Free Republic

This week, we saw another incident of protesters shutting down an event to prevent others from hearing opposing views. At an event with commentator and author Ann Coulter, one protester yelled “Your words are violence.” It is the latest example of how some on the left are treating free speech as harm on college campuses. Unlike many other incidents, however, Cornell has stood by the right of the student group, Network of Enlightened Women, to hold the event and pledged to hold students accountable for the cancellation of the speech.Students and faculty previously pressured Cornell to cancel Coulter as someone...

The bust was modeled from life just before Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. It was created by American sculptor Vinnie Ream, the first woman to be granted a federal commission by the United States, according to the university’s website. It was purchased and donated to the campus by Ezra Cornell, founder of the university. Its scheduled return to public viewing comes amid concerns over its removal among some Cornell donors and alumni. The public was first alerted of its removal by an article in The College Fix in late June 2022. The Fix was told of the situation by Cornell...

The Cornell University Library has removed a bust of President Abraham Lincoln and a bronze plaque of the Gettysburg Address after reportedly receiving a complaint. Randy Wayne, a professor of biology at Cornell, said the library had removed the display, which had been there since 2013, after "someone complained," the College Fix reported . In a statement to the Washington Examiner, university spokeswoman Rebecca Valli said the bust of Lincoln "was part of a temporary exhibit on the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address" and that it had been on display from 2013-2021. With the display gone, only an empty...

A professor at Cornell University says the school’s library has removed a bronzed Gettysburg Address plaque and a bust of President Abraham Lincoln after somebody complained. “Someone complained, and it was gone,” Cornell professor Randy Wayne (said), referring to a Gettysburg Address plaque and Lincoln bust that had been on display in the Ivy League university’s Kroch Library since 2013. The professor said that he had noticed that the items were gone after stopping by the library several weeks ago, adding that when he asked the librarians about it, they were unable to give any details, other than saying it...

“Someone complained, and it was gone.” That’s all Cornell University biology Professor Randy Wayne said he has been able to determine so far about the whereabouts of a longtime display in the Ivy League school’s Kroch Library of a bust of President Abraham Lincoln in front of a bronzed Gettysburg Address plaque. Wayne, a frequent visitor to the library, which houses Cornell’s rare and manuscript collections, said when he stopped in several weeks ago he noticed the display had been disappeared. “It’s been there since I can remember,” he told The College Fix in an interview. He asked the librarians...

The college student in the age of the coronavirus is used to putting up with quite a bit: regular surveillance testing, vaccine (and now booster) mandates, mask mandates, remote classes, restrictions on social gatherings, the cancellation of university events and traditions. At the beginning of the pandemic, most students, myself included, were willing to accept these burdens, owing to the real risk Covid posed. However, now that we have vaccines, campus restrictions have taken on an increasingly absurd character — ruining the college experience in a (failed) attempt to control a virus that poses minimal risk to students. Indeed, all...

As cases of COVID-19 surge at Cornell, local health officials say every single student sample they tested was the omicron variant, underlining how quickly the highly contagious virus is spreading. Tompkins County health officials said late Friday they checked 115 samples from COVID-positive students ages 18-24 and every single one of them was the omicron variant, which was unknown to science less than a month ago. None of the students in question are severely ill, they added. At a community testing site at a local mall, 18 of 44 positive samples were omicron, suggesting community spread well off campus too…....

Cornell University on Saturday blamed off-campus maskless gatherings for the cancellation of all in-person student activities, both formal and informal, on the Ithaca campus. Upon revealing 300 hundred new cases of coronavirus, including the omicron variant, among students at the campus, Cornell took measures to lock down all in-person campus activities due to “off-campus student social gatherings where masking and other public health measures were not followed.”

Five Democratic senators have told the White House they won't support Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, effectively killing her nomination for the powerful bank-regulator position.Why it matters: The defiant opposition from a broad coalition of senators reflects the real policy concerns they had with Omarova, a Cornell University law professor who's attracted controversy for her academic writings about hemming in big banks.Their opposition also hints at a willingness of some Democratic senators to buck the White House on an important nomination, even if it hands Republicans a political — and symbolic — victory.Republicans...

Researchers have discovered evidence to support the idea that Vikings settled on the Azores several hundred years before the Portuguese arrived in 1427. Evidence from animal remains has led ecologist Pedro Raposeiro and his team, of the University of the Azores, to believe the Vikings were there first.... ...Evolutionary biologist Dr Jeremy Searle of Cornell University has supported the conclusions by Mr Raposeiro. He has also argued that Vikings made it to the Azores - but his work is based on the mouse as his biological source....

