The Search for Truth at Cornell University – by Randy Wayne
There is a fork in the road for the future of Cornell University. Cornell must choose between what Jonathan Haight calls two mutually exclusive telos the search for truth or social justice activism. The fact that these two teloi are mutually exclusive has been highlighted at Cornell University where the SIPS Diversity and Inclusion Council claims on an official website of the CALS School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS):
The Council s vision is for an inclusive SIPS community that flourishes because it values and supports diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. It recognizes that our institution was founded on and perpetuates various injustices. These include settler colonialism, indigenous dispossession, slavery, racism, classism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism, and ableism.
Does anyone who is reading this now believe that Cornell perpetuates slavery? Does anyone in charge of perpetuating this website care whether this claim is fact or fiction, true or false a fundamental concern of science at a university? Sadly, as documented in The College Fix and by Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, the answer is no.
When the search for truth is subservient to another telos, authoritarianism becomes more likely.
Here’s hoping my somewhat beloved Cornell take the right fork in the road. So far it seems going back is difficult.