When Andrew Dickson White introduced the bill establishing Cornell University to the New York State Legislature in February of 1865, it was, he would later write, “a signal for war.”
“The nonsectarian university was attacked as ‘godless;’ Ezra Cornell’s character was assassinated in local papers across the state,” said Interim President Michael I. Kotlikoff in his first State of the University address, delivered Oct. 18 in Statler Auditorium during the Trustee-Council Annual Meeting.
White and Cornell were vilified for the very idea of Cornell, he said, and the attacks persisted even after it was established. “One of my favorite quotes,” Kotlikoff said, “derided Cornell as ‘a school where hayseeds and greasy mechanics are taught to hoe potatoes, pitch manure and be dry nurses to steam engines.’ I guess they were hoping for something a little bit more elite and ‘woke.’
“It is perhaps comforting that criticism of university leadership was part of the deal from the jump,” he said. “Ezra and Andy got through it, and so will we.”
But while criticism is inevitable, he said, it must be contextualized alongside “the enormous positive impact that this university has had on the world” in nearly 160 years.
“What we need to do today is apply that perspective to our own moment: listening to criticism where it has merit, evaluating ourselves honestly and always being open to improvement – even as we forcefully defend the value of our institutions to individuals and society, and our bedrock principles of academic freedom and free expression,” he said. “Now, as then, there is no better way to rebuild a fractured nation than to educate citizens to think for themselves, and live together; and to value truth, openness and equality as cornerstones of democracy.”
In addition to White and Ezra Cornell, Odysseus, historian Carl Becker and philosopher John Dewey all found a spot in Kotlikoff’s address. Kotlikoff eloquently detailed history – both the university’s and his own – while highlighting faculty, student and institutional accomplishments from the past 12 months, and issuing a call “to ensure that all of our students go out into the world able to live in an environment of diversity with respect.”
Kotlikoff – who began a two-year term as interim president on July 1, following of Cornell’s 14th president, Martha E. Pollack – expressed humility at being tasked with guiding the university during trying times.
“When I say it’s an honor to be up here, I really mean it,” he said. “This is a unique place that has been populated by giants and has transformed countless lives. It is also a place where people can sometimes be unruly and difficult to govern. But I don’t think you can get one without the other.”
A geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 when he and his lab were recruited to Ithaca, Kotlikoff said he knew “by the time I folded myself back into that little prop plane that used to go from Ithaca to Philadelphia” after his first visit that he’d found his home.
“Not just my academic home, or my professional home, but a community that would welcome me and my family,” he said. “Cornell and Ithaca have shaped all of us, in various ways, into who we are.”
He alluded to a Becker speech in 1940, during the university’s 75th anniversary celebration, in which he described the Cornell tradition as one that “allows a maximum of freedom, and relies confidently on the sense of personal responsibility for making good use of it.”
That was also a time in which democracy was facing serious threats. Europe was at war, and the “great European centers of knowledge and reason, including the renowned universities of Germany, had been swallowed whole by a rising tide of autocracy,” Kotlikoff said.
Becker saw universities as “bulwarks” against the tide of authoritarianism, preparing students to enter and strengthen democracies. Kotlikoff noted that, in order to serve that purpose, “we must be committed to protecting the fundamental principles from which we derive these values. And free speech – including the right to say things that offend – is the first and perhaps the foremost of those principles.”
That right has enabled Cornell’s very existence, Kotlikoff said, including the work of its faculty, including , emeritus music professor and and information scientist and of Cornell Tech.
Kotlikoff also praised Cornell’s staff workers, noting that the recent contentious United Auto Workers strike “tended to divide staff and set up conflict with leadership, but we settled that strike with respect for our staff, and a renewed investment in those who work in our dining rooms, our residence halls and our buildings.”
Kotlikoff shone a light on the work of several students and university centers, Cornell’s commitment to affordability (the capital campaign has generated $420 million toward the goal of $500 million for financial aid), and how has expanded the university’s reach “to over 150,000 non-traditional students around the world.”
In closing, Kotlikoff reminded the audience of the bedrock values of a democratic society: respect for knowledge and truth; engaging across difference; civil discourse; and “a fundamental commitment to the ideals of human dignity and worth.”
“To quote John Dewey,” he said, “‘Democracy must be born anew in every generation and education is its midwife.'”
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