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Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025

Letter_to_the_editor

LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Cornell Chose Comfort Over Courage on Slope Day

Reading time: about 3 minutes

Back in 2016, as vice president of the Cornell Republicans, I sat across a long table from university police, mapping security and exit routes so former Senator Rick Santorum could take questions in Statler Auditorium. Plenty of students viscerally opposed him; many demanded we cancel the event outright. We insisted that he speak, believing then, as I do now, that exposure to challenging viewpoints is essential to education. The show went on.   

Cornell has now made a different choice in scratching Kehlani from the Slope Day lineup. The administration chose perceived comfort over the principle of free expression. Yes, a celebratory concert is different from a political Q&A, but the core issue is the same: Students invited this speaker, and students themselves should have the autonomy to decide whether to boo, cheer, sing along or simply walk away. It’s not the administration’s role to pre-curate art to avoid discomfort.

Free expression is the oxygen of a real education precisely because it allows for ideas and truths to be aired and debated. It’s the condition that allows one student to publish a provocative take in The Sun and another to rebut it line by line. Sadly, as our government deports students over their op-eds, Cornell has decided to vet performers for political orthodoxy. Our university is nudging every future speaker — rapper, novelist, scientist — toward safe, ambient agreement. Silencing an artist and stripping students of symbolic clothing signals that the only voices protected on the Hill are the least provocative ones.

In choosing to cancel Kehlani, Cornell acted as a risk-averse brand manager — prioritizing image and appeasement over its role as an educational institution. Our University’s history, from the raw confrontations of the 1969 Willard Straight Hall occupation to the charged atmosphere around last year’s Ben Shapiro lecture, demonstrates a hard-won capacity for weathering precisely these kinds of storms. That legacy shows the campus could have handled this. 

The show, indeed, will not go on. A voice students chose to hear has been silenced by administrative fiat. The Hill will still ring on Slope Day, but its sound will be a muted chorus, curated for comfort, not forged in courage.

Irvin McCullough ’18 is a former vice president of the Cornell Republicans, co-founder of FOIA Friend — a public records startup — and a former investigator for the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. He can be reached at icm28@cornell.edu.

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