant discrimination at the University of Miami and the University of Colorado at Boulder rounded out the article:

Until public outcry forced the university to back down, white students at the University of Colorado at Boulder were barred from taking the popular School and Society course on Fridays. The school had reserved that class period for "students of color" in order to provide "a much safer and open environment."

Former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala, now President of the University of Miami, permitted the denial of recognition of a new conservative student group on the theory that the College Republicans speak for all conservatives, despite the fact that Miami recognizes six liberal groups.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'll be out of the academic world soon. Every time I hand an essay in these days, I feel like there's a club hovering over my head waiting to come down the moment someone shouts "CONSERVATIVE!".