GUEST ROOM | Cornell Taught Us Better Than That, Ms. Weingarten

Dana Stangel-Plowe ’92 is the Chief Program Officer at NAVI, the North American Values Institute. She can be contacted at dana@navivalues.org. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a Cornell alumna like me, cloaks herself in the language of Cornell's free inquiry tradition, invoking terms like "critical thinking” and "open debate.” 

But the hypocrisy is hard to miss. 

Weingarten claims to “reject the binary,” yet leads an institution captured by a rigid ideological framework that promotes it. Though she laments the ills of a certain kind of authoritarianism, she peddles an equally coercive agenda to K-12 teachers across the country, to the detriment of American children. 

Under Weingarten’s leadership, the AFT shapes what millions of children are taught, how they’re taught and which viewpoints are brought into their classrooms. The ideological framework it promotes is simple: the world is divided into the oppressors and the oppressed, and your group identity determines which side you're on. Dissent from that superficial sorting is treated not as disagreement but as moral failure that requires condemnation. 

In the classroom, these ideas are not presented as arguments to be critically examined or openly debated; they are expected to be accepted as truth. Over time, they harden into dogma that supposedly stands outside the bounds of reasonable debate. 

We need to resist dogma from both the left and the right. Schools exist to cultivate reasoning and independent judgment. When ideas cannot be challenged, students are taught what to believe, not how to develop their own beliefs. This is especially harmful to children, who are still forming their understanding of the world and are particularly susceptible to accepting ideology as fact. 

Under the banner of social justice, the AFT supports teaching children political conclusions rather than cultivating their own reasoning skills. In practice, teachers see their jobs as “change agents” in the classroom. They increasingly view their mission as activating children to support their political agendas, rather than teaching fundamental academic skills and knowledge. 

This framework predictably produces student activists. The widespread campus protests after Oct. 7, 2023 — not against Hamas’s atrocities, but in favor of “globalizing the intifada” — didn't emerge from nowhere. Students were simply applying what they had absorbed during their K-12 schooling, later reinforced in higher education. 

Teachers’ unions like the AFT are at the center of this push toward activist education. 

Take AFT’s co-sponsorship of the Zinn Education Project's Day of Action, for example. Zinn publishes the Rethinking Schools curriculum, including the “Teach Palestine” book and materials, which openly promulgate intentional bias, steer children toward predetermined conclusions (e.g., Israel is an apartheid state) and tell teachers that they have “a moral and an educational responsibility” to take a side in a complex geopolitical conflict. If the AFT truly supported critical thinking and open inquiry, it would avoid partners that openly push such one-sided narratives. 

Moreover, Weingarten cynically treats efforts to address antisemitism at Cornell as political. She dismisses accountability measures by the Trump administration as "weaponization," an affront to Jewish students who have been targeted and harassed at Cornell and elsewhere. She sticks to the party line — anything this administration does must be denounced — and in doing so, she politicizes the real problems of antisemitism. 

Meanwhile, she refuses to address antisemitism in her own union, which is facing federal scrutiny for failing to protect its Jewish members. 

You don’t have to agree with Trump on any other issue to see that antisemitism is alive and well at Cornell. In the days following Oct. 7, a Cornell diversity official made headlines for celebrating Hamas’s brutal attacks. A Cornell professor has openly cheered Hamas and another excluded an Israeli student because of his ethnicity. And a Cornell student threatened to shoot Jewish students and urged others to follow Jewish classmates home and slit their throats. 

Students, faculty, administrators and alumni who care about Cornell’s institutional integrity and its commitment to equal protection of civil rights for Jewish students and faculty should welcome greater accountability, even if it comes from an administration they despise. 

Weingarten’s downplaying of antisemitism at Cornell is no accident. The frameworks she and her union promote routinely cast Jews and Israel as oppressors and have contributed to a climate of hostility in schools nationwide. 

In a stark example of this framework in action, the AFT has reportedly embraced the American Near East Refugee Aid, an organization accused of having terrorist ties, as a "partner organization,” with Weingarten personally soliciting donations from AFT teachers while denying the organization’s links to Hamas. This is the appalling track record behind Weingarten’s disingenuous appeals to “moral clarity” and “academic freedom.”

Weingarten cannot promote the DEI framework, a vehicle for the oppressed/oppressor ideology, and then condemn its conclusions and claim to support open inquiry.

Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff recently emphasized the critical role of academic inquiry at Cornell when he rejected Student Assembly Resolution 55. The resolution was a thinly veiled attempt at silencing Israeli viewpoints, passed under the guise of protecting students but serving only to curb freedom of speech. 

Laudably, President Kotlikoff expressed concern over the resolution’s “logical fallacies,” “unsubstantiated assertions” and “clear indications of political bias.” He reinforced that “rigorous inquiry requires exploring an issue from all sides, without a predetermined conclusion.”

That principle reflects the best of Cornell. It is also the standard that Weingarten invokes but does not uphold in her own organization.

Weingarten appears genuinely grateful for her Cornell education, as am I. But if she’s going to claim that she supports open inquiry at Cornell, she should own her role in politicizing K-12 education, narrowing debate and fueling the very antisemitism she claims to condemn. 

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