Ivy League student-group demands ‘racial quotas’ and that school ‘recruit non-white students’
A GROUP of faculty and students at Cornell University have issued a scathing letter of demands from administration including “cluster hires” of Black teachers and recruiting more students of color.
The letter, signed by dozens of the Ivy League school’s students and teachers, was published Monday on Medium by the Cornell Faculty Coalition – which claims the school was founded on an “egalitarian vision of education” but has “fallen far short of its democratic ideals.”
“Cornell remains a site of entrenched racial disparities, mirroring, in many ways, the larger failings of the nation as an interracial democracy,” the letter reads.
The letter’s authors also slammed the university’s “colorblind” practices that “perpetuates racial disparities.”
“While the university faithfully performs the liberal rituals of ‘diversity,” such practices have proved to be largely symbolic and therefore empty,” the letter reads.
Signatories demand that administration encourage academic departments to make “cluster hires of Black and other faculty of color” particularly in departments that they claim have no black, indigenous, or other people of color.
The coalition also seeks departments to target Black and African-American graduate students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities “with the aim of achieving balance between international students of color and students of color who are U.S. nationals.
A Cornell factbook shows that under-represented minorities made up 8.6 percent of faculty in 2019.
The Cornell Faculty Coalition wants to increase representation of Black faculty to 7 percent in 2025 and to 10 percent in 2030. The group hopes for an increase in other faculty of color to 20 percent in 2025 and 25 percent in 2030.
The coalition also hopes to eliminate standardized testing for admission, including SAT/ACT scores at the undergraduate level and GRE scores at the graduate level – as well as hire 10 faculty members solely to dedicate scholarly work to teaching and mentoring on issues of Black experience.
The letter also addressed curriculum, demanding students read “decolonized readings” beyond social sciences and humanities and amplifying the work of scholars of color, “especially women.”
Trump has recently slammed “critical race theory” and condemned schools that have planned to incorporate The New York Times’ 1619 Project into their curriculum, raging that Black-focused education “takes your history away.”
The president added that he planned to “restore patriotic education” to schools.
Cornell University has often been at the forefront of discussions on race and education in America.
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A Pulitzer Prize-winning photo in 1969 showed students emerging with weapons from Willard Straight Hall after a burning cross had been found on campus, according to an article on the Cornell website.
The incident left the campus torn with “deep psychological scars” but was seen to have birthed an “enormous social, governance and ideological change” at the school.