Reposted by Stephen Yang!
I think it’s fair to say that the student journalists at Cornell are braver than the news networks who just gave up on their WH pool ban even though CNN is still being denied access.
www.cornellsun.com/article/2026...
cornellsun.com
EDITORIAL | Cornell Won’t, We Will
The Editorial Board demands that Cornell stops protecting the alleged Chi Phi rapists through the University's opaque sexual assault policies.
![• J. Kennerly (Ken) Davis Jr., a leader within the Federalist Society, the far-right conservative and libertarian organization that advocates for a textualist and originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. He is also active with the Alumni Free Speech Alliance and the Cornell Free Speech Alliance, which oppose anti-racist DEI efforts, and which promote the nebulous idea of “viewpoint diversity” — the idea that all opinions should be represented in classrooms, regardless of their academic, scholarly, or scientific merit.
• Cindy Crawford, an attorney for the Koch brothers’ primary political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which advocates to end government regulations of environmental and safety issues, to end public education as a universal good, and to promote other policies that make it easier for the ultra-rich to become richer and to control public life.
What do these candidates believe? In their own words:
Of his student days in the 1960s, Davis wrote: “[T]he devastation wrought upon … all of Cornell by the shameful capitulation of President James Perkins to the armed occupation of Willard Straight Hall by campus radicals taught me forever that constitutionally compliant enforcement of the law and rule-based order is absolutely essential to protecting and preserving the integrity of the academic enterprise and, indeed, all of civil society.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:rwbqyvmee43mq76h5hxmfe6t/bafkreiadnrm2ad75j2u66n7vprihw2sgvsmrh64wpvll7xc5ngumq34mdu)
![Apparently referring to campus protest and movements for greater equity and justice, Crawford wrote: “[W]e are at a tipping point in which all elite universities, and Cornell in particular, must decide whether they will remain beacons of learning or acquiesce to demands for censorship, conformity, and political activism. It is relatively easy to pay homage to free expression and diversity of thought. But it can be difficult to uphold those values when confronted by aggressive attempts to shout down (or shut down) that support. I have dedicated my professional life to those issues, and I can guide and defend an incoming administration that is going to face severe challenges and tough decisions that will inevitably spawn outrage, whether real or feigned.”
(Crawford's professional life has been inside Koch-network organizations that seek to support billionaires and to undermine environmental regulations, public education, taxation on wealth, and other functions of civil society and the public good.)
Neither candidate has a significant volunteer history with the university, unlike the CATN-endorsed candidates. This means that they have not built up the same kind of knowledge of the operations of the university as the CATN-endorsed candidates, and it appears that their interest in sitting on the board of trustees is primarily for the purpose of enacting a right-wing political agenda on the university's administration.
The Cornell Free Speech Alliance and other organizations are organizing their constituencies to vote in this election. Since voter turnout is usually low, they can have a big impact.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:rwbqyvmee43mq76h5hxmfe6t/bafkreieotxntrec3tuut2xmprzx64qap6lbiyv6dhw2fogtn6u2qh3jxk4)
