I do not care if I am right.
I wanted those to be my first published words as Cornell Sun opinion columnist. I’ve spent years caring about being right, and it got me nowhere.
My column, Common Matters, has a simple but necessary goal: helping people engage with the world and with each other.
You don’t need to agree with me to care about an issue. The one thing I do believe is that Cornell students should not tune out the world around them and that we need to talk about common matters with each other.
Maybe it’s easier to tune out the chaos around us, but the moment we neglect what's happening and stop talking, people get forgotten and problems go unsolved. Becoming an educated Cornell student isn’t just about getting good grades or landing a high-paying job, it’s about engaging with perspectives beyond your bubble.
If I’m wrong about caring, then so be it. But I’d rather be wrong about caring than be right about indifference.
My name is Mihir Steingard, and I was inspired to start Common Matters because I grew up surrounded by people who thought differently from me. I used to love being right. I believed that having the best argument was how you got people to care about issues. I realize now that the best conversations weren’t when I was dominating arguments or steamrolling viewpoints; they happened when I took the time to listen to what people cared about and where their opinions came from.
I grew up in a staunchly liberal environment. I was raised by an Indian immigrant mother and a Jewish father; both were professors. We talked openly about politics at the dinner table leading me to believe that everyone shared the same views about immigration, gun control and climate change. As I got older, I realized that my liberal bubble at home wasn’t everywhere. I spent most of my formative years in Boy Scouts, where I had friends who were NRA members and believed that Critical Race Theory was being taught in our local high school. Their opinions couldn’t have been more different from mine. At the time, I was sure that I needed to be right to convince them.
That changed last year. I was on the rowing team at Saint Joseph’s University, a Catholic school in Philadelphia. I had teammates who were Trump supporters and disagreed with nearly every view about climate change, immigration and social spending.
At first, I used my old approach of trying to be right. I quickly realized that if you are spending four hours a day in practice and another three eating meals, that doesn’t work. They would soon hate me and I’d be miserable. If I wanted to be connected with them I had to understand what they cared about.
During a conversation about immigration with a friend whose family employed immigrant farm workers, I realized that we both cared about giving immigrants good lives. He believed that if there were too many immigrants, the lives of those who were here would be made even more difficult. That’s what I missed for years: we had the same values but had different views about the solution.
To get to that stage of understanding, we both had to pay attention to what was going on in the world and be willing to engage in uncomfortable conversations.
Right now, we are at a time when the world is changing at an unimaginable pace. Free speech is being challenged in court, AI is transforming the labor market, and U.S. political parties are becoming more negative towards each other. For us as Cornell students, it’s easy to ignore the world around us with prelims and psets. In reality, that's the opposite of what we need right now. We need to talk with each other.
When I asked 50 students on campus the question, “Do you talk about the news with your friends?” 37 said yes. When I followed up with the question, “Do you ever discuss it with people who disagree with you?” the number dropped to 16.
For us as Cornell students, it's time to be present with the news and talk to the people who disagree with us. Let me be clear, Common Matters isn’t a news source or a bipartisan overview. I’m going to make you uncomfortable, and I’m going to argue that issues matter. Your job is to talk about these issues with each other. The time for apathy and avoidance is over. I don’t need you to agree with every word, but as long as you engage, I am satisfied. I don’t care that I’m right, I care that you are no longer indifferent to the common matters in our lives.
Mihir Steingard '28 is an Opinion Columnist studying Industrial and Labor Relations. The name of his column, Common Matters, is a play on words and aims to show why common matters in politics, on campus and in society should matter to us, the common people. He argues against being apolitical or apathetic and instead advocates vehemently for empathy and understanding. He can be reached at msteingard@cornellsun.com.
