The recent May 24, 2024 Cornell Campus Report presents a Case Study which shows how the current Cornell Administration uses DEI Statements in faculty hiring to screen out candidates whose personal views do not conform to the mandated DEI dogma which now dominates campus life. With such hiring practices seen as violations of US and NY State anti-discrimination and employment law, media reports have linked these Cornell policies to the termination of the Martha Pollack Presidency which is set to occur on July 1, 2024.
Under the Pollack Administration, biased faculty hiring practices have helped create an ideological monoculture which is stifling academic freedom, free expression, and open inquiry on campus. In addition, as noted by leading Cornell faculty, the university’s current DEI monoculture has fueled the outbreak of virulent antisemitism on campus over the past year.
Supported by thousands of members of the Cornell Community, CFSA represents a politically non-partisan initiative endeavoring to help Cornell leadership revoke these harmful DEI practices and politically motivated policies --- and to return Cornell to its fundamental mission of merit-based hiring and educational excellence.
Viewpoint diversity is an essential characteristic for any top university. A range of backgrounds, races, religions, and ethnicities in faculty composition is necessary to create intellectual diversity on campus. Progressive, centrist, and conservative viewpoints must all be embraced in a properly functioning university.
However, if one-sided political agendas and identity quotas supplant viewpoint diversity, academic standards, and scholastic merit in order to enforce preferred perspectives and faculty hiring outcomes, the university’s fundamental mission of academic excellence is abandoned. When captive to such biased political agendas, a university can devolve into blatant and unlawful hiring discrimination. This is what has happened at Cornell and other leading US universities.
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