Cornell Faculty To Vote On Mandated ‘Anti-Racism’ Training For Students, Staff That Teaches ‘Structural Racism,’ ‘Colonialism’

Faculty at Cornell University this week will be voting on six so-called anti-racism proposals, half of which relate to mandated training for students and faculty.

National Review reported that the votes “come after university president Martha Pollack tasked the Faculty Senate with developing plans for the creation and implementation of such a requirement in July 2020.”

“Three resolutions focus on anti-racism teachings for students. One is an endorses [sic] a proposal that lays out plans for a for-credit educational requirement as ‘worthy of consideration’ by the administration and says that faculty must be consulted before any decision is made to implement the group’s recommendation,” the outlet continued.

Another of the three proposals directed at students would a faculty endorsement for a requirement that all students “complete at least one for-credit course that addresses race and bias.” The third student-centered proposal would have one or more courses on “racism, colonialism, antiracism, and decolonization” required to be co-taught by faculty members from Africana Studies; American Studies; American Indian and Indigenous Studies; Asian American Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; and Latinx Studies, National Review reported.

The three remaining proposals are faculty centered, with one insisting the recommendations from a faculty working group that proposed new programs for faculty that teaches them about “structural racism, colonialism and injustice” would be “worthy of consideration” by Cornell administrators. Another would encourage the news programs to be developed by departments, not the administration, and the third would endorse faculty members’ voluntary participation in their own “anti-racism and bias” programs.

A week ago, Cornell’s Faculty Senate “voted to approve the creation of an anti-racism center on campus,” National Review reported.

William A. Jacobson, a clinical law professor at Cornell Law School, told the National Review that he does not approve of the proposals currently working their way through the Faculty Senate.

“I am unequivocally against mandates. I do not accept what the university and much of academia, I believe, misleadingly calls anti-racism,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson noted to the outlet that “anti-racism,” as is being taught to students and faculty from books like Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Anti-Racist,” actually calls for new discrimination to remedy past discrimination. Jacobson told National Review that being an anti-racist insists that people who “have the traditional American civil rights notion that we treat people based upon the content of their character, not the color of their skin” are actually racist.

Further, Jacobson said, Cornell shouldn’t adopt an “offshoot of critical race theory” as an official policy.

“If you read these proposals, it says that this is what it is on campus, that this is what students and faculty must accept and learn about and I think that’s anti-educational,” he told the outlet. “That’s an ideological mandate that a lot of people disagree with. It’s not in the tradition of the American civil rights movement and they are adopting it as a semi-official or official University ideology.”

“There is so much critical race theory and anti-racism, activism, programs, administrative personnel. The campus is awash in this stuff. If students want to go and participate in that voluntarily, fine. But I don’t think that should be forced on people. I think when you are forcing it on people, you’re now engaging in coercion, not education,” he added.

As The Daily Wire has previously reported, “anti-racism” training often includes disparaging America as irredeemably racist, segregating people based on the color of their skin, and telling white people they are the cause of society’s ills.

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