ACTA Launches Campaign to Promote Free Expression and Academic Freedom at Cornell

The American Council Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) is starting a new campaign targeting students, faculty and alumni to improve protections for academic freedom and freedom of expression at Cornell.

ACTA is “an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting academic excellence, academic freedom, and accountability at America’s colleges and universities.” Cornell is the third campus targeted by ACTA’s “Campus Freedom Initiative” after MIT and UT Austin.

In consultation with experts in higher education, ACTA has developed a Gold Standard for assessing what a university should achieve to promote these important freedoms.  ACTA evaluates each campus to determine what speech protections are lacking and then customizes a petition for the university to improve its top four deficiencies. In the case of Cornell, the four petition goals are:

1. Adopt an uncompromising statement on freedom of expression such as the Chicago Principles.
2. Establish institutional neutrality on political and social issues [as detailed in the Kalven Report.]
3. Make intellectual diversity a stated goal in hiring and admissions; and
4. Add a program on free expression to the new-student orientation.

To attract viewers to the campaign website, ACTA has created this social media video ad:

ACTA will also sponsor print advertising.

Eventually, ACTA will distribute a ranking of major colleges to help prospective students decide between colleges based on their level of academic freedom.

When asked why ACTA picked Cornell to be the third campus for this program, ACTA’s President Michael Poliakoff said, “We chose Cornell because, by all appearances, it is in trouble but can still make the course correction it urgently needs. It’s clear that Cornell suffers from a stifling monoculture. Now it’s tilting toward requiring faculty, staff, and students to be trained in prescribed orthodoxies. These developments violate Cornell’s own values, which include commitments to open inquiry and free expression, and they’re harming the education the school provides to its students. Cornell is increasingly training its students to think in an approved manner instead of educating them to think for themselves.”

Steven McGuire, who heads ACTA’s Cornell effort, noted that Cornell students can get more involved in this campaign: “We would be happy to work with [students] to organize student support for this initiative and discuss ways they can push for better conditions for free expression on campus. We also know faculty and alumni who would love to work with them on these issues.”

McGuire continued, “Students are an important voice on campus, and we believe they can help Cornell to meet some of the standards in ACTA’s Gold Standard for Free Expression. For instance, they could ask the administration to offer significant programming on the importance of free expression during new student orientation. As another example, they could ask the administration to support debates on campus that would demonstrate the value of free expression, intellectual diversity, and civil discourse. Do these seem like difficult or unreasonable requests? I can tell you they are not.”