Cornell’s Not Even Hiding Its Bias Anymore

A few highlights from the online site of Cornell University’s conservative student newspaper, the Cornell Review:

• At her inauguration as Cornell’s new president, Elizabeth Garrett said, “We must heed the call to be radical and progressive.” Later she issued apparently contradictory statements on free speech, calling herself “an avid supporter of freedom of speech” at a press event in New York.Later, she said, “Speech can be regulated. Speech has to be regulated in the narrowest possible way to serve a compelling state interest.”
• At a rally against “rape culture,” student Bailey Dineen said that the institutions promoting “rape culture”–Cornell, the Justice System, and the “white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchy”–must be destroyed.” The rally was sponsored by several groups,including Direct Action to Stop Heterosexism (DASH) and the Kinky Club of Cornell.
• Though 96 percent of Cornell facultypolitical donations from 2011 to 2014 went to Democrats, government professor Andrew Little was quoted as saying that hiring a few Republicans would compromise the quality of Cornell’s faculty. “Placing more emphasis on diversity of political beliefs when hiring [would] almost certainly require sacrificing on general quality or other dimensions of diversity.”
• Another government professor, Richard Bensel, said, “Our job is not to mold the minds of young students — they’ll go out into the world and do that for themselves…. Cornell does not have to be a banquet that offers every viewpoint.” He added that recent Republican debates have illustrated the deviation of “mainstream conservatives” from views that are widely accepted by intellectuals at reputable universities.