BY JOHN K. WILSON
The news that Cornell University’s administration sternly rejected a student demand for trigger warnings has spread across the country for the past month. The New York Times reported that “the conflict illustrates a stark divide in how different generations define free speech” with repressive students on one side while “proponents of free speech are lauding” the administration’s “quick and unequivocal action.”
A Washington Post editorial asserted that “this story has all the trappings of a wider phenomenon increasingly prevalent on American university campuses: the curtailing of academic inquiry, and sometimes even free speech, for the protection of perceived student ‘sensitivities.’” According to the editorial, “What happened next is cause for celebration: The Cornell administration immediately struck down this resolution, a welcome reminder that academic institutions have the power to defend their fundamental values — and are willing to use it.”
In reality, the much-maligned Cornell student resolution was quite reasonable and did not threaten academic freedom at all. The resolution said, “Student Assembly implores all instructors to provide content warnings on the syllabus for any traumatic content that may be discussed.” Students are, in fact, free to urge instructors to give warnings. The resolution added that “students who choose to opt-out of exposure to triggering content will not be penalized, contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content.” Once again, that’s a perfectly reasonable provision that ensures students cannot use content warnings as an excuse to avoid classwork. An inaccurate abstract that incorrectly summarized the resolution may have contributed to the confusion about the resolution, but the text itself was fine. I wish that students would encourage instructors to include more controversial materials rather than issue worthless content warnings, but a request is not a serious threat to academic freedom. In fact, the resolution takes it as a given that controversial material (and even horrific content) will be a necessary part of a college education and does not ask for any censorship.
So, what does threaten academic freedom? It’s the standards outlined by Cornell’s president Martha Pollack and provost Michael Kotlikoff in their letter announcing that they had rejected the resolution: “Academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle in higher education, establishes the right of faculty members to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it, provided that they behave in a manner consistent with professional ethics and competence, and do not introduce controversial matters unrelated to the subject of their course.”
This last clause is extremely alarming because, unlike the student resolution, it actually does endanger academic freedom, and, also unlike the student resolution, it is a message coming from the top officials at the university. The wording in the letter is an absolute ban (“do not introduce”). That violates the AAUP standards expressed in the 1940 Statement of Principles, which the letter seemingly paraphrased incorrectly. The actual wording of the 1940 Statement is this: “Be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject.” The term “be careful” is much less repressive than Cornell’s “do not introduce.”
Even that 1940 provision was considered far too restrictive many decades ago, and it was amended with the 1970 Interpretive Comments: “The intent of this statement is not to discourage what is ‘controversial.’ Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry which the entire statement is designed to foster. The passage serves to underscore the need for teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.” There is a huge gap between “persistently intruding” (without any aspersions on “controversy”) and the “do not introduce controversial matters” standard of the Cornell letter.
The reasons why the Cornell standard is wrong should be clear. A total ban on controversial matters, even in a slip of the tongue, is extraordinarily broad. And how are faculty supposed to know for certain if controversial material could be deemed unrelated to the course? It’s ironic that Cornell’s administration would announce a complete prohibition on unrelated controversial matters in a self-righteous letter proclaiming the need to protect controversial material.
Cornell sophomore Claire Ting, who co-sponsored the resolution, later told the campus newspaper, “A lot of the headlines online have really mischaracterized this resolution and even [painted] Cornell as a university of triggered snowflakes.” Ting noted that “we completely agree [that] interacting with this difficult material is essential for learning and for growth.”
It’s disturbing that Cornell students were globally denounced as censors for an innocuous resolution that did not infringe upon academic freedom, while the official administration response was universally praised as a defense of academic freedom even though it announced extraordinary new rules restricting the liberty of professors.
Cornell’s leaders need to rescind their poor choice of words and publicly announce that it was a mistake, and then they need to fix Cornell’s policies to protect academic freedom by ensuring that the AAUP standard of “persistently intruding” without any denunciation of controversy will be enacted. And everyone who was so quick to denounce an entire generation of students and praise administrators based on newspaper headlines might want to actually read resolutions and official letters before jumping to erroneous and exaggerated conclusions.
John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies.
