LETTER TO THE EDITOR | Alternative Commencement: No to Silence

Eric Cheyfitz is the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters and a professor of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. He can be contacted at etc7@cornell.edu. 

Editor’s note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered by Prof. Cheyfitz at the Alternative Commencement of the People’s University. 

I thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today at a time of crisis in the American university system when academic freedom, the foundation of all education, is under attack from the U.S. government in collaboration with the very administrations of the system itself.

But first a land acknowledgment:

Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York state and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ' people, past and present, to these lands and waters.

The AIISP faculty would like to emphasize: Cornell’s founding was enabled in the course of a national genocide by the sale of almost one million acres of stolen Indian land under the Morrill Act of 1862. To date the university has neither officially acknowledged its complicity in this theft nor has it offered any form of restitution to the hundreds of Native communities impacted. 

I start with three generative quotations:

“You don’t compromise on what you do, and you do it till they tell you to leave. That’s all you can do. That’s all you can do.” (Jon Stewart in an interview with David Remnick in the New Yorker)

“The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do, apparently, is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees, and livelihoods.” (Arundhati Roy)

The third quote appears at the beginning of my course AIIS 3500: “Gaza, Indigeneity, Resistance”:

“Have the courage to speak out about situations of injustice, even when doing so may threaten your own safety.” (Thich Nhat Hahn quoted in Curtis White’s Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse)

I have tried to ground my life and work in these precepts, which are the foundation of social justice. I come from a Jewish family of labor organizers who led transformative strikes in the 1930s that brought a measure of social justice to working people through unionization. That work was set back beginning in the 1980s by the neoliberal agenda of both political parties, which has only grown more virulent. But the work of organizing is ongoing and visible in strikes around the country. And it is work that needs our support and must be extended to academic workers, faculty, students and staff. If they had the courage to organize, faculty are in a unique position to strike because unlike industrial workers their very specialized labor cannot be reproduced by scabs.

But for now l want to focus in these few comments on where we are and what we are facing, which you all know quite well, hence this Alternative Commencement.

Cornell University is complicit in two genocides, an ongoing “structural genocide” in Native America, in the wake of a cataclysmic genocide beginning at the end of the 15th century and ending at the end of the 19th, and an ongoing cataclysmic genocide in Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank, in the wake of a structural genocide beginning in 1948 with the foundation of Israel on Palestinian land and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from that Land. 

As defined by Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide” and instituted genocide studies, and Patrick Wolfe, who was instrumental in the foundation of the study of settler colonialism, a structural genocide is an incremental process that confines a people in conditions that generate a failure to thrive and as such threatens the social and psychological existence of the community, whereas a cataclysmic genocide is one that through massive slaughter threatens the physical existence of the community.

Cornell’s partnership with Israel’s Technion, which is instrumental in developing the weapons of genocide, confirms its complicity in the Palestinian genocide just as its foundation on stolen Native land and its failure at restitution confirms its complicity in the Native American genocide.

I note here that Cornell’s international ethical engagement guidelines, which it fails to observe, emphasize the importance of academic freedom, respect for diversity and the promotion of social good in global partnerships. The Technion partnership violates these guidelines, for it is significantly involved in the militarization of the Occupied Palestinian Territories against the dictates of international law.

It has been the purpose of my work in collaboration with my students to show the relationship of these two genocides that are a constitutive part of the settler colonialism characteristic of both the United States and Israel.

To remain silent in the face of these two genocides, which includes the administrative sanctioning of faculty and students who speak out about them, is to be complicit. 

Thus, I affirm the students who have refused this silence, and paid a price for this refusal, my students among them, for whom I am deeply appreciative for their activism and support, and I urge all of you to continue that resistance and persistence. I urge you, then, to organize in forms that refuse the silence and to work toward a transformation of what is now a culture of death in the United States into a culture of life, a culture that values every human life, a culture that is based in social justice.

At a university such a culture is based in academic freedom.

Academic freedom, as expressed in the American Association of University Professors 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, is the gold standard of teaching and research at colleges and universities. This standard grounds the open exchange of ideas in the classroom, scholarship and public speaking. Without the protection and practice of this exchange, which is at present being undermined by the universities themselves through the weaponization of antisemitism (the conflation of it with criticism of Israel and Zionism), education transforms from learning — the critical and creative analysis of all ideas — to indoctrination, the compulsory memorization of the status quo. The code of academic freedom, protected under the First Amendment, fundamentally protects the process of teaching and research from external pressures, which includes pressures that come from college and university administrators acting in the interests of trustees and donors, the interests of corporate capital, rather than those of students, faculty and staff, the interests of what should be an open learning community.

In an article by the professor of education Henry Giroux, he references the Palestinian scholar and activist Edward Said, who died in 2003: “Said’s pedagogy demands that education be used as a vehicle for social change, not simply as a means of economic productivity or ideological conformity.”

I am deeply appreciative of your affirmation of this form of education.

I congratulate you all on your achievements and wish you a life of health and well-being, and one of productive struggle for the values of social justice to which this People’s University Commencement is dedicated.

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