While running for president, Joe Biden campaigned as a lunch-pail-carrying, blue-collar moderate from Scranton, Pa. But during his short tenure in the White House, Biden has proven himself to be a far-left champion of bureaucracy, reckless government spending and the centralization of economic and political power. The most recent example is Biden’s nomination of Cornell law professor Saule Omarova to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a branch of the Treasury Department. Omarova is a controversial choice. Born in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, Omarova was educated in the Soviet Union, graduating from Moscow State University...

President Biden’s nominee for a key Treasury Department post believes that the free market does not always “know best.” Saule Omarova — the Beth and Marc Goldberg Professor of Law at Cornell University and a 1989 graduate of Moscow State University — was tapped to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, which “charters, regulates, and supervises all national banks.” The Kazakh-American, however, has nodded toward the Soviet economic system’s purported gender equality. “Until I came to the US, I couldn’t imagine that things like gender pay gap still existed in today’s world. Say what you will about old USSR, there...

President Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Cornell law professor Saule Omarova to regulate the nation’s banks is triggering intense anxiety among the lenders and their Washington lobbyists and threatens to set off a bruising battle in Congress. The nomination of Saule Omarova as comptroller of the currency by President Joe Biden has set off alarm bells in the financial services industry. Omarova is more than just a finance industry critic — she has proposed essentially ending the banking industry as we know it by letting the Federal Reserve take on the deposit accounts of all Americans. News of her nomination...

President Joe Biden is expected to choose Omarova to run the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which supervises about 1,200 banks and federal savings associations, as soon as this week, sources told the news agency. Omarova, a Kazakhstan native, currently teaches law at Cornell University Law School. In her academic work, she has argued in favor of policies that would tighten banking regulations across the board and give government a larger role in supervising the financial system, such as restructuring the Federal Reserve. She also has argued the central bank should provide consumer bank accounts.

ANALYSIS: If the goal is to prevent infection, the 95 percent vaccination rate on Cornell’s campus has not accomplished that Cornell University has aggressively pushed its students to get vaccinated, announcing a vaccine mandate for the 2021-22 academic year in April and frequently denying religious and medical exemptions. As a result, 95 percent of the campus population, both students and faculty, is vaccinated. Despite this, Cornell University has more than five times the amount of confirmed positive cases during its first week of this academic year than it did during its first week of the 2020-21 academic year, according to...

An astronomy course at prestigious Cornell University, concerned about racism in the universe, not just Planet Earth, asked the deathless question: “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?” As famed author Heather Mac Donald, who has written numerous books, including “The War on Cops,” writes in City Journal, the course, titled “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” notes in the catalog description that “conventional wisdom” asserts that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” but astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri suggest the truth may be...

A student group backed by the Chinese embassy is pressuring Cornell University to ignore faculty and student opposition and push forward with a multimillion-dollar partnership with the regime. The Cornell chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) is circulating a petition calling on Cornell to launch a controversial dual degree program bankrolled by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The group dismisses allegations of Chinese human-rights abuses as an attempt to "deliberately discredit and attack China."... Students frequently launch petition campaigns—but unlike most student groups, the CSSA has the official backing of a foreign government. CSSA is the "ONLY...

The governing bodies of faculty and undergraduate students at Cornell University have voted against a proposed partnership with China’s Peking University (PKU), citing the state-run institution’s poor record of academic freedom and human rights. In a 16-39 vote with 20 abstentions, the Cornell Faculty Senate on Wednesday rejected a non-biding resolution endorsing a proposed dual-degree program between Cornell and PKU, one of the 76 top-tier universities directly administered by the Chinese Ministry of Education. The proposed two-year program, according to the website of Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration (pdf), would allow graduates to obtain a master of management in hospitality...

A Cornell University course titled “BIPOC Rock Climbing,” was originally restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color.”.. When Campus Reform contacted the school, Cornell officials edited the course description to remove the race-based enrollment restriction. Cornell University altered the course description of a racially-segregated physical education course offered to students during the Spring 2021 academic semester after Campus Reform reached out for comment. The class, entitled “BIPOC Rock Climbing," was originally restricted to “people who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or other people of color," before its description was edited to...

We have been discussing student editors and student government leaders using their positions to retaliate against the exercise of free speech by other students with the support of faculty. This trend is hardly surprising as journalism deans call for censorship and journalism professors call for the rejection of neutrality in the media. Universities have generally remained passive as students and faculty harass and punish those with opposing views. The latest such example was detailed in a column on the site College Fix on how students at Cornell University moved to oust student representatives who voted against disarming and defunding campus...