Cowardice And Capitulation At Cornell

from the not-the-cornell-i-remember dept

On Friday it was announced that my alma mater, Cornell, had caved to the Trump administration and agreed to a “deal” the federal government had offered them to get back the funding it had illegally cut off from Cornell as part of its authoritarian efforts to bully top universities into submission. This capitulation came just days after the American electorate showed that they were in strong agreement that the Donald Trump regime is out of control and needs to be stopped. Doing this now suggests that the administration at Cornell has no business running a top university.

Techdirt wouldn’t exist without Cornell University. I started the seeds of what became Techdirt directly while a student there, and much of the framework through which I view innovation and tech policy came from working with certain professors. I’m taking a moment here to explain why this matters to me personally, because the lessons I learned there make Cornell’s failure all the more painful. As a teaching assistant for both Don Greenberg (who appears to still be going at age 91!) and Alan McAdams (who passed away in 2013) I learned to think deeply about innovation, business models, and policy.

Greenberg taught me how to better understand the trajectories of technological innovation (in 1996 he tasked me with thinking through the implications of both widespread broadband adoption—at a time when most people were still on dial-up modems—as well as the impact of widespread access to digital photography). McAdams, on the other hand, introduced me to the concept of open source software, and pushed me to help him think through why open source software and universal, people-owned broadband access were both wholly compatible with (and, in fact, advantageous to) free market innovation.

McAdams also directly encouraged me to start writing about these ideas and to create a website about them, which eventually gave me the confidence to put together Techdirt. I would sit in McAdams’ office for hours while he’d sit there, in a suit, but while wearing sneakers with the laces untied, going on and on about how too many people didn’t understand how open access and open systems were the secret weapon against tech monopolies. He would talk about how you could use the centrality of tech monopolies against them, by targeting them with open systems.

One other professor who helped shape me was Professor James Gross (who appears to have just retired a few years ago, but appears to still be writing) who taught an incredibly impactful class on “values.” I ended up taking multiple other classes with him and used to go to his office hours way too often, where he was always kind and willing to chat. One of the key lessons Gross taught me was that values aren’t relative. You can’t say “well, that’s different” as an excuse for compromising. If you were compromising your values, you didn’t really have values.

Cornell has compromised its values, proving it doesn’t have them. In their announcement regarding this capitulation, University President Michael Kotlikoff tries to argue that they didn’t really fold, and he asks that everyone read the agreement “in its entirety” before reacting.

And, it is true that the agreement is much less onerous and ridiculous than the ones signed by Columbia, UVA, and Brown (or the one proposed with Harvard). UCLA law professor Joey Fishkin notes that rather than supporting the bullshit racist anti-DEI policies that the Trump admin has demanded of other universities, Cornell only agreed that it would provide that racist nonsense “as a training resource” to faculty and staff.

Fishkin’s right that Cornell avoided the worst demands—the explicitly racist requirements that other schools accepted. But even this “lighter” version creates serious problems, because capitulation is capitulation regardless of degree. The settlement still includes terms no self-respecting university with values should agree to. It is paying the federal government $30 million for no reason at all. It also is going to hand over “anonymized” admissions data to Trump’s thugs:

Cornell shall provide the United States with anonymized undergraduate admissions data consistent with 34 C.F.R. § 100.6 and similar regulations broken down by Cornell’s individual colleges and schools, race, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests, on a quarterly basis, in a form permitting statistical analyses for each year of the Agreement. Admissions data will also be subjected to a comprehensive audit by the United States. This information will be maintained confidentially and exempt from public disclosure and subject to pre-disclosure notification and an opportunity to object to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, to the fullest extent possible by law

There’s no such thing as truly “anonymized” data at this scale—a fact multiple Cornell professors in the relevant fields could explain to the administration. The settlement language itself reveals the problem: data “broken down by Cornell’s individual colleges and schools, race, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests” creates enough granularity that re-identification becomes trivial. But the bigger issue is that this data will enable the federal government to insist that Cornell is not being racist enough, meaning that further demands, and further capitulation is to be expected.

You can see the calculation Cornell made here. There were hundreds of millions of dollars in grant money that were being illegally blocked by Trump as part of his and his minions’ bullying. So paying $30 million to get back way more seems worth it. Agreeing to hand out racist nonsense as “guidance” rather than demands, and forking over “anonymized data” feels like a small price to pay to get these goons off your back.

But that calculation is based on a false premise: that the Trump administration will now leave Cornell alone. They’ve shown no signs of actually doing that. Authoritarian regimes don’t reward capitulation with restraint—they take it as permission to demand more. And more. Beyond that, the administration itself is weak and has been losing battle after battle. And the election last week showed how incredibly unpopular they are. To cave now gives a weak administration a desperately needed win, allowing it to get back off the ground when it was down.

On top of all that, as a university that claims to have values that it seeks to instill in its students, capitulating to such obviously bullshit bullying wipes out any belief that the University stands for anything real at all.

Finally, as Fishkin also notes, the lighter weight details of this agreement suggest that the Trump regime itself was desperate for a win… and Cornell just handed it to them.

Cornell here has not modeled values. It has modeled cowardice and capitulation, and it’s a stain that should remain on the university going forward. What does this teach current students about institutional courage? What message does it send to faculty who might face similar pressure? What signal does it give to other universities watching this play out? Cornell had a choice between its stated values and expedience, and it chose expedience. That choice will define this administration’s legacy.

Filed Under: capitulation, donald trump, principles

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