When Cornell came to an agreement with the federal government to buy back their funding, we also sold them the right to decide who on our campus gets protected. In exchange for the restoration of frozen research funding, the University has accepted a set of rules that redefine what discrimination looks like on campus and treat long-standing equity efforts as threats rather than support systems. The Department of Justice insists that it is not dictating academic life, yet the restrictions placed on race-conscious programs, hiring practices, student support initiatives and even the language used to describe student experiences make that claim impossible to believe. The bottom line is that the federal government has created a definition of discrimination that penalizes efforts to address racial inequality. In signing this agreement, Cornell has contradicted itself. While we profess to celebrate diversity and academic freedom, we now operate under policies that directly attack both.
While President Kotlikoff claims to want to “secure and protect our own independence as a private institution … [and] protect our faculty and their academic freedom and free inquiry, which is fundamental to our excellence and our ability to teach students in an appropriate way and to create new knowledge,” Cornell agrees to extreme oversight through admissions data provision, conducting climate surveys and regular certification as part of the deal. What is the “appropriate way” to teach? Is it without recognition of the struggles and backgrounds that different students come from? Is it achieved by censorship and silencing? By exclusion in the name of inclusion? The irony is that these provisions inherently do not allow the University to freely do those things. Repeatedly, we see the University and the government say they want to do something, while actively doing the opposite.
Things that are now viewed as discriminatory include “raced based scholarships or programs … Preferential Hiring or Promotion Practices … [and] Access to Facilities or Resources Based on Race or Ethnicity.” The memo also prohibits the use of proxies for protected characteristics that include but are not limited to “Geographic or Institutional Targeting … [or] Overcoming Obstacles Narratives/Diversity Statements.” Finally, the document outlines practices that constitute “unlawful segregation,” such as “Race-Based Training Sessions … Segregation in Facilities or Resources … [and] Implicit Segregation Through Program Eligibility.” All of these things have proved to be essential in creating an equitable campus environment for all students and faculty. It is no accident that the aforementioned policies target programs that were created to make higher education more accessible to students of diverse backgrounds.
For most of American history, race determined who had access to education, safety, housing and political rights. After emancipation, Black students were forced into schools that were deliberately underfunded and segregated. Redlining and exclusion from the GI Bill kept families of color from building the generational wealth that pays for tutors, enrichment programs and college. Even after Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, many areas resisted integration for decades. The effects of these laws and practices are still evident.
The fact that Cornell was never explicitly racially segregated does not exclude us from the role we — as a leading institution of higher education — should play in shaping America. Because of America’s harrowing history of dehumanization, discrimination and exclusion, the advent of race-conscious scholarships, community programs, cultural centers and support networks were never about giving unfair advantages. There have always been attempts to repair the damage created by laws and institutions that worked for generations to restrict who could thrive in school. Stripping away those tools in the name of neutrality ignores how uneven the starting conditions have always been. To think that hundreds of years of work to promote diversity and make Cornell as inclusive as possible could be undone in one memo is heartbreaking and horrific. Just last year, Cornell was awarded the Higher Education Excellence in Diversity Award, but now we risk falling to the elitist and discriminatory tendencies of our current government.
The provisions outlined from the DOJ have already impacted organizations run by women and minorities at other schools. Last December, the University of Alabama suspended two student magazines, one with a largely female student readership and the other with a largely Black student readership. The magazines faced suspension because they appeared to exclude other racial and gender groups, even though the editors of both magazines maintained that the organizations have always been open to anyone of any identity on campus and, as magazines, should have been protected under the First Amendment. While Alabama obviously differs from Cornell, it might be a glimpse of what’s to come. Identity-based student groups are platforms to express those parts of ourselves and to take that away when restricting race-based organizations isn’t inclusion, it’s colorblindness.
You may be asking what the issue with colorblindness is. While the belief generally stands that ‘not seeing color’ is a way of equality, it’s actually just a means of avoiding accountability. Equity has always required intention. It has always required acknowledging the weight of history. And it has always required structures that extend a hand to those who were never meant to be included in the first place. Equity is what separates maintenance of systemic racism from restructuring the systems that feed it — and that’s exactly what these programs offer. Cornell cannot afford to hide behind the language of neutrality while the ground shifts under our feet. The DOJ’s provisions leave schools to choose between funding and values. Cornell chose funding. The lip-service that our administration has served us is not what their actions say and we cannot sit back and trust their judgement. If we give up the tools that helped build a more representative campus, we risk becoming the kind of institution history warns us about: one that protects its image more fiercely than its people.
Zara Cheek '28 is an Opinion Columnist and a student in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her fortnightly column, Big Red, White and You, focuses on the intersection of campus issues, diversity, and American politics. She can be reached at zcheek@cornellsun.com.
