Coming from the Mid-Atlantic, the main artery into Ithaca, N.Y., is Interstate 81. A voyage to Cornell University necessitates trekking through the heart of Pennsylvania into upstate New York, all the while cruising by a sorrowful list of impoverished towns that were once thriving steel metropolises.
Indeed, as one passes from Scranton to Binghamton, the sights are so atrocious that they have literally become a Billy Joel song. Where mighty steel plants once stood, organized labor came, saw and destroyed. The union leaders drove business out of town (indeed, out of the country) and then slyly followed themselves, leaving behind a series of once-glorious empires that are now good for little more than a tank of gas and Big Mac en route to Grandma’s house for the holidays.
And yet, despite this startling lesson in the faults of the neo-Marxist labor economics of modern liberals, Cornell’s student body has become shockingly adept at simply taking in the scenery and missing the message as they make their way to school. The campus is a bastion of left-leaning ideology (although, to be certain, not nearly one on par with Madison’s love-thy-hammer and bless-thy-sickle environment).
But apparently the liberal philosophies of supposed-acceptance have failed this campus in particular, because the student government is currently working to silence one of the school’s conservative rags. Citing a duo of grossly technical violations of student organization guidelines (one of which may well not even be a genuine infraction), the student governing body has frozen funding to the Cornell America and now threatens to permanently render the fish wrap’s presses a rusty anachronism on par with the scenery in Wilkes-Barre.
According to sources at Cornell University familiar with the issue, the motivation behind the stopping of the presses is likely a firm discontent with some of the hyperbolic ideology recently having spewed forth from the pages of the American. But the Supreme Court of the United States has been explicit in its instructions regarding the handling of offensive rhetoric at public universities (which Cornell is): all actions must be dealt with in a viewpoint-neutral manner. The governing case, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System v. Southworth, was born out of this university, and establishes a precedent such that the Cornell student government’s retributive actions, although well disguised as independent maneuvers, are firmly out of line.
Yet, still it seems that the American erred in publishing content of such a radically inflammatory nature that the campus community has now moved to shut the rag down. The press, an institution rather well secured in the Bill of Rights, has a certain intrinsic responsibility to the communities that it serves — if papers are not picked up at newsstands, there seems to be little reason for them to continue to be placed there.
Alternatively, another tarnished rag, The Chronicle, Duke University’s student newspaper, has recently shown the sort of reckless disregard for the sensibilities of its readership that ought to give students reason to pause before picking up morning copies. The paper published an Oct. 18 editorial column by Philip Kurian simply headlined, “The Jews.”
Thoroughly anti-Semitic and unrelentingly hateful, the article glosses over panoply of issues, from criticizing the government for lending the Holocaust Museum such prime real estate to explaining, “To be Jewish is to have the right to move seamlessly between the majority and minority, without constraint. Thus, Jewish-American appropriation of the ‘oppressed’ moniker is disingenuous, belying the reality of America’s social hierarchy.”
Mr. Kurian’s piece is mostly an indictment of leading American universities — including Duke — for accepting too many Jewish students. Implicitly recommending a certain reverse-affirmative action against Jews, the anti-Semitic author expresses thorough outrage at the notion of Harvard being 30 percent Jewish when the minority only represents 3 percent of America.
And so at Duke and Cornell we can see shades of black and white that simply cry out for a grayscale compromise. It is bitterly indefensible — and borderline illegal — that a newspaper’s funding is now under fire because of a controversial wave of conservative columns. But it is equally troubling that the Chronicle, an independent student paper, would choose to level such outrageous fighting words at the campus community and still expect to be everyone’s paper of choice the next morning.
Both student rags would be well advised to remember that when a paper manages to alienate its readership to a point of no longer making a daily trek to the newsstand, the publication becomes just as impotent as those old steel towns on Interstate 81.
Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in rhetoric.
