In discussing race relations or feminism my students often say that things are getting better, frequently as a preface (e.g. “Even though race relations have improved, we must still … ”). It is a general assumption that U.S. social history is a story of progress. There are temporary setbacks, but the trajectory is upward: We are better today than yesterday, will be better tomorrow than today.

I have been dreading, since deciding to quit grad school to pursue journalism, the ego-crushing task of finding a job — the unreturned calls and emails, submitted résumés lost to the abyss of corporate career sites and the self-doubt and desperation that come with rejection. Given the economy, perhaps now was not the best time to make this decision, but one of my personal traits is a penchant for deciding on a course of action with only minimal consideration of its feasibility. Perhaps this (naïve but motivating) faith in my ability to accomplish things is what made looking for jobs so discouraging the first time I did so.

I have written before about “intellectual diversity,” which presupposes a sweeping view of American intellectual history in which a “nutritious” diet of Great Books was hijacked by liberals in the ’60s and replaced with feminist and race studies. In this nostalgic fantasy, students in crisp button-downs discussed the Aeneid en plein air until, at midnight on December 31, 1959, they metamorphized into bra-burning protest fanatics.

Discussions about “affirmative action” tend to revolve around the same scenario: two applicants to a single position, identical down to the last detail except that one is black and the other is white. They tend not to go beyond the answer to the question, “Is it fair for the black applicant to be admitted over the white one?” Nor does the scenario ever seem to involve a white and an Asian student, or a black and Hispanic pair. In fact the participants seem to ignore altogether that the only “fair” outcome — if one concedes that race should not be taken into account — would be to admit neither candidate and find a more qualified applicant to break the intractable deadlock. Or to hire or admit both.

For three years I had weekly sessions with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Dr. Nicolosi thought that homosexuality was a pathology, a sublimated desire to reconnect with one’s lost masculinity. The theory: under-attentive fathers and over-attentive mothers create gay children. The purpose of therapy was to put me in touch with my masculine identity and thereby change my sexual orientation.

Over the summer, when members of the Westboro Baptist Church protested the “perverts” employed by Cornell and accused the University of “trying to make fags and dykes out of all of their students,” the Queer Resource Center held a counter-protest. University officials gave speeches, protesters held signs and cheered. I clapped politely: while I supported the cause, the theatricality of rallies has always made me self-conscious.

For all the emphasis that Cornell administrators put on mental health and suicide prevention, when a student does commit suicide the community is surprisingly tight-lipped about it. Between 1996 and 2006, 21 students at Cornell committed suicide, averaging about two suicides per year, which is close to the national average. However, The Sun only reported three of these.

When former Cornell student Ash Thotambilu ’06 committed suicide in 2006, the paper dedicated a mere 62 words to the story, shorter than the length of this paragraph. In 2000, two students committed suicide over the summer: The Sun reported that Jun Wang died after jumping into Fall Creek Gorge, but did not bother to reveal the name of the graduate student in mathematics who had done the same.

What struck me about Officers Brian Page, Bryan Miller and Richard Brown’s column in The Sun last week was their open criticism of the segregated military. And alongside it, their “personal opinion” about “don’t ask, don’t tell:”

“If you are asking us to come out and say that the law is wrong, then our response to you is that as Army officers we follow the laws that are given to us. As citizens, we look to see where our congressman stands on the issue and make it a consideration on election day.”

The debate about ROTC’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on campus flares up and dies down periodically, and is basically the same each time. The arguments are typically orthogonal: military service is noble, provides students with funding for college and teaches valuable lessons; discrimination is bad and should not be tolerated here. While most of Cornell’s peer institutions have done away with on-campus ROTC, the University is in a unique position given its land-grant status; it cannot simply ban ROTC unless it forfeits crucial State funding. Thus, the fact that Cornell professes a commitment to inclusiveness and the flagrant exception to this in ROTC policy is a consistent source of tension.

Criticizing President Skorton feels like criticizing a friendly neighbor. His avuncular air of approachability is perhaps a welcome change from Jeffrey Lehman ’77, who mysteriously left Cornell citing “irreconcilable differences” with the Board of Trustees (and was paid over a million dollars his last year, which some suspect was “hush money”). Every so often Skorton’s cheery face looks up at us from his guest column in The Sun, usually dedicated to praising the Cornell community on some point or another. We also get periodic emails from him touching on current events or issues in academia — Virginia Tech, Martin Luther King Day, diversity at Cornell, etc.