As a saga of free speech and free press unfolds at Cornell University, the players sound all too familiar.
There is the relatively inept student government that has frozen the funds of the Cornell American newspaper pending investigation — something not too dissimilar to the currently frozen election results of this semester’s Associated Students of Madison race, pending appeal. There is a left-leaning campus largely alienated with the amplification of conservative voices via the use of student taxes. And at the center of all of it is a school bound by the responsibilities of a public university (Cornell is half public, half private).
Indeed, the current saga in Ithaca, N.Y., with all its perversely human complexities, is of interest to those of us 1,000-plus miles away in Madison because it offers a free peek into the potentially sad state that campus speech could take on.
The Cornell American is a student-funded publication that competes with the Cornell Review for the right-thinking campus audience. There is also a “mainstream” paper to be found, the Cornell Sun, but its daily readership and robust circulation put it in a category of its own.
The American has recently seen a freeze on its student funding — a move that would cripple the paper if made permanent — in light of two investigations into its operating activities. The first major controversy is a question of the status of an individual listed as its staff or faculty adviser. That the person listed is indeed a student seems to be of concern, but there appear to be more intricacies at play here than meet the eye. Indeed, the individual in question was listed in the school’s public directory as a member of the faculty last semester.
The second issue at hand is the name of the student organization under which the American operates: The Cornell Literary Society. The student government is charging that this title is deceitful insofar as it suggests a literary mission, not a journalistic one.
But that controversy has somehow erupted over a technicality involving the status of a faculty adviser and the perception of a student group’s name is in no way grounds for the de-funding of a campus paper. Surely ASM has wreaked havoc in Madison before over technicalities of an equally preposterous degree — again, consider the current election nightmare — but that does not mean the viable speech contributions of a student newspaper to the campus community should be grossly overshadowed and permanently jeopardized by such matters.
And so it appears that there might well be more at work here than meets the eye. The student government at Cornell is seemingly left-leaning, and the American is apparently not only conservative in nature, but hyperbolically taunting to liberals at times. Yet in a country where the Supreme Court’s Southworth decision — born out of this campus — rules the land of public universities, it would be a patent violation of viewpoint neutrality to de-fund a student newspaper because of objectionable content.
Yet should the student government proceed down this path of clearly saying one thing while meaning another, it will quickly become clear that their actions are far more objectionable than the American’s content could ever be.